Tell Me a Riddle Women Writers (New Brunswick,

title:
N.J.)
author: Olsen, Tillie.
publisher: Rutgers University Press
isbn10 | asin: 081352136X
print isbn13: 9780813521367
ebook isbn13: 9780585002682
language: English
Cancer--Patients--Fiction, Married people--Fiction,
subject  Working class--Fiction, Aged women--Fiction,
Olsen, Tillie.--Tell me a riddle.
publication date: 1995
lcc: PS3565.L82T45 1995eb
ddc: 813/.54
Cancer--Patients--Fiction, Married people--Fiction,
subject: Working class--Fiction, Aged women--Fiction,
Olsen, Tillie.--Tell me a riddle.
 ''Tell Me a Riddle"
 
Women Writers
Texts and Contexts
SERIES EDITORS
THOMAS L. ERSKINE
Salisbury State University
CONNIE L. RICHARDS
Salisbury State University
SERIES BOARD
MARTHA BANTA
University of California at Los Angeles
BARBARA T. CHRISTIAN
University of California at Berkeley
PAUL LAUTER
Trinity College

VOLUMES IN THE SERIES

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, ''The Yellow Wallpaper"
Edited by Thomas L. Erskine and Connie L. Richards, Salisbury
State University
JOYCE CAROL OATES, "Where Are You Going,
Where Have You Been?"
Edited by Elaine Showalter, Princeton University
FLANNERY O'CONNOR, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"
Edited by Frederick Asals, University of Toronto
TILLIE OLSEN, "Tell Me a Riddle"
Edited by Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt, University of Maryland,
College Park
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, "Flowering Judas"
Edited by Virginia Spencer Carr, Georgia State University
LESLIE MARMON SILKO, "Yellow Woman"
Edited by Melody Graulich, University of New Hampshire
ALICE WALKER, "Everyday Use"
Edited by Barbara T. Christian, University of California,
Berkeley
HISAYE YAMAMOTO, "Seventeen Syllables"
Edited by King-Kok Cheung, University of California, Los
Angeles
 
 ''Tell Me a Riddle"
TILLIE OLSEN

Edited and with an introduction by

DEBORAH SILVERTON ROSENFELT

 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Olsen, Tillie.
Tell me a riddle / Tillie, Olsen; edited and with an introduction by
Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt.
p. cm. - (Women writers: texts and contexts)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8135-2136-X (cloth) - ISBN 0-8135-2137-8 (pbk.)
1. CancerPatientsUnited StatesFiction. 2. Married people
United StatesFiction. 3. Working classUnited States-Fiction.
4. Aged womenUnited StatesFiction. 5. Olsen, Tillie. Tell me a riddle.
I. Rosenfelt, Deborah Silverton. II. Title. III. Series: Women writers
(New Brunswick, N.J.)
PS3565. L82T45 1995
813'.54-dc20
94-29813
CIP
British Cataloging-in-Publication information available

This collection copyright © 1995 by Rutgers, The State University For

copyrights to individual pieces please see first page of each essay.
Published by Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ All rights
reserved
 
For Miranda
 
Contents
Introduction 3
DEBORAH SILVERTON ROSENFELT
Chronology 27
Tell Me a Riddle 33
TILLIE OLSEN
Background to the Story
Silences in Literature 87
TILLIE OLSEN
Personal Statement 105
TILLIE OLSEN
Critical Essays
The Circumstances of Silence: Literary Representation and Tillie 113
Olsen's Omaha Past
LINDA RAY PRATT
From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and the Radical Tradition 133
DEBORAH SILVERTON ROSENFELT
A Feminist Spiritual Vision 177
ELAINE NEIL ORR
Death Labors 199
JOANNE TRAUTMANN BANKS
Motherhood as Source and Silencer of Creativity 213
MARA FAULKNER
To ''Bear My Mother's Name": Künstlerromane by Women 243
Writers
RACHEL BLAU DuPLESSIS
 
 ''No One's Private Ground": A Bakhtinian Reading of Tillie
271
Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle
CONSTANCE COINER
Selected Bibliography
305
Permissions
309
 
 Page 1

Introduction
 
 Page 3

DEBORAH SILVERTON ROSENFELT

Introduction
How much it takes to become a writer. Bent ....
circumstances, time, development of craft-but beyond
that: how much conviction as to the importance of what
one has to say, one's right to say it. And the will,
the measureless store of belief in oneself to be able to
comprehensions. Difficult for any male not born into a
class that breeds such confidence.
Almost impossible for a girl, a woman.
TILLIE OLSEN,
Silences

Tillie Olsen's life spans more than eighty years of this century. Born in
Nebraska in 1912 or 1913, she lives today, as she has for many years, in a
third-floor walk-up apartment in cooperative housing in San Francisco, still
the modestly priced multicultural community envisioned by its
longshoremen's union founders. Writer, scholar, teacher, activist, mother,
she has touched the lives of others through her presence as well as through
her prose. Her legacy of published work is not large: in the thirties, two
poems, two essays, a story; in the forties, columns for the People's World, a
leftist newspaper; subsequently, the work she is known for todayTell Me a
Riddle (1962), a volume of short fiction; Yonnondio, a novel written in the
thirties but not published until 1974; ''Requa I" (1970), a short story,
intended as the first section of a longer work; Silences (1978), a collection
of critical essays as intricately webbed as a poem. A poem and a short story
written when Olsen was in her teens were published for the first time in
1993. She also edited a "daybook and reader," Mother to Daughter,
Daughter to Mother (1984), a gathering of words from 120 writersmothers
and daughters, including herself
 
 Page 4

and her daughter Julie Olsen Edwardsand wrote or cowrote several short
essays and prefaces. Though Olsen has written less than her readers might
wish, her fiction is highly regarded for its transformative vision and
consummate craft. As Robert Coles observed in a review of Tell Me a
Riddle, ''Everything she has written has become almost immediately a
classic."1

Olsen: Her Life and Her Work

Tillie Olsen's parents, Samuel Lerner and Ida Beber Lerner, were born and
raised in Russia.2Like many other young people of their time, they saw in
socialism the promise of a world free from religious superstition and from
the divisiveness of narrow ethnic identities, as well as from the political
oppressions of the tsarist regime. As Jews, they were close to the Bund, a
Jewish socialist organization with a humanist and internationalist
perspective; this radical humanism informs the grandmother's passionate
rejection of traditional Jewish religious practice in "Tell Me a Riddle": "Tell
them to write: Race, human; Religion, none."3They participated in the 1905
Revolution, a mass uprising protesting the tyranny of the tsarist regime in
Russia and calling for democratizing measures. When the revolution failed
and Samuel faced imprisonment and exile in Siberia, he fled to this country,
where he and Ida were married. Samuel Lerner eventually became the
secretary of the Nebraska Socialist Party, and the six Lerner children grew
up in a home where the struggles for survival of their working-class
immigrant family were understood in the context of global human struggles
for survival and dignity. As Elaine Orr writes, the young Tillie Lerner
came to know the United States both as a place of promise and as a country economically,
socially, racially, and sexually divided. Around her she saw farmers suffering from a
depressed agricultural industry and miners and packinghouse workers (among them her
father) who were beginning to organize against management. Thus her first memories were
colored by labor struggles, the realities of the workplace, the desire of laborers for a job and
dignity, and a growing Ameri-
 
