FREE ESSAY ON AGAINST STILL LIFE

AGAINST STILL LIFE

Against Still Life
In the poem Against Still Life, poet Margaret Atwood fascinates us by weaving her words
into descriptive feelings we can all relate too, especially women. Atwood is a well known
poet and novelist who has a certain way of grabbing the attention of the reader and
throwing the reader's thoughts around without her even realizing it. In Against Still
Life for example, Atwood opens her poem with an orange, nothing more than an orange. By
the end of the poem she has got the reader pondering what men think about. It is assumed
that Atwood is the speaker of the poem and the setting is simply a situation most of us
can find ourselves in often.
The speaker of the poem is Margaret Atwood herself. She describes thoughts that would
only belong to her. Atwood uses the word "I" to describe herself in the poem and "you" to
describe a second party other than the reader, who we later find to be a man. The poem,
seems as though it is directed as a thought to the man, not a conversation or a poem for
him to read, but Atwood's desire to know this man's thoughts. Atwood is clever, and
describes feelings and the frustrations that any woman has felt about a man. This makes
us really wonder if Atwood truly feels this way, or if she is just describing feelings
that a general woman have about a general man. I believe Atwood did this on purpose not
only to more easily relate to the reader but because she once said in a lecture, "Plato
said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I
am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so
much as about their own lives… I of course -- being also a novelist -- am a much
more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?" (Atwood).
This suggests that maybe Atwood doesn't really feel this way about a man, she could have
made the whole thing up simply to please and relate to her readers, but then again, she
could be telling the truth.
Atwood's attitude in the poem is very demanding and unknowing. She is a woman who wants
answers about a man. She is having a hard time understanding this man and wants to know
what's going on inside his head. This happens to describe Atwood perfectly because she
once said her husband (who is also a writer) was "[b]etter than a dentist. At least
another writer knows why you are being so strange. And you can take long vacations"
(Author Profile).
In the poem, Atwood compares an orange to the man. It is said that Atwood often writes of
food in her publications because she feels as though women have come to feel
uncomfortable with themselves and food. Atwood probes the prohibitions on the public
display of female appetite and the social taboos which surround women and food in terms
of the politics of eating (Parker). I believe Atwood does this to make herself and the
reader feel more comfortable with the frustrations she describes. She can only see the
outside of the orange in the same way that she can only see the outside of the man. But
she wants more than that, "I want to pick it up in my hand I want to peel the skin off; I
want more to be said to me than just Orange: want to be told everything it has to say"
(Muller 255). She wants to know all she can about the man, and it is driving her crazy
not knowing what's really going on inside that head of his. There is a constant battle in
our world; men want to know how women really work and think, and women want to know what
men really work and think. Atwood even mentions that she knows the man is thinking the
same thing she is, and she wants to make him say it out load. "[M]ake me want to wrench
you into saying: now I'd crack your skull like a walnut, split it like a pumpkin to make
you talk, or get a look inside" (Muller 256). She knows that this man has the same
thoughts about her. She knows that he has this overwhelming desire to understand her by
knowing everything and anything about her. It frustrates her even more that he doesn't
and won't tell her that he has these feelings. Atwood wants to be able to relate her
feelings to his feelings any way she can, and she feels as though his orange silence will
not let her.
Atwood paints the scene beautifully. A man and a women, sitting across from one another
at a table and in the center of the table, an orange, "Orange, in the middle of the
table… [a]nd you, sitting across the table, at a distance with your smile
contained, and like the orange in the sun; silent…" {Quote}. This could be taking
place somewhere as simple as Atwood's personal kitchen or maybe in a park at a picnic
bench. The woman is sitting there with orange and man in perfect line of view. She first
stares at the orange. Her eyes move from the orange to the man and she notices how alike
they are because she has no idea what's going on in the inside of either one. The
situation then becomes uncomfortable for Atwood as she realizes she is sitting across
from someone who is as quiet and awkwardly easily compared to an orange. She wants to
know everything about the man including past, present and future. It is not enough that
he is just smiling, sitting across from her.
As she continues to describe her intense feelings on how she wants to know what's inside
the man, she mentions a thing of great importance. Instead of the poem being an actual
scene, it could really be taking place anywhere. Maybe she is describing an on-going
thought, in which she feels the same wonderment whenever she is sitting across from this
man. So, she says, "and you, man, orange afternoon lover, wherever you sit across from me
(tables, trains, buses) if I watch quietly enough and long enough." It seems as though
Atwood realizes that she may never really ever know what the man is thinking, and she
will probably always have the same thoughts when sitting across from the man, wherever
they are. The reader can now identify with this situation. Atwood weaves words together
so that it could be any woman or man, any where, any place, sitting across from a person
of the opposite sex wanting to know what the other is all about. Atwood discovers that
through each conversation she would find, "there are mountains inside your skull garden
and chaos, ocean and hurricane; certain corners of rooms, portraits of
great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade; your deserts; our private dinosaurs;
the first woman"(Muller 256). These sorts of answers could only be explained and
interpreted through several conversations through life. And even then, the answers given
to Atwood's questions might not be understood and she would be left off right where she
left off, with no true understanding at all. But she doesn't care, she wants to know
everything from the beginning.