What the exam asks
- Paper 2 (comparative essay, 25 marks): You answer one of four general literary questions without the texts, comparing Duffy’s poems as a whole work with another literary work. Criterion B1 (5 marks) rewards analysing and evaluating how both small-scale features (internal rhyme, colour imagery, syntax) and broader authorial choices (rewritten fairy-tale persona, narrative arc, the shift in tense at the ending) shape meaning. Criterion B2 (5 marks) rewards sustained comparison.
- HL essay (20 marks): You investigate a broad line of inquiry across several of Duffy’s poems (never just one poem on its own), such as how Duffy subverts inherited narratives to trace the cost of female autonomy.
- Individual oral (40 marks): Because the poem is 42 lines long, a continuous 40-line extract (either stanzas 1 to 6 plus the first four lines of stanza 7, or stanzas 2 to 7) can anchor a global issue such as how an older male mentor shapes and restricts a young female artist, linked to the wider collection and a non-literary body of work.
Core ideas
Rewriting the fairy tale and the allegory of apprenticeship
The title takes the Grimm brothers’ name for the heroine (Rotkäppchen, “Little Red-Cap”). Whereas Charles Perrault’s 1697 version ends with the cautionary moral of the wolf devouring the gullible girl, and the Grimms’ version has a male huntsman cut open the sleeping wolf to rescue the girl and her grandmother, after which the wolf’s belly is filled with stones, Duffy strips away both the cautionary victimhood and the male rescuer.
Critics frequently read the poem as an allegory of a young female poet’s literary apprenticeship to an older, established male poet. Rather than being tricked off the path, the speaker actively chooses the wolf as a mentor in order to gain access to literature, endures a decade in the woods until she recognises the limits of his repetitive art, and finally slays him herself to reclaim a silenced female tradition.
Structure, form and sound
Duffy organises the 42-line dramatic monologue into seven six-line stanzas (sestets). The regular visual frame of the sestets holds a wild, boundary-crossing coming-of-age story that moves across five distinct stages:
| Stanzas | Narrative stage | Key formal and tonal shifts |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The threshold | Moves from the suburban edge of childhood to the woods; plain, retrospective past tense. |
| 2–3 | The encounter and pursuit | The wolf as performance poet; fairy-tale exclamations reversed; enjambment across stanzas drives the pursuit. |
| 4–5 | Tuition and discovery | Seduction framed as a lesson; innocence killed; the glowing wall of books where words become physical life. |
| 6 | The ten-year awakening | Time compressed; natural imagery of decay and song exposes the wolf’s creative stagnation. |
| 7 | Liberation and exit | Three parallel axe blows; the huntsman’s role seized; final shift into the solitary present tense. |
Although the sestets do not follow a regular end-rhyme scheme, Duffy packs the lines with internal rhyme, alliteration and assonance. In the early stanzas, heavy, playful chimes mimic the intoxicating spell of the fairy tale and the wolf’s charisma; by the final stanza, sharp, monosyllabic internal rhymes drive the violence of her self-liberation.
Colour symbolism: red and white
Duffy tracks the speaker’s transformation through a pattern of red and white:
- Red connects girl, wolf and art: the wolf has “red wine staining his bearded jaw” (stanza 2), the girl leaves “scraps of red from my blazer” on the branches (stanza 3), and the wolf’s secret bookcase is “crimson, gold, aglow with books” where words are “music and blood” (stanza 5). Red shifts from an emblem of schoolgirl uniform and sexual danger to the lifeblood of poetry.
- White marks both what is lost and what is recovered: the “white dove” of adolescent innocence is bitten dead in stanza 5, while in stanza 7 the speaker splits the wolf open to uncover “the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones”—reclaiming an uncorrupted ancestral purity and female lineage.