 Page 5

can socialism. . . . Woven into Olsen's young consciousness . . . was . . . her parents'
immigrant identity, the Yiddish ideal of enlightenment they embodied, and a spirit of hope,
for freedom and justice that had imbued their lives in Russia. (23)

The second of six children, Tillie Lerner left high school after the eleventh
grade to earn a living. She took a series of jobstie presser, mother's helper,
hack writer, model, ice-cream packer, book clerk, waitress, punch-press
operator. Today, she points out to those who speak of her as a high school
dropout that she received more education than most of the women of this
era. In Silences, she notes that ''two-thirds of the illiterate in the world today
are women," and asks: "How many of us who are writers have mothers,
grandmothers, of limited education; awkward, not at home, with the written
word, however eloquent they may be with the spoken one? Born a
generation or two before, we might have been they."4 Olsen's love of
learning began early and persisted; she read voraciously in Omaha's
Carnegie Library, especially fiction, and like other working-class readers,
she found a world of literature and social thought in the Little Blue Books,
inexpensive miniature editions of authors ranging from Plato to Marx, their
contents shaped by the socialist background of Kansas publisher Emanuel
Haldeman-Julius. Harriet Monroe had begun publishing Poetry in 1912, and
Olsen was introduced in its pages to the work of midwesterners and
modernists like Sandburg, Stevens, Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, and Lowell. Both
her formal schooling and her informal learningnot just her reading, but her
attendance at local events like visits from poet Carl Sandburg or Eugene
Debs, the eloquent leader of the Socialist Party; her absorption of the
discussions about politics and history in her home, her attentiveness to the
nuances of voice and experience in the world about herinformed her use of
language and shaped her consciousness.
It was a surprisingly diverse worldnative-born and newly immigrant
midwestern workers, visiting socialist activists and intellectuals, black
families in the Lerner's integrated neighborhood. The young Tillie Lerner
seems to have been, very early, "one on whom nothing is lost," a favorite
phrase of hers from Henry James (Silences 62, 147); her ability to recall
 
 Page 6

and inscribe the rhythms of languagethe cadences of Black sermons, the

multiethnic exchanges of factory workers, the inflections of Yiddish-
influenced Englishmake her prose a particularly rich evocation of
multicultural America. Olsen's democratic use of language, as Constance
Coiner argues in her essay in this casebook, expresses an inclusive social
vision that insists on dignity and equality for all human life. Olsen sees her
work as part of a ''larger tradition of social concern," which included for her
as a young reader writers ranging from Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Victor Hugo
to Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and Walt Whitman.
In the Notes for her essay on Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills (1861,
reprinted by The Feminist Press in 1972), Olsen tells how at fifteen, her
encounter with the story, published anonymously in The Atlantic Monthly,
reminded her, "'Literature can be made out of the lives of despised people,"
and "You, too, must write.'" 5
Olsen's commitment to writing and her social engagement unfolded
simultaneously. Responding to the struggles for survival of those around
her, and influenced by the socialist ideals of her parents, Olsen became a
political activist in her teens. She joined the Young People's Socialist
League and in 1931 the Young Communist League. In the 1930s, when
America was in the midst of a devastating depression, communism seemed
to many to offer a more humane, and more socially successful, vision than
the laissez-faire capitalism of the pre-New Deal United States. Her work
took her to Kansas City, where she was jailed for helping to organize a
strike in a packing house. She contracted pleurisy while working in a tie
factory; in jail, she developed incipient tuberculosis, and she went for a
period of recovery to Faribault, Minnesota. There, she became pregnant and
began work on the novel that would become Yonnondio. As Pearlman and
Werlock put it, "When Olsen left Minnesota for California in the spring of
1933 ... she took with her the commitments of a political activist, a writer,
and a mother" (18-19).
In California, Olsen remained politically engaged throughout most of the
thirties. She also met and eventually married Jack Olsen, himself a YCL
activist. Both participated in the great union-building efforts of those years,
and in 1934,
 
 Page 7

they were arrested for taking part in the San Francisco maritime strike, one
of the most important strikes of American labor history. In the same year,
Olsen had published ''The Iron Throat," part of the opening chapter of
Yonnondio, in The Partisan Review; its power won her immediate
recognition, and she responded to the encouragement of Lincoln Steffens by
producing accounts of the strike ("The Strike") and of her arrest ("Thousand
Dollar Vagrant"). Also in 1934, she published two poems, "I Want You
Women up North to Know" and "There Is a Lesson," the first protesting the
exploitation of women workers in the sweatshops of the southwestern
garment industry; the second castigating fascist massacres in Austria and
prophesying revolution.
In her thirties writing, Olsen voices the angers and longings, the hopes and
capacities of working people-men, women, and children. The perspectives
and experiences of women are particularly significant in her work: in
Yonnondio, as I maintain in my essay here, she brings to the masculinist
world of the left proletarian novel an account of familial life only rarely
articulated in the genre. Yonnondio tells the story of a working-class
midwestern family, the Holbrooks, who struggle to survive by moving from
a mining town in Wyoming, to a farm in South Dakota, and finally to the
slaughterhouses of a city much like Omaha, Nebraska. The novel creates in
Mazie Holbrook, the young daughter, and in her mother Anna a figure who
reappears throughout Olsen's work, both fiction and criticism: a woman
potentially an artist/activist, silenced by poverty, by the willingly assumed
burdens of caring for others, and by the expectations associated with her
gender.
As the decade wore on, and Olsen bore her second daughter, she became
increasingly absorbed in the balancing act of mothering her family and
working for pay, though she did not relinquish her activist commitments.
She left off work on Yonnondio, putting aside the completed chapters, not
rediscovering them and preparing them for publication until the 1970s. In
the forties, she bore two more daughters. Her experiences as a mother have
made her one of motherhood's most powerful and influential chroniclers;
few other writers have rendered so fully the profound contradictions of
maternality:
 
