Introduction

When a friend of Carol Ann Duffy’s described the traditional practice of maids wearing their mistresses’ pearls during their day’s work so that their body heat might improve the pearls’ appearance, she anticipated Duffy to feel indignation at mistresses’ shameless treatment of their inferiors. Indeed, in Duffy’s dramatic monologue, which most likely takes place in Victorian or Edwardian England, there is a clear political undertone about class division. For although the maid desires to speak, she has no voice because of her subordinate status: ‘In her looking-glass / my red lips part as though I want to speak.’ (15-16) Therefore, the maid could be viewed as fantasizing about being of a higher class without these class restrictions that leave her unfulfilled and frustrated. This is in contrast to the mistress’s sense of entitlement, as one could consider her as objectifying the maid as a tool to warm her pearls so that they look more beautiful when she wears them. 

Despite this reading, Duffy also interpreted the concept as a beautifully sensual, erotic image of desire and sexual attraction: for while the maid does her appointed task, she falls in love. The maid expresses, however, a desire and love that is unconventional and homoerotic. This is particularly related by the concept that it is the maid’s body heat from working that is expected to give the pearls their lustre, which has strong sexual overtones: ‘She fans herself / whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering / each pearl’(6-8), this suggests that the maid desires to be very intimate with her mistress. It could be suggested that the maid simply feels deep admiration and fascination towards her mistress, rather than sexual lust. However, the maid’s voice consistently seems impassioned and erotically explicit, particularly when she envisages her mistress ‘Undressing, / taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching / for the case, slipping naked into bed’ (18-20), which creates a vivid picture of the maid yearning for her mistress. 

Nevertheless, the maid would have to suppress these passions, not only because of her inferior social position, but also because of its illegality and the antipathy felt by society towards lesbianism. This makes her lust supremely illicit because in the early modern period these homosexual and class-crossing thoughts would be considered highly transgressive: many contemporaries viewed this behaviour as female servants corrupting their innocent mistresses (Hallett 40). Indeed, Kristina Straub asserts that there was a noticeable intensification in complaints about the insubordination and corruption of servants in 18^th and 19^th century Britain known as “the servant problem” (5), thus Duffy could be viewed as exploring the period’s new household anxiety. But Duffy could also be depicting, through the use of beautiful imagery and enjambment, the way that the maid would benefit from a society where concepts of identity are more fluid and malleable, rather than a society that rigidly binds people into certain classes and acceptable sexualities. These themes of social hierarchy and illicit desire and sexuality will be developed by later blog posts that will further elucidate the context surrounding the poem, as well as a thoroughly analyse its form, symbols and imagery.  

Imogen Grandon-White

Bibliography 

Duffy, Carol Ann. "Warming her Pearls". Poetry Foundation, 1987. Web. 28 Apr. 2015.

Hallett, Nicky. “Did Mrs. Danvers Warm Rebecca's Pearls? Significant Exchanges and the Extension of Lesbian Space and Time in Literature.” Feminist Review No. 74, Fiction and Theory: Crossing Boundaries (2003), pp. 35-49. Web.

Sansom, Peter. Writing Poems (Bloodaxe Poetry Handbooks). Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books Ltd; First Edition, 1994. Print.

Straub, Kristina. ‪Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008. Print.