1. Remember to refer to 2 or 3 quotes from critics to further your argument

2. Embed the critical quote and use it to develop your own point The inequality of the relationship between Tess and Alec is partly the fault of Tess who fails to represent her own interests assertively, she is merely the ‘acquiescent complement to the male’ (Bloom) which makes it difficult, as a modern reader, to fully sympathise with her plight.

3. Frances Leviston on Rapture Gone is the sharp sense of history, the wry snap of modern life, the distinct yet palatable feminism; all those competing stories she delighted in telling have dissolved, it seems, in the single most important story of all, that of the human love affair. “ a combination of intimate and teasingly anonymous”

4. There is a danger, in replicating love’s single- mindedness, of replicating also the boredom felt by those who do not share the rhapsodist’s feelings, and Rapture accordingly can seem to beg too much indulgence of the reader, relying on its rhythms and a sense of recognition to carry it through

5. New Scotsman The danger in ‘Rapture’ is that the singularity of the subject matter could become relentless, and this danger is heightened by Duffy's recurrent use of certain images: stone, moon, charm, star, heart, gift, trees, bones. But actually, contrarily, the book works cumulatively, and the poems take on the strange power of charms, spells, incantations.

6. Optmistic or pessimistic ending? The final poem in the collection takes lines from Robert Browning as its epigraph: "That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, / Lest you should think he never could recapture / That first fine careless rapture!" The quotation gives Duffy both the title of her collection and the title for this poem - "Over". The affair may be "over", but in her verse she can sing it "over" and the effect is uplifting and thrilling.

7. Rapture is sad, but not bleak

8. Duffy is a very brave poet. Only pop songs are braver in their use of repetition, and in "Finding the Words" she succeeds in making an ordinary "I love you" into something extraordinary.

9. RAPTURE is brilliant, beautiful, and heart-aching.

10. Her frank presentation of sexual contact through the device of repetition articulates physical experience at a visceral level

11. https://www.overdrive.com/media/107283 6/rapture Rapture is a map of real love, in all its churning complexity, showing us that a song can be made of even the most painful episodes in our lives.

12. Duffy What’s the best poem ever written? Shakespeare’s sonnet, number 116

13. Duffy Poetry is the music of being human We find in poetry the echoes of our deepest feelings and most serious moments.

14. Fairytale This naiveté carries over into the poems. They too find themselves indebted to the timelessness and universality of fairytale. There are occasional explicit references –the ‘Beast’s rose’ (in ‘Unloving’), the ‘goblin’ (in ‘Your Move’), the being lost in a forest (‘Forest’). And like the ‘three wishes’ of fairytale there’s the three-word repetition which she leaves like a footprint -a breadcrumb? ‘love, love, love’ (in ‘Write’), ‘reprieve, reprieve, reprieve’ (‘Spring’), ‘rhyming, rhyming, rhyming’ (‘Name’), ‘text, text, text’ (‘Text’), ‘gold, gold, gold’ (‘Hour’) and ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’ (‘Finding The Words’) Why do you think Duffy chooses to draw on faiytale?

15. Tess of the D’Urbervilles Harold Bloom Tess sets out, not as any positive thing, containing all purpose, but as the acquiescent complement to the male Tess never tries to alter, not to change anybody Alec sees her as the embodied fulfilment of his own desire It is not Angel’s fault that he cannot come to terms with Tess’ history ‘It is the result of generations of ultra Christian training’

16. Sarah E Meier The sexual urges of males were seen as regrettable but ‘natural’ Whereas ‘Purity is a defining characteristic of female sexuality’ In Tess, Hardy exposes this over-simplification of woman’s sexual roles, and the hypocrisy of the prevalent sexual double standard

17. Laura Claridge ‘A less than Pure Woman’ ‘Victorian literature often appropriated the lushness of nature to foreground sexual initiation’ ‘in a slight distress she parted her lips and took it in’ Tess accedes to Alec’s wish that he feed her the strawberry himself. P.47 ;’it is precisely our sense that Tess chooses her sexual initiation that makes this scene highly erotic’

18. Tess as figure of temptation ‘Tess as the Eve who rather too quickly yields to the temptation of the snake in the grass’ ‘Equally interesting is the conflation of identity wherein Tess takes on snakelike characteristics’ Angel approaches Tess as she is yawning ‘the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake’s’ and she then stretches her arm above her ‘coiled up cable of hair’ p.217 ch.27

19. Tess was more a passive victim of male aggression and idealization than an active participant in her own disastrous fate.’ (Kristen Brady 1986) ‘It has been suggested that the narrator derives an almost sadistic pleasure from Tess’ suffering…’ (Kristen Brady 1986)

20. Lim Jane “a critic in Saturday Review, while identifying Tess as the most true to life character in the novel, found the other characters “stagy” or “farcical.” He objected to what he saw as Hardy’s excessive concern with descriptions of Tess’s appealing physical attributes and deemed the story improbable”

21. “Tess is curiously ‘absent’ from most of the key events in the novel; from the death of Prince, to the strawberry scene, the night in the Chase, Angel’s return and her capture at Stonehenge, she is asleep or in a trance” – Kaja Silverman

22. By giving increased prominence to the villainy of both Alec and Angel, Hardy was able to half suggest that Tess was more a passive victim of male aggression and idealisation than an active participant in her own disastrous fate.” – Kristin Brady 1986