 Page 8

its calling forth of all one's love, patience, humor, and sometimes, when the
resources for furthering growth are nonexistent, despair; its absorption of
one's attention, time, thought; its transformation of one's creative capacities
from the boldly visionary to the carefully nurturant. This theme resonates in
Yonnondio and is central to the stories of Tell Me a Riddle. It receives its
most devastating articulation in Silences: ''And indeed, in our century as in
the last, until very recently almost all distinguished achievement has come
from childless women" (31). Yet motherhood also deepened Olsen's passion
for a society that would nurture rather than inhibit human growth.
It was not until the 1950s that Olsen began to write fiction again. The 1950s
were a time of relative material prosperity for many, but it was also an era
haunted by the memory of the terrible holocausts of World War II and by
the pervasive threat of nuclear annihilation. The Cold War against the
Soviet Union provided the context in which the anti-Communist
inquisitions of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ilk could flourish.
Congress, the courts, businesses, most labor unions, the entertainment
industry, the academic worldall collaborated in the vigorous repression of
the left activist politics and culture of the previous decades. Jack Olsen was
called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee,
where he asserted his intention to "resist with all of my power efforts of this
committee to curtail our freedoms."6He was blacklisted from his work in
the Warehousemen's Union, and began all over again as a printer's
apprentice. The FBI followed Tillie Olsen from job to job; she was fired
after each of their appearances.
Ironically, this was also a time of passage from Olsen's busiest mother-
work-activist years, when "the simplest circumstances for creation did not
exist," to the moment when, her youngest child in school, she was able to
snatch the necessary moments to write. In 1954 she enrolled in a writing
class at San Francisco State University, almost finishing one story, "I Stand
Here Ironing," and completing the first draft of a second, "Hey Sailor, What
Ship?" On the basis of this work, she received a Stegner Fellowship in
creative writing to Stanford, and there, "as the exiled homesick come
home," she
 
 Page 9

found ''the comradeship of books and writing human beings."7In her eight
months of "freed time" at Stanford, she completed "Hey Sailor, What
Ship?", wrote "O Yes," and finished the first third of "Tell Me a Riddle."
She describes this period in both personal and social terms in the passage
from First Drafts, Last Drafts and the excerpt from Silences, both included
here.
Olsen continued to struggle with the circumstances imposing silence in her
own writing life: the need to work for pay; the interruptions occasioned by
family life; the loss of the habit of writing, of the feeling of being "peopled"
by her characters. She seems to have suffered, too, from what she calls in
Silences, quoting Louise Bogan, "The knife of the perfectionist attitude in
art and life"; "woman, economic, perfectionist causesall inextricably
intertwined," she writes (9). "Requa I," published in 1970, was her first
story in almost ten years, and its linguistic density suggests something of
the perfectionist labor that created it. A stylistically complex work set in the
depression era, "Requa" narrates a thirteen-year-old boy's slow recovery
from the devastating loss of his mother. Though "Requa" is literally the
American-Indian place-name of the North Pacific town where the boy,
Stevie, comes to live with his clumsily nurturant uncle, a worker in a
junkyard, the word also connotes a requiem, a commemoration of the
dispossessed and forgotten. Written, as Blanche Gelfant puts it, "after long
silence," "Requa" implies, in its simultaneous difficulty and beauty of form,
an order won from disorder. Its final coherence, wrought from a chaos of
fragments, blank spaces, catalogues of junkyard sounds and implements,
ultimately draws a parallel, as Gelfant suggests, between "a child's renewed
will to live" and "an artist's recovered power to write."8
Silence, or rather, the reclamation of lives and words from silence, from
silencing, becomes Olsen's greatest theme, enacted in the rhythms of her
life, documented in her essays on the lives, work, and words of others.
Yonnondio: From the Thirties was reclaimed from silence, pieced together
in 1972-73 from manuscripts written in the thirties, by the older writer, "in
arduous partnership" with "that long ago young writer."9The novelactually
the opening section of what
 
 Page 10

had been a more ambitious projecttakes its name from a poem by Walt
Whitman that Olsen draws on for the novel's epigraph:
Lament for the aborigines. . .
A song, a poem of itselfthe word itself a dirge. . .
(Race of the woods, the landscapes free and the falls!
No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future:)
Yonnondio! Yonnondio!unlimn'd they disappear;
To-day gives place, and fadesthe cities, farms, and
factories fade;
A muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is borne through
the air for a moment,
Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost.

Yonnondio's title and epigraph, invoking a vanished American Indian

culture, link it not only to ''Requa I" but to the essays Olsen was also
writing in the sixties and seventies, essays that simultaneously theorized the
effects of silencings in writers' lives and that pay a special respect to writers
who have rescued the otherwise invisible and silent lives of others from
oblivion. As Olsen says toward the conclusion of Silences, it was "an
attempt, as later were 'One Out of Twelve,' 'Rebecca Harding Davis,' and
now the rest of this book, to expand the too sparse evidence on the
relationship between circumstances and creation." (262). For Olsen,
creativity is a human gift accorded to most of us; the "circumstances" of
gender, of race, and of class-"the great unexamined" (Silences 264)are what
deform and impede its expression.
At the end of the 1971 talk for the Modern Language Association that
became the second chapter of Silences, Olsen called on those present to join
her in the task of reclamation; her emphasis on women as writers, as
readers, as teachers marks her deepening response to and her growing
importance for the feminist criticism and culture taking shape during the
seventies:
You who teach, read writers who are women. There is a whole
literature to be re-estimated, revalued....
 
 Page 11

Read, listen to, living women writers; our new as well as

our established, often neglected ones. Not to have audience is
a kind of death.

Read the compass of women writers in our infinite vari-

ety. Not only those who tell us of ourselves as ''the other half,"
but also those who write of the other human dimensions,
realms.

Teach women's lives through the lives of the women who

wrote the books, as well as through the books themselves. . . .
Help create writers, perhaps among them yourselves.
(44-45)

Olsen's work as a scholar and teacher during this time exemplifies her
commitment to her own mandates. She compiled influential reading lists of
neglected writings for the Radical Teacher and the Women's Studies
Newsletter, and she helped identify "lost" texts for reprinting by The
Feminist Press, the first of many small presses devoted to the writings of
women. One of these was the story that had been so important to her as a
young girlRebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills. Olsen's
"Biographical Interpretation" of Harding Davis's life and work richly
recreates the world in which her predecessor lived and wrote, arguing that
Davis's literary gifts diminished as she assumed the prescribed, and desired,
roles of wife and mother as well as the burden of writing for money. In
commenting on Rebecca Harding Davis's last years, Olsen hypothesizes a
secret life reminiscent not only of the grandmother's in "Tell Me a Riddle"
but also of her own sense of life buried within her during her non-writing
years: "Probably to the end of her days, a creature unknown to those around
her lived on in Rebecca, a secret creature still hungry to know; living . . .
ecstatically in nature. . .; 'with her own people, elsewhere' in the . . . red-
brick house" (151).
In 1978, Olsen published Silences, an innovative collection that includes
her previous essays, an extended gloss on them, and excerpts from the work
of other writers, culled from her "jottings"hundreds, maybe thousands of
note-cards and scraps on which over the years she recorded passages to
remember. Silences catalogues all the various forms
 
 Page 12

of silencing that befall writersespecially, though not exclusively, women;

especially, though not exclusively, those who must struggle for sheer
survival.
Tillie Olsen's life and work form a bridge between the activism and culture
of the ''red decade" of the thirties and the movements of the sixties and
seventies, especially the women's movement, which provided an eager
audience for her work. An important influence on the feminist writers,
critics, and students of the seventies and eighties, Olsen has also contributed
to "the larger tradition of social concern" both as a writer of fiction and a
scholar and teacher whose efforts have been crucial to the democratization
of the American literary canon.

