18 pages • 36 minutes read
Sharon OldsThe Victims
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Objects Representing the Body, Self, and Identity
Beginning with Line 7, “The Victims” shifts into a list in which the speaker lists various objects that are taken away from the father following the loss of his job. “We were tickled / to think of your office taken away” (Lines 7-8), the speaker begins, following this statement with a number of other people, objects, and things: “[Y]our secretaries taken away, / your lunches” (Lines 9-10). The speaker even goes so far as to list “your pencils” (Line 11) and “reams of paper” (Line 11) as objects taken from the father. By chronicling this detailed list of nouns, the speaker illustrates how the father not only lost his family and his job; he lost every little element of himself including the very pencils he used to write. The speaker strips the father of his identity and any semblance of power and adulthood he had. This concept is solidified when the speaker finally asks, “[w]ould they take your / suits back, too” (Lines 11-12) and “the black / noses of your shoes” (Lines 13-14).
Further, stripping the father of all items in his life sets the poem up for the final movement in which the speaker, in the present tense, passes “bums in doorways” (Line 18) whose suits are slits with their “their bodies gleaming through” (Line 19). The father, too, has nothing and has become comparable in many ways to the bums who have “given it all away” (Line 25).
President Nixon
By evoking President Nixon and the 1974 historical context of his voluntary resignation from office, Olds offers the context of President Nixon’s departure: the Watergate scandal. To compare the children in the poem who “grinned inside, the way people grinned when / Nixon’s helicopter lifted off the South / Lawn for the last time” (Lines 5-7), is to compare the children to the American people happy to see their guilty President leaving office. Furthermore, this compares President Nixon (and his negative actions) to the speaker’s father. Olds is careful not to explicitly mention what the father did to the mother or to the children to cause the divorce. However, by evoking President Nixon (and the subsequent scandal connected to his presidency) it can be inferred that the father, too, has committed some scandal or some form of taboo or abuse resulting in joy at his removal.
The children are pleased with the ejection of their father from the family in the same way the American public was pleased with the removal of Nixon. However, it is important to note that as with politics, divorce, too, involves taking sides. The children in “The Victims” side with the mother. When the mother finally kicks out the father, “her / kids loved it” (Lines 3-4). Yet, the father’s story is never told. It is unclear why he was divorced. And the speaker, in the final movement of the poem, expresses quiet remorse for possibly treating the father too harshly. This is evident in Line 17 when the speaker says the word “Father” (Line 17) for the first and only time.
Animals
Olds describes the father’s black suits as “those dark / carcasses” (Lines 12-13). A suit is often considered a symbol of wealth, power, and professionalism. However, by using “carcasses” (Line 13) to describe the father’s suits hanging in the closet, Olds links the suits with the dead bodies of animals, dehumanizing the father, and stripping the suits (and the father) of their power.
Furthermore, in Line 17 when “The Victims” shifts into the present tense, several images having to do with animals are presented. The speaker describes the bums who line the streets: “[t]he white / slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in their / suits” (Lines 18-20). The speaker focuses on “the stained / flippers of their hands” (Lines 20-21). These descriptors—taken from animals (slugs and some type of marine animal like a dolphin or seal)—illustrate how the father (and the bums) are stripped of everything in their lives (family, jobs, possessions) and of their humanity. By comparing their hands to “flippers” (Line 21), the speaker comments on the uselessness of their hands as though these people are useless to society. Using the word “slugs” (Line 19) to define their bodies evokes a laziness about the “bums” (Line 18), as though they are unable to move with the swiftness of men and women. Slugs, too, are known for leaving a trail of slimy liquid behind them, much like those without homes often leave pieces of their existence. The imagery of animals symbolizes that these “bums” (Line 18)—like the speaker’s father—have been stripped of their humanity and the identities of who they had been before their misfortune.
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