The Victims
When
Mother divorced you, we were glad. She
took it and
took
it, in silence, all those years and then
kicked
you out, suddenly, and her
kids
loved it. The you were fired, and
we
grinned
inside, the way people grinned when
Nixon’s
helicopter lifted off the South
Lawn
for the last time. We were tickled
to
think of your office taken away,
your
secretaries taken away,
your
lunches with three double bourbons,
your
pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take your
suits
back, too, those dark
carcasses
hung in your closet, and the black
noses
of your shoes with their large pores?
She
had taught us to take it, to hate you and take it
until
we pricked with her for your
annihilation,
Father. Now I
pass
the bums in doorways, the white
slugs
of their bodies gleaming through slits in their
suits
of compressed silt, the stained
flippers
of their hands, the underwater
fire
of their eyes, ships gone down with the
lanterns
lit, and I wonder who took it and
took
it from them in silence until they had
given
it all away and had nothing
left
but this.
Literary Analysis:
A great deal of Sharon Olds’ poetry is a daughter’s response to an abusive and uncaring father from the point of view of both a child and an adult. Though some would label Sharon Olds as a confessional poet and others claim she is simply egotistical and confessing nothing, the fact still stands that in her works Olds traces her relationship with her father from beginning to end, from abuse, to expulsion of the abuser, to her father’s death. The Victims is an excellent example of one of Olds’ typical family snapshots that captures how the dysfunctional family reacted to the end of misrule by the father.
In The Victims Olds takes the point of view of the recollecting adult, showing no empathy for her father, but celebrating his ousting from the household and successive loss of job.
The word “it” in the first two lines carries ambiguous weight, suggesting abuse and mistreatment, but remaining non-specific. This generic description makes the poem more universal and less selfishly personal, but also minimizes the impact of her struggles.
This description and reference to abuse makes one wonder if Olds simply is mistaking contrived reverence and coy exhibitionism for honesty, trying to get attention to make up for the fact that she was never loved enough.
Olds’ simplistic language paints a very good, though slightly vague, picture of the father figure: a businessman with a drinking problem who abused his family.
Risky line breaks appear again, but Olds succeeds in pulling off this choppiness because of her mix of bluntness (how glad she was when her father left) and balanced emotional structuring (there is still a wonderfully human conflict of feelings between despair and glee).
Olds’ imaginative metaphors can be seen in comparing a cruel father to a bum—a man who gives so much abuse away to his family will eventually have nothing left, making him as worthless as a homeless beggar.
The end of the poem adopts a somewhat nautical theme (i.e. flippers, underwater, ships sinking), capturing a feeling of drowning; such a sensation could symbolize the weight of the situation on Olds as well as the way her father drowned in his own destructive nature.