Tell Me a Riddle and "Tell Me a Riddle"

"Tell Me a Riddle" is the title story of Olsen's only collection, published in
1962. The other stories are "I Stand Here Ironing," "Hey Sailor, What
Ship?" and "O Yes," all written in the 1950s. Originally conceived as
sections of a novel, the stories portray the lives of members of an extended
family over three generations. David and Eva of "Tell Me a Riddle" are the
first generation; their childrenClara, Vivi, Hannah, Sammy, Helen, and
Davy, killed in World War IIthe second generation; and Jeannie and Carol,
Helen and Lennie's children, representative of the third. All the stories
explore the interrelatedness of the "private sphere" and the "public"; set
within the home, constructed from the rhythms and language of daily
familial life, they constantly expand their scope to illustrate the location of
the family within a larger set of social relations. In "I Stand Here Ironing" a
mother broods in a sustained monologue on the ways in which growing up
in anxious poverty has affected, perhaps limited, her daughter's capacities;
at the conclusion her fierce prayer is that her child's will to live is strong
enough to transcend the hard soil of her youth: "Only help her to knowhelp
make it so there is cause for her to knowthat she is more than this dress on
the ironing board, helpless before the iron."10In the elegaic "Hey Sailor,
What Ship?" an old sailor friend of Lennie's and Helen's comes to shore on
leave and collapses of alcoholism and ill-
 
 Page 13

ness in their home before disappearing once again; the very intrusiveness of
his visit measures the degree of loss the story records, the loss of an earlier
time when men and womenincluding Lennie and Whitey, the sailorunited to
struggle as progressive union activists for better working conditions and for
a better world. In ''O Yes" Helen sadly watches her daughter grow
increasingly estranged from her closest friend, who is Black, as the formal
and informal tracking system of the American public school system
intrudes on the less racially differentiated world of early childhood.
The most sustained and complex of the pieces in the Riddle volume, "Tell
Me a Riddle" addresses some of the deepest concerns of western culture:
the nature of human bonding; the quest for, in Olsen's words, "coherence,
transport, meaning"; the aspiration toward justice; the confrontation with
death. The ethical and spiritual dimensions of these themes cannot be
severed from the social and historical. Like Olsen's other work, the novella
celebrates the endurance of human love and of the passion for justice, in
spite of the pain inflicted and the capacities wasted by poverty, racism, and
a patriarchal social order, and in spite of the horrors of the Holocaust and
the war and the new possibilities for nuclear destruction. Its power derives
from a distillation of such themes in evocative and precise language that
makes poetic and performative use of the specific rhythms and idioms of
Yiddishborn English, and from a structure that only gradually reveals the
relevance to the lives of one poor aging immigrant Jewish couple of a past
embracing the great struggles and great horrors of modern history. In its
slow unfolding of that past and in its final revelation of Eva's passionate
idealism, the novella invites its readers to recognize how deeply they are
embedded in the processes of history, to meditate on the "circumstances" of
class, race, and gender as the soil which nurtures or impedes human
achievement; and to acknowledge, as David does, the discrepancy between
what isincluding perhaps their own complicity with injusticeand what
should be.
"Tell Me a Riddle" begins with an argument between an old man and
woman, married forty-seven years, a deadly battle of wills over whether or
not to sell their home and move to a cooperative run by his lodge. The
conflict is shaped by the
 
 Page 14

different ways poverty has affected the man and the woman. David longs to
be free from responsibility and fretting about money, so that he can use ''the
vitality still in him"; Eva, remembering the desperation and humiliation of
years of making do with remade clothes and begged meat bones, vows to
"let him wrack his head for how they would live," for she "would not
exchange her solitude for anything." "Never again to be forced to move to
the rhythms of others" is a refrain echoing through the text. David longs to
be surrounded by friends; Eva longs only to be left alone. The years of
struggle to keep her family fed and clothed have transformed her capacity
for engagement in the lives of others into its obverse: the terrible need for
solitude, for "reconciled peace."
When Eva falls ill, and the illness turns out to be terminal cancer, David
finds himself compelled to become a caretaker himself. Concealing the
seriousness of Eva's condition from her, but fearing to stay home alone with
her in her dying, he takes her on a pilgrimage, first to visit a daughter and
her family in Ohio, and then to Venice, California, which in those years was
home to a community of older, working-class Jews. As her condition
deteriorates, Eva becomes delirious, pouring out fragments of poetry and
song from her youth. Tended in her illness not only by David but by her
granddaughter, Jeannie, a nurse, Eva passes on to Jeannie the legacy of her
earlier years. It is crucial to the way "Riddle" works as art that Olsen
reveals the dimensions of that legacy only gradually; only gradually do we
realize that this grouchy, sick grandmother, this silent bitter woman who
wants only solitude, was once an orator in the 1905 revolution, that she and
her husband met in the prison camps of Siberia, that she had once publicly
articulated a passionate vision of human possibility and human liberty.
Through this narrative strategy, Olsen suggests the tragic dimensions of
social silencings: those imposed upon working class people by physical and
intellectual deprivation, isolation, and routinized work; and those imposed
upon women by role-related demands and patriarchal ideologies
antagonistic to the act of creative articulation. Read this way, Eva's final
utterances in "Tell Me a Riddle," her coming to speech again at last,
become an act of resistance and creation, both cathartic and political.
 
 Page 15

Eva's deathbed oration forces Davidand the readerto acknowledge not only
what has been lost and destroyed in her, but what has been lost and
destroyed in the complacent yet troubled American society of the 1950s,
with its grasping for material well-being, its atomic nightmares, its
repression of the radical culture of the past. The narrative form of ''Riddle"
itself is secretive, riddling; unfolding in the present, the narrative is
continuously disrupted by intimations of the past, a past only divulged in
brief revelations and fragments of conversation and memory, as though it is
too complex, too different, for the present to contain, but too important to
utterly repress. As the past becomes ever more intrusive, embracing
revolutionary vision and experience and the "monstrous shapes" of history
that intervened between the thirties and the fiftiesthe holocaust, the war, the
atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasakithis narrative counterpoint
reveals that Eva's withdrawal, though grounded in her personal
circumstances, has deeper causes still: a terrible anguish over the course of
modern history, and an overpowering sense of the disparity between the
revolutionary idealism that inspired her youthful activism and the
complacency of contemporary life. One of the resonant words of "Riddle"
is "betrayal," and David's changed consciousness at the novella's conclusion
must encompass "the bereavement and betrayal he had
shelteredcompounded through the yearshidden even from himself." His
final reconciliation with his dying wife must take place within a historical
context that she has forced him to acknowledge, to remember. In dying, Eva
awakens David (and the community of readers who share his acceptance of
things as they are) from a numb accommodation into potential opposition.
Her rage at contemporary waste and injustice exemplified by the pollution
of Los Angeles and the confinement of her friend Mrs. Mays to a single,
inadequate room emerges finally not as odd but as appropriate, as
necessary.
"Riddle" addresses profound issues of consciousness, asking how the
passionately humanistic vision of a progressive moment in history can
survive and be transmitted to a new generation in a different historical
moment. While the motif of illness is grounded in the literal and
autobiographicalOlsen had watched her own mother die a similar deathit
also func-
 
