The Map as a Metaphor Dean Lundie College

In the poem ‘The Map Woman’, Carol Ann Duffy uses the extended metaphor of a map being printed on a woman’s body to explore ideas surrounding hometowns, childhood and nostalgia. This is immediately introduced in the first line where the reader learns that ‘A woman’s skin was the map of the town where she’d grown from a child.’ In an attempt to hide her hometown from the world, the character covers herself as much as possible due to shame she feels. This climaxes in her shedding her skin in the second to last stanza. With such a metaphor, certain imagery is created in the mind of the reader, such as that of a snake or of the human body. This could ultimately be narrowed down into three main concepts; location, permanence and identity.

The extended metaphor used in the poem allows Duffy to show how the woman’s body and the map are one in the same. The figurative language in stanza two links the anatomy of her body with location of different features of her hometown, such as her statement that ‘her veins [are] like shadows below the lines of the map, the river an artery’. The language used suggests that like an ‘artery’ and a ‘vein’, the character needs this map and the features of her town in order to survive. This idea that the...