Water, Economy, and Gender/Sexuality in Poems of Duck and Collier

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Mary Collier's poetic voice, or her plebeian-cultural imagination as "a washer woman," is found out to be "doubly" alienated; first from her seemingly "opposing" male, Stephen Duck as a thresher, who belongs to the same social class as hers, common labouring class, and then from their cultural opponent, Alexander Pope, who clearly belongs to the gentry/squirarchy as a representative of 18th-Century polite culture.This double alienation of her can be shown through our analyses of their several poems concerning the aspects of rural society at those times; the poems are interpreted culturally and socially by comparison of their particular clusters of "water" imagery, together of their sex/sexuality/gender ideologies, in their poetic discourses.