 Page 16

tions as an emblem of this radical humanist's profound alienation from the

post-war order. Richard Ohmann argues that a certain ''structure of feeling"
characterized American fiction from the end of World War II through the
mid-seventies, inscribed in narrative patterns in which "social
contradictions were easily displaced into images of personal illness" (390).
He notes a pattern in which illness becomes an alternative to an acceptance
of distorted social relationsmale supremacy, class domination,
competitiveness, individualism. For Ohmann, the basic story on which
fiction of the era plays variations is "the movement into illness and toward
recovery."11 Eva's cancer, the source of her physical disintegration and the
sign of her refusal to accept fifties America, links her to other postwar
heroes whose illness is a response to an apparently untransformable social
order; but for her, there is no personal recovery, no accommodation. Like
Whitey, the sailor in "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" whose alcoholism dooms
him as surely as Eva's cancer dooms her, Eva is tragically anachronistic as
the repository of revolutionary consciousness, an actor in a textual order
structured by the plot of her expulsion from that order. Yet the narrative that
leads to her death is produced by the same narrative act that redeems her
life from the silence to which fifties culture had consigned the radical past.
12

Critical Responses and Casebook Materials

The best commentator on Olsen's fiction is Olsen herself; passages from
Silences provide both a context for the writing of the fiction and a more
direct articulation of many of its themes. In the first chapter of Silences,
"Silences in Literature" (originally published in Harper's Magazine in 1965
and included here) Olsen explores the "unnatural silences" that impede
human creativity and testifies to the silencings in her own life. Readers may
perhaps recognize Eva in its evocation of those among the silenced "whose
waking hours are all struggle for existence; the barely educated; the
illiterate; women." Also included is Olsen's statement from First Drafts,
Last Drafts: Forty Years of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford, a
compressed discussion of her time at Stanford and
 
 Page 17

of the era and events that underlie the writing of ''Tell Me a Riddle."
For a work of such complexity and power, "Tell Me a Riddle" has generated
surprisingly little sustained criticism. The Tell Me a Riddle volume received
excellent reviews, including one by Dorothy Parker in Esquire13and one in
the New York Times Book Review.14"Tell Me a Riddle" received the 0.
Henry Award for the Best American Short Story of 1961; reprinted in
numerous anthologies and translated into many languages, its status as one
of the great American short stories of our time remains secure. Yet Robert
Coles, another admirer of the Riddle stories, is also correct in noting that
Olsen has been "spared celebrity." 15 As Mickey Pearlman and Abby H. P.
Werlock point out in their book-length study of Olsen,
She is often not a reference point in discussions of American writers of either gender. It is
unusual, to say the least, that a writer so admired by a large number of other writers and
general readers is missing so completely from scholarly studies by Americans. (xii)

Serious and sustained critical treatment of Olsen has come largely from
feminist critics and writers, for whom her work resonates with particular
poignancy: she anticipated and indeed helped formulate some of the crucial
issues of contemporary feminism, especially the tensions between
motherhood and other forms of productive activity. The critical reactions to
Olsen's work have been chronicled in Kay Hoyle Nelson's helpful
introduction to The Critical Response to Tillie Olsen. Nelson suggests that
"over the decades the critical response . . . has moved from descriptive to
celebratory to analytical." 16 The trajectory of Olsen criticism may not be
quite so clear as Nelson implies. The celebratory began in the thirties, as
she herself demonstrates, when Robert Cantwell praised the young Tillie
Lerner's first published section of Yonnondio as "a work of early genius,"
with "metaphors startling in their brilliance," 17and recent work, including
theoretically sophisticated analysis, can still be celebratory of Olsen's
achievement, as is Constance Coiner's essay in this volume. It is true,
though, that
 
 Page 18

sustained work on Olsen began in the late seventies with essentially

descriptive overviews, and has led to more complex ''rereadings" in the late
eighties and early nineties, including Pearlman and Werlock's 1991 volume
in the Twayne series, which offers respectful critiques of Olsen's major
writings while problematizing the "fragmented quality of her sparse output"
(ix). In the interim, critics have explored various specific dimensions of her
workthe contextual, the spiritual, the estheticand have elucidated particular
themes, narrative patterns, and clusters of imagery.
Two important early overviews of Olsen, Ellen Cronan Rose's "Limning: Or
Why Tillie Writes"18and Catherine R. Stimpson's "Tillie Olsen: Witness as
Servant,"19both written in the mid-seventies, explore the relationship of
Olsen's work to feminist consciousness. Rose cautions against reading the
fiction as a feminist statement and finds a disparity between the emphasis
on the struggles of women in Olsen's talks and what Rose perceives as a
broader vision in her fiction that bestows esthetic form on the otherwise
inchoate struggles for meaning common to all human life. Rose seems to
have felt the need to rescue Olsen from too exclusive an embrace by the
community of feminist readers and writers who claimed her as a source of
inspiration in the early seventies. Stimpson finds Olsen working toward a
synthesis of literature, feminism, and other forms of radical analysis; she
also assumes the pervasiveness of a deeply political passion in Olsen, a
grief and rage over "the loss of talent, love, promise, energy,
adventurousness, power, and creativity" and a commitment to bear witness
to those losses in a way that will alter the circumstances of future
generations. This tension between an emphasis on Olsen's humanism and
universality on the one hand and the specificity of her circumstances as a
working-class woman with political commitments on the other reappears
frequently in Olsen criticism; yet it seems necessary only because American
literary criticism has so often claimed the incompatibility of art and politics,
of an encompassing imaginative vision and a specific cultural location.
A number of critics have examined the social and autobiographical
contextsthe soil, in Olsen's wordsin which her work took root. The stories
of Tell Me a Riddle use Olsen's
 
 Page 19

life experience, as Linda Pratt demonstrates in her essay here. Pratt shows
how the structure of Olsen's family coincides with the structure of the
family in the Riddle stories, noting the resemblance to Olsen's mother, and
to her death from cancer, in Eva and her fate. The pioneering essay in this
regard was Selma Burkom and Margaret Williams's ''De-Riddling Tillie
Olsen's Writings," which offered an overview located in the
autobiographical circumstances of her life. Reprinting for the first time two
of her poems from the thirties, Burkom and Williams discuss in some detail
Olsen's roots in the American left. As with Rose, their concern is to
demonstrate how Olsen manages to transcend the political and the
propagandistic to render "the complexity of reality" through a realism "not
narrowly 'social' but broadly humanistic" (79). My own essay, "From the
Thirties," included here, is indebted to Burkom and Williams's research;
however, in locating Olsen as a working-class woman coming to voice
within a tradition of American socialism and Marxism, I tried to explore
and reclaim the dimensions of that legacy that have nurtured cultural
expression, as well as to investigate the contradictions facing women
writing within the left. In attending to the historical and class contexts and
ideological conflicts that shaped Olsen's work, I offer a reading I later
designated as "materialist feminist."20Constance Coiner addresses some of
the same issues in her writings on Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur and
develops them further in her forthcoming book for Oxford University
Press.21
Another dimension of Olsen's life that has received critical attention is her
Jewish background and its relation to her fiction. Jacqueline Mintz and
Rose Kamel place Olsen in a tradition of Jewish American women writers,
examining the influence of the eastern European Jewish heritage on Olsen's
representation of women and family life.22Elenore Lester, writing in the
Jewish journal Midstream, rebukes Olsen for repressing the issue of ethnic
identity in Yonnondio, but John Clayton and Bonnie Lyons argue for the
importance of radical Jewish humanism to her vision, a vision that
embodies, in Lyons's words, "both the messianic hope and universal
worldview of a particular kind of secular Jew." 23Linda Pratt offers a more
sophisticated version of Lester's critique in the essay included here. She
researches the specificity of Olsen's heritage
 
