Still Life in Landscape

Writing at the end of the 20th century, Sharon Olds’s literary association with Feminism is unavoidable. Her frequently domestic subject matter further invites her characterization as a Feminist poet; any woman writing about daily life in the 20th century contributes to the movement’s effort to make a place for female voices as part of artistic culture. Poets like Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton—with all of whom Olds is often associated—at some point make direct claim to voice and artistic validity. Olds’s work rarely takes gender or justification of voice as a central topic; her most feminist gesture is her confidence in artistically centering her personal experience without feeling obligation to justify its worth. Her disposition places her between Second and Third Wave Feminism, both of which movements alternately scorn and embrace her.

Some Feminist poets of Olds’s generation—the Second Wave Feminism of the 1960s through the 1980s—reject Olds’s work as salacious or self-indulgent, as undermining the legitimacy of women’s voices. Denise Levertov characterized Olds’s work as shallow and self-centered, a model for poetry rooted in victimhood. Other critics object to Olds’s graphic physical descriptions, particularly of female bodies. For some time, her work’s notoriety derived in no small part from the objections of critics like Helen Vendler, who characterized her poems as pornography. Feminist art continually challenges societal regulation of the female body’s portrayal. The graphic language, but clinical affect, describing the woman’s body in “Still Life in Landscape” addresses in some ways the critical backlash over Olds’s depiction of female bodies. The poem raises the questions of perception and boundaries, ownership of image and narrative, and the interaction between physical and sensory worlds.

Third Wave Feminists recognize Olds as a leading figure in reclaiming the language of the female body and of sexuality. However, her traditional subjects of marriage and family don’t always resonate with younger writers who, while acknowledging her influence, look to break newer barriers. Third Wave Feminism begins in the early 1990s and tends to see gender as a fluid social construct. The movement seeks to embrace all classes and races, and as a middle-class white woman born in the 1940s, Olds strikes many Third Wave Feminists as a voice already heard.

With “Still Life in Landscape” and other poems, Olds implies the validity of female subjectivity; this aspect of her work alone still constitutes a radical premise. While male poets writing first-person narratives may be celebrated for their specificity and individuality, female poets adopting a lyric “I” receive criticism for egotism and shallow self-interest, unless they fulfill a narrowly-defined genre or subheading. Audiences still grapple with the value of a man’s biography versus the value of a woman’s personal narrative; even men’s prose biographies find a sufficient subject in the building blocks of a man’s life, while women’s biographies need a narrative angle, a theme to support their relevance to a defined audience. For a later generation of women writers, Olds’s work exemplifies, before it was widely acceptable to do so, speaking without apology or justification for her gender or allegedly gendered subject matter.