The dramatic monologue often explores the unsettling ambivalence of desire. A voice speaks to us of intimacies and longings that may threaten to dismantle the very structure of the private life, even of identity itself. The reader becomes aware of the speaker’s compelling need to reveal through testimony, untold secrets, and maskings.

This imperative for disclosure in the dramatic monologue engenders a palpable tension that haunts this poetic form. Who can read Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” without a shudder at the fastidious rationalisation of murder? It is as if the voice of the speaker is emerging from a long oppressive silence, finally yielding to the perverse liberation of expression and voicedness. Browning’s monologues memorably offer the reader an unsettling and ironic gift of love’s nemesis, pathological jealousy.

Carol Ann Duffy's “Warming Her Pearls” explores the very intimate and even strangely co-dependent relationship between a maid and her mistress. For although maids may dress and touch their mistresses through the daily rituals of care because it is their prescribed role, Duffy suggests they may also fall somewhat illegitimately in love. This love is rendered illegitimate for economic reasons as well as for those of social status, and sexual proclivity.

“Warming Her Pearls” explores the tension between a care that is bought through employment and the resulting care and erotic tenderness that is subsequently experienced in spite of social and economic separation. Just as Lady Dedlock’s French maid Hortense, in Dickens’s Bleak House, experiences a complex and ambivalent attachment to her employer in the novel, so Duffy’s maid transforms the everyday gestures of grooming her mistress into erotic moments of thwarted possibility and connection.

This secret romantic attachment of the maid for her mistress rewrites the dynamics between servant and employer, so that all the conventional signs of such an economically stable relationship become eroticised and suffused with fantasy and the instability created through sexual longing. The connotations of being or having a mistress are correspondingly re-appropriated in Duffy’s poem, adding to the illicit suggestiveness of the poem's subtext.

Whilst we are accustomed to hearing about men having mistresses, we may be unaccustomed to women taking mistresses. Women are not supposed to take a mistress for themselves, let alone if they are employed as maids to serve their employers with their many needs. Duffy provocatively explores an erotic other possibility in the poem, a possibility later explored in Sarah Waters’ best selling novel Fingersmith.

In Duffy’s poem, each stanza explores the familiar, all too known spaces of the home occupied by maid and mistress, recognising that desire renders all such places unashamedly erotic. Each stanza acts as another room or place in the day's rituals. We may all crave to know the whereabouts and activities of the beloved, but this poem ironises the erotic power and potential of such knowledge.