 Page 20

as a secular and socialist jew in the Midwest, at a moment when anti-

Semitism would have reminded her of her marginality in a predominantly
Christian world and when the upwardly mobile religious Jewish community
would have had little use for the secular, indeed, proudly atheist traditions
of leftist Yiddishkeit. Pratt wonders, provocatively, if this dual
marginalization might help account for the assimilated quality of the
Holbrooks in Yonnondio, while in ''Tell Me a Riddle," written years later in
a different era, Olsen can at last pay tribute to and draw on the language and
experiences of the revolutionary Jewish midwesterners of her parents'
generation. Olsen herself resists this interpretation; she feels that the
universalizing of the Holbrooks owes more to the internationalism of the
left than to internal conflicts over her Jewish identityan identity
unimportant in her secular family of origin.
A number of critics have responded to "Tell Me a Riddle" as a work of
spiritual significance. In the first important book-length study of Olsen,
Tillie Olsen and a Feminist Spiritual Vision, Elaine Orr offers a reading that
emphasizes the transformative and visionary dimensions of her work. Orr
argues that Olsen's writings invite religious comprehension because they
celebrate the "miracle and sanctity of each human life" and affirm a hoped-
for world in which renewal and rebirth arise from brokenness and
discontinuity (xvi-xvii). For Orr, Olsen's work is in effect an inspirational
text, calling forth a response best described in terms of the insights of
feminist theologians like Nelle Morton and Rosemary Ruether. Such
feminist thinkers find transformative possibilities in the dailiness of human
life, in attentiveness to women's personal experience, and in the acts of
human nurturance often but not inevitably associated with maternality. In
the chapter from Orr's book included here, she explores a trinity of images
associated in Olsen with the reconstruction of individual identity in relation
to human community: journeying, blossoming, and piecing. Naomi Jacobs
makes a similar argument, but identifies a different cluster of imagery based
on "the four prescientific elements: earth, air, fire, water."24
Joanne Trautmann Banks's essay comparing "Tell Me a Riddle" with
Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Illich" explores how
 
 Page 21

each text inscribes the processes and meanings of dying. Banks, who writes
for Literature and Medicine as a professor of literature in a medical school,
told Olsen in a letter how hundreds of her students have read the story ''as
they seek to understand terminal illness in an intelligent, humane context . .
. they've become better doctors because of it."25Her essay, included here,
contrasts the stylistic modes of the two texts while suggesting the evolution
in each of a language appropriate to each character's spiritual labor in
dying.
Olsen's explorations of the hidden experience of maternality in all its power
and ambivalence have been noted by a number of critics. One of the few to
bring a psychoanalytic feminist perspective to bear on "Tell Me a Riddle,"
Judith Kegan Gardiner argues that the novella is akin to other contemporary
women's fictions of the maternal deathbed in its representation of an
embittered maternal figure dying of a "disease of nurturance gone sour,
digestive cancer," but different in its vision of potential healing between
generations of women. Jeanne's acceptance of her grandmother, Gardiner
argues, "breaches the alienation shown in ... other fictions"; the novella
"cuts the noose of the mother knot by weaving a more complex and lovely
tie between the generations."26The chapter on "Motherhood as Source and
Silencer of Creativity" from Mara Faulkner's book included here uses
concepts of multiple vision and "organic feminist criticism"; Faulkner
deliberately places herself in opposition to postmodernist silencings of
contextual concerns, conjoining an interest in contexts with a concern for
literary style. Like Orr, she locates three constellations of images in "Tell
Me a Riddle"here, hunger, stone, and floodseeing them as elaborating a
pattern of blight-fruit possibility that pervades Olsen's work as a whole.
For Rachel Blau DuPlessis, the mother-daughter dyad in "Tell Me a Riddle"
links it with other texts by contemporary women writers that feature a
daughter artist and a mother whose creative capacities are blocked or
frustrated. One of the pioneering critical studies of contemporary fiction by
women, DuPlessis's Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of
Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985) brings a materialist feminist
analysis to the study of narrative. DuPlessis argues that modern women
writers have developed narrative
 
 Page 22

strategies that escape the limits of their nineteenth-century predecessors'

narratives: their bifurcation into either romance plots or plots of bildung
(development) and quest, and their resolutions either in a heroine's marriage
or in her death. The chapter included here examines the figure of the female
artist as reconstructed in contemporary women's fictions, inviting us to
view Eva as a silenced artist whose last work is the ''cantata" she composes
in dying. In this reading the granddaughter's practice of her art, similar in its
ethical motivation to Eva's, will realize the creative potential left unfulfilled
in the grandmother's life.
Constance Coiner's essay applies the poetics of Mikhail Bakhtin to Tell Me
a Riddle, drawing also on feminist versions of reader-response theory. She
demonstrates how Olsen's commitments to social change are elaborated in
her linguistic strategies: a democratization of style that, as in Eva's dying
"cantata," draws on many voices simultaneously, rather than privileging a
univocal narrator; and an open-endedness that invites readers into the text
as participants and actors in the making of meaning and the remaking of
culture. My essay, "Rereading Tillie Olsen in an Age of Deconstruction,"
not included here, is in dialogue with Coiner's, as well as with my own
earlier work on Olsen. Rereading Olsen at the close of the Reagan-Bush
years, an era comparable in many ways to the 1950s when the Riddle stories
were written, I found in them a sense of loss and alienation that no doubt
reflected my own malaise. Reading them through lenses ground in part by
the deconstructions of post-modernism-that is, the emphasis on texts as
linguistic structures participating in the dominant discourses of an era and
inscribing dualistically some of its ideologies-I argued that Olsen's stories
both oppose the oppressions and repressions of their era and unwillingly
accede in their narrative structure to some of the era's constructions of
gender and race. For example, though Jeanne is enriched by and becomes
the bearer of her grandmother's legacy, I sensed in her portrayal a
diminution, even a domestication, of Eva's revolutionary rage. Yet the
stories exist for us primarily as affirmations, the narrative act that created
them defying the forces of silence.
It is certain that readers and critics will continue to find
 
 Page 23

much to debate, much to enlighten, and much to inspire in Tillie Olsen's

work. To paraphrase her injunction to readers at the outset of her edition of
Life in the Iron Mills: You are about to give the life of your reading to an
American classic. . . . Remember, as you begin to read: these lives, brought
here for the first time into literature, unknown, invisible.

