Abstract:
Ekphrasis rests on the paragone between the sister arts, namely verbal and visual arts, the
word and the image. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his Laocoön claims that the image is silent and fixed
while the literary work is based on voice and action. W. J. T. Mitchell in his Picture Theory enlarges
this binary opposition between the word and image in terms of gender roles: the female image versus
the male word. The female image is objectified and gazed, while the male author/artist is the subject and
the gazer. The poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “Standing Female Nude” challenges such binary
oppositions by giving voice not to the male artist but to his female model, and by attributing the role of
gazing to her. Hence, the aim of this article is to display how Duffy deconstructs the ekphrastic tradition
in her poem in order to subvert the domineering relationship between the artist and his model.
