Duffy's Queen Kong in Comparison to Austen's Emma

Sometimes, a woman will do anything for love. Make sacrifices to be with her lover, travel far to see him, and in some peculiar cases, wear his corpse around her neck in order to be close to him even in death. In Carol Ann Duffy’s Queen Kong, the narrator of the piece exhibits the power of loneliness, and what it can do to someone’s sanity. This parallels Jane Austen’s Emma regarding the urgency in both poem and novel for women to wed and be with a man, versus living a life of independence, which to them means solitude and loneliness. Queen Kong depicts the story of King Kong, only through the perspective of a female gorilla that falls in love with one of the men that is exploring her natural habitat. For her, “it was absolutely love at first sight” (Duffy). The Queen had been all alone for much too long, and she desperately craved the affection of a man. When her lover leaves her to go back to New York City, she becomes even more obsessed with the idea of a man and marriage, and goes to insane measures to feel close to him such as “[drinking]/ handfuls of river right by the spot where he’d bathed” (Duffy). In the end, the Queen gives up the chance to live a life of independence and follows him to New York, tracking him down and staying with him until the day he dies. Even after his death, she holds onto him by “wear[ing] him now around [her] neck,/perfect, preserved, with tiny emeralds for eyes. No man/has been loved more” (Duffy). The rash way that Queen Kong behaves is very similar to the women of Jane Austen’ s Emma. Emma and the women she surrounds herself with are after one thing in life; to escape loneliness and be wed to a man that will protect them and keep them company. The only thing that they are taught from a very young age is that they must marry, specifically into a high class family of either similar or better rank than their own families. They know no other life than the one where they are wed into another family, and have a man by their side constantly. The very thought of ending up an old maid leads them to desperately seek a husband, looking for a groom before they look for love, and tricking themselves into falling for the first high class, worthy suitor that comes their way. Similar to the ladies of the novel, the Queen is distraught at the idea of being without a man in her life, and when he leaves she “thumped at [her] breast, distraught I lasted a month. I slept for a week, then woke to binge for a fortnight” (Duffy). Queen Kong cannot picture her life without a man, who she sees as ever powerful and superior. The women in Emma act in a similar, yet more civilized way about the matter. They crave the stability of a man in their lives, and they do not seem to dream or desire of anything more than being settled down into a marriage and starting a family. This complete lack of thought about an independent lifestyle is similar to the way Queen Kong sees living without her lover, stating that “[she] had been so lonely” and that “no man has been loved more” regarding her affection and devotion to him (Duffy). Although Emma herself does not seem to want to marry at the beginning of the novel, it all changes as the novel unravels. The fact that the singular woman who seemed as if she could make it on her own without a husband eventually crumbles to what society wants of her says something for the values of the women and society during the beginning of the 20th century.