Notes
1. Robert Coles, ''Reconsideration," New Republic (December 6, 1975): 30.
2. My discussion of Olsen's life draws on the following sources: personal
interviews with Tillie Olsen conducted in 1980 and in 1992 and a lengthy
phone conversation in 1994; transcripts of interviews with Olsen conducted
in 1986 and graciously supplied by Constance Coiner; Selma Burkom and
Margaret Williams, "DeRiddling Tillie Olsen's Writing," San Jose Studies 2
(February 1976): 64-83; Elaine Neil Orr, Tillie Olsen and a Feminist
Spiritual Vision (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987); and
Mickey Pearlman and Abby H. P. Werlock, Tillie Olsen (Boston: G. K.
Hall, 1991). Subsequent references to these sources typically appear in the
text.
3. I use italics for the volume of stories, Tell Me a Riddle (Philadelphia:
Lippincott, 1961; New York: Dell, Delta, 1989), and quotation marks for
the novella, "Tell Me a Riddle." References to the other Riddle stories in the
text refer to the 1989 edition.
4. Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York: Delacorte Press/ Seymour Lawrence,
1978), 184. Subsequent references appear in the text.
5. "A Biographical Interpretation," in Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the
Iron Mills and Other Stories (Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press,
1972, 1985), 157-158. Subsequent references appear in the text.
6. Quoted in Pearlman and Werlock, Tillie Olsen, 26.
7. Personal Statement in First Drafts, Last Drafts: Forty Years of the
Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, prepared by William
McPheron with the assistance of Amor Towles (Stanford: Stanford
University Libraries, 1989). Included in this volume.
8. Blanche H. Gelfant, "After Long Silence: Tillie Olsen's
 
 Page 24

'Requa,''' Women Writing in America: Voices in Collage (Hanover, N.H.:

University Press of New England, 1984), 70.
9. Yonnondio: From the Thirties (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour
Lawrence, 1974), viii. Subsequent references appear in the text.
10. "I Stand Here Ironing," in Tell Me a Riddle (New York: Dell Delta,
1989), 12.
11. "The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction 1960-1975," in Robert van
Hallberg, ed. Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983),
passim.; quotations 390, 395-396.
12. Parts of this analysis appear in somewhat different form in my essay,
"Rereading Tell Me a Riddle in the Age of Deconstruction," in Shelley
Fisher Fishkin and Elaine Hedges, eds., Listening to 'Silences': New Essays
in Feminist Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
13. Dorothy Parker, "Book Reviews," review of Tell Me a Riddle, Esquire
(June 1962): 64.
14. William H. Peden, "Dilemmas of Day-to-Day Living," review of Tell
Me a Riddle, New York Times Book Review (November 12, 1961): 54.
15. Coles, 30.
16. "Introduction," Kay Hoyle Nelson and Nancy Huse, eds., The Critical
Response to Tillie Olsen (New York: Greenwood Press, forthcoming), 16.
17. Cited in Nelson, The Critical Response, 5.
18. Ellen Cronan Rose, "Limning: Or Why Tillie Writes," Hollins Critic
13.2 (April 1976): 1-13.
19. Catherine R. Stimpson, "Tillie Olsen: Witness as Servant." Polit: A
Journal for Literature and Politics 1.2 (Fall 1977): 1-12.
20. Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt, "Introduction: Toward a
Materialist-Feminist Criticism," Feminist Criticism and Social Change:
Sex, Class, and Race in Literature and Culture (New York: Methuen, 1985).
21. "Literature of Resistance: The Intersection of Feminism and the
Communist Left in Meridel Le Sueur and Tillie Olsen," in Lennard J. Davis
and M. Bella Mirabella, eds., Left Politics and the Literary Profession (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Constance Coiner, Better Red:
The Writing and Resistance of Tillie
 
 Page 25

Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
22. Jacqueline A. Mintz, ''The Myth of the Jewish Mother in Three Jewish,
American, Female Writers," Centennial Review 22 (1978): 346-55; Rose
Yalow Kamel, "Riddles and Silences: Tillie Olsen's Autobiographical
Fiction," in Aggravating the Conscience: Jewish-American Literary
Mothers in the Promised Land (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1988),
81-114.
23. Elenore Lester, "The Riddle of Tillie Olsen," Midstream (January 1975):
75-79; John Clayton, "Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen: Radical Jewish
Humanists," Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review 46 (1984): 37-52;
Bonnie Lyons, "Tillie Olsen: The Writer as Jewish Woman," Studies in
American Jewish Literature 5 (1986): 89-102; quotation 93.
24. Naomi M. Jacobs, "Earth, Air, Fire and Water in 'Tell Me a Riddle',"
Studies in Short Fiction 23 (Fall 1986): 401.
25. Joanne Trautmann Banks, Letter to Tillie Olsen, May 10, 1990.
26. Judith Kegan Gardiner, "A Wake for Mother: The Maternal Deathbed in
Women's Fiction," Feminist Studies 4 (June 1978): 146-65; quotation page
163.
 
 Page 27

Chronology
1912 or 1913
Tillie Lerner is born in Wahoo, Omaha, or Mead, Nebraska, the second of
six children.
1929-1930
Leaves high school after eleventh grade; seeks work in Stockton,
California.
1931
Relocates to Midwest; joins Young Communist League; organizes workers
in Kansas City, Kansas; contracts incipient tuberculosis.
1932
Moves to Faribault, Minnesota; begins Yonnondio; gives birth to daughter,
Karla.
1933
Moves back to California; settles permanently in San Francisco.
1934
Arrested for participating in San Francisco Maritime Strike; publishes ''The
Iron Throat," "The Strike," "Thousand Dollar Vagrant," "There Is a
Lesson," and "I Want You Women Up North to Know."
1935
Attends American Writers Congress in New York.
1936
Begins relationship with Jack Olsen.
1938
Daughter Julie born.
1943
Daughter Katherine Jo born. Marries Jack Olsen.
1948
Daughter Laurie born.
1953-1954
Writes "I Stand Here Ironing"; begins "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" Enrolls in
creative writing course at San Francisco State University.
1955-1956
Attends Stanford University on Stegner fellowship in creative writing;
completes "Hey
Adapted from Tillie Olsen by Mickey Pearlman and Abby H. P. Werlock
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991).
 
 Page 28

Sailor, What Ship?'' and "O Yes"; works on "Tell Me a Riddle."

