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.