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Title: Father/daughter relationships
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A well-known poet, Sharon Olds has written poems that while reading them you feel so intimate and it is difficult to believe they are imaginary. The poem “The Lifting” from her book the Father is a good example of it. In this poem, the storyteller’s father is dying, and he lifts his nightdress to uncover himself to his daughter. The shirt “rises the way we were promised at death it would rise” (Olds, 406) and the storyteller is given a glance at the physical aggravation of a formerly powerful figure in her life.
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It is very inconvinient for some people to read about the physicality and the realism of a daughter who is looking at dying father with “the gaunt torso of a big man/who will die soon” (Olds, 406). Olds realistically depicts every detail, allowing her story to involve the father’s “penis in all that/ dark hair” (Olds, 406). Undoubtedly, there is something innocent and familiar in this poem when the father smiles at the storyteller and she sees “how much his hips are like mine” and “how much his pelvis is shaped like my daughter” (Olds, 406).
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Sharon Olds applies the full description of the father’s appearance to display the intimacy of his relationship with the daughter. Via author’s descriptions an approaching sense of lovepenetrates the whole poem. Olds uses the concrete to show the emotional. This is the type of thing that sets Olds apart from her contemporaries. She always wants to exceed the limits of that unsafe place in poetry that may deeply enlighten.
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The male characters in this poem such as father, teacher, statue, gestapo officer, husband and vampire are created as leading and oppressive. The father appears as a strong, powerful and restrictive - god-like figure. The female character is constrained (‘black shoe/In which I have lived like a foot’) and unable to lead a full life (‘Barely daring to breathe or Achoo’) in his prevailling presence. This oppression is realised by the female character who decides that she must revolt against this male power that reject her control over her life (‘Daddy , I have had to kill you.’)
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The father is compared with the Nazi who takes the responsibility for the mass slaughter of Jews (‘I thought every German was you’) and the female character is depicted as the oppressed victim (‘I think I may well be a Jew’). Putting her father on the stage next to the Nazis, at the same time she puts women in the same position as the Jews, being exploited and violated. In this comparative portrayal men have the force to destroy women, to be the reason of their metaphorical deaths all within legitimate limits. The poem describes that the real power of the men is to make women give in to the dominant ideology, making their additional part of the natural order of the world.
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