Knowing who we are, and finding a way to tell ourselves, are two of Duffy's central concerns. In questioning the ways in which we are represented, she also addresses the difficulties of knowing the self through otherness. As I suggested in the previous chapter, this is a questioning for which the dramatic monologue is particularly useful. In her use of the form, Duffy inherits a tradition from Browning, Laforgue, Eliot and W. S. Graham. Importantly she can also be grouped alongside three other contemporary women poets: U. A. Fanthorpe (b. 1929), who reconstituted the dramatic monologue for feminist ends in the late 1970s and early 1980s; and two Scottish poets, Liz Lochhead (b. 1947), and Jackie Kay (b. 1961), whose The Adoption Papers (Bloodaxe, 1991) directly acknowledges Duffy's ‘help and encouragement’.

Primarily the dramatic monologue presents a way of bringing the poet's self into the public world, while simultaneously denying responsibility, and masking presence - it is not, after all, the poet who is speaking but the character who is being portrayed. Yet while being a mode of writing that appears to destabilize the relationship between the poet and the poem's speaking voice, the ‘I’ of the monologue exhibits an over- determined and objectified selfhood symptomatic of anxieties about claiming any kind of subject position. In many ways the monologue is a method of disclaiming or dislocating oneself from a subject position. Robert Langbaum concedes that the ‘standard account of the dramatic monologue is that Browning and Tennyson conceived it as a reaction against the romantic confessional style’, and cites the disclaimer to Browning's 1842 Dramatic Lyrics: ‘so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine’.

One important reason why the monologue may appeal to women as a form may come from an already pervasive sense of the everyday artificiality of the construction of women's role.