1956
Publishes "Help Her to Believe" ("I Stand Here Ironing").
1957
Publishes "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" and "Baptism" ("O Yes").
1959
Receives Ford Foundation grant in literature.
1960
Publishes "Tell Me a Riddle."
1961
"Tell Me a Riddle" receives O. Henry first prize for best American short
story. Tell Me a Riddle (the book) published.
1962-1964
Receives fellowship from Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study.
1969-1970
Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence, Amherst College.
1970
"Requa I" published; reprinted in Best American Short Stories of 1971,
dedicated to Olsen.
1971
Teaches first "women in literature" class and creative writing seminar at
Stanford University.
1972
At MacDowell Writers' Colony in New Hampshire, working on recovered
manuscript of Yonnondio and on biographical interpretation, "Rebecca
Harding Davis, Her Life and Times," published in Life in the Iron Mills.
1973-1974
Writer in residence, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
1974
Publishes Yonnondio. Distinguished visiting professor, University of
Massachusetts, Boston.
1975-1976
American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters award for
distinguished contribution to American letters; Guggenheim Fellowship.
1978
Publishes Silences.
 
 Page 29

1979
Awarded honorary Litt. D. by University of Nebraska (first of six honorary
degrees).
1980
International visiting scholar, Norway; Radcliffe centennial visitor and
lecturer. Film version of Tell Me a Riddle, directed by Lee Grant.
1981
May 18 proclaimed Tillie Olsen Day in San Francisco.
1983
Tillie Olsen week; symposium, 5 Quad Cities Colleges, Iowa and Illinois.
1983-1984
Awarded Senior Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities.
1984
Publishes Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother.
1985-1986
Bunting Fellow, Radcliffe College
1986
Hill Visiting Professor, University of Minnesota.
1987
Gund Professor, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio. Regents lecturer,
University of California at Los Angeles.
1989
Jack Olsen dies.
1991
Receives Mari Sandoz Award, Nebraska Library Association.
1994
Receives Rea Award for the Short Story ($25,000 to writers contributing
significantly to the short story as an art form).
 
 Page 31

Tell Me a Riddle
 
 Page 32

The edition of ''Tell Me a Riddle" included here is the 1989 Delta reprint, the most recent
version of the text. Olsen has gradually revised "Tell Me a Riddle" since its first publication
in 1961, most notably to eliminate language like "man" and "mankind," substituting the more
generic and inclusive "human" and "humankind." In the first edition, Eva's quotation from
the old socialist hymn, "These Things Shall Be," included the line "all that may plant man's
lordship firm"; this line was omitted in subsequent versions. These revisions suggest the
influence of feminist critiques of sexist language; they support Olsen's inclusive and
democratic vision.

The first edition lacked the hopeful and prophetic subtitle, "These Things Shall Be," included
in all subsequent versions. Another interesting change is the alteration of Eva's wish to
"journey to her self" to a longing instead to "journey on." The motive behind this change may
be guessed by noting another emendation to the same passage when Olsen excerpts it for
Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother. In all editions of the full text, Eva searches for
"coherence, transport, meaning." In the daybook, she seeks "coherence, transport,
community" (198). Olsen's revisions move the text away from a privileging of the isolated
self and develop further the implicit longing for a community and a commitment larger than
self or biological family.
 
 Page 33

Tell Me a Riddle
TILLIE OLSEN
''These Things Shall Be"*
(1956-1960)

I
For forty-seven years they had been married. How deep back the stubborn,
gnarled roots of the quarrel reached, no one could saybut only now, when
tending to the needs of others no longer shackled them together, the roots
swelled up visible, split the earth between them, and the tearing shook even
to the children, long since grown.
Why now, why now? wailed Hannah.
As if when we grew up weren't enough, said Paul.
Poor Ma. Poor Dad. It hurts so for both of them, said Vivi. They never had
very much; at least in old age they should be happy.
Knock their heads together, insisted Sammy; tell 'em: you're too old for this
kind of thing; no reason not to get along now.
From Tell Me a Riddle (New York: Delta, 1989).

*Poem by John Addington Symonds, sung in the British labor and socialist movements, and
in progressive social and religious movements in the United States.
 
 Page 34

Lennie wrote to Clara: They've lived over so much together; what could
possibly tear them apart?
Something tangible enough.
Arthritic hands, and such work as he got, occasional. Poverty all his life,
and there was little breath left for running. He could not, could not turn
away from this desire: to have the troubling of responsibility, the fretting
with money, over and done with; to be free, to be carefree where success
was not measured by accumulation, and there was use for the vitality still in
him. There was a way. They could sell the house, and with the money join
his lodge's Haven, cooperative for the aged. Happy communal life, and was
he not already an official; had he not helped organize it, raise funds, served
as a trustee?
But shewould not consider it.
''What do we need all this for?" he would ask loudly, for her hearing aid
was turned down and the vacuum was shrilling. "Five rooms" (pushing the
sofa so she could get into the corner) "furniture" (smoothing down the rug)
"floors and surfaces to make work. Tell me, why do we need it?" And he
was glad he could ask in a scream.
"Because I'm use't."
"Because you're use't. This is a reason, Mrs. Word Miser? Used to can get
unused!"
"Enough unused I have to get used to already.... Not enough words?"
turning off the vacuum a moment to hear herself answer. "Because soon
enough we'll need only a little closet, no windows, no furniture, nothing to
make work, but for worms. Because now I want room.... Screech and blow
like you're doing, you'll need that closet even sooner.... Ha, again !"
 
 Page 35

for the vacuum bag wailed, puffed half up, hung stubbornly limp. ''This
time fix it so it stays; quick before the phone rings and you get too
important-busy."
But while he struggled with the motor, it seethed in him. Why fix it? Why
have to bother? And if it can't be fixed, have to wring the mind with how to
pay the repair? At the Haven they come in with their own machines to clean
your room or your cottage; you fish, or play cards, or make jokes in the sun,
not with knotty fingers fight to mend vacuums.
Over the dishes, coaxingly: "For once in your life, to be free, to have
everything done for you, like a queen."
"I never liked queens."
"No dishes, no garbage, no towel to sop, no worry what to buy, what to eat."
"And what else would I do with my empty hands? Better to eat at my own
table when I want, and to cook and eat how I want."
"In the cottages they buy what you ask, and cook it how you like. You are
the one who always used to say: better mankind born without mouths and
stomachs than always to worry for money to buy, to shop, to fix, to cook, to
wash, to clean."
"How cleverly you hid that you heard. I said it then because eighteen hours
a day I ran. And you never scraped a carrot or knew a dish towel sops. Now
for you and mewho cares? A herring out of a jar is enough. But when I
want, and nobody to bother." And she turned off her ear button, so she
would not have to hear.
But as he had no peace, juggling and rejuggling the money to figure: how
will I pay for this now?; prying out the storm windows (there they take care
of
 
 Page 36

this); jolting in the streetcar on errands (there I would not have to ride to
take care of this or that); fending the patronizing relatives just back from
Florida (at the Haven it matters what one is, not what one can afford), he
gave her no peace.
''Look! In their bulletin. A reading circle. Twice a week it meets."
"Haumm," her answer of not listening.
"A reading circle, Chekhov they read that you like, and Peretz. * Cultured
people at the Haven that you would enjoy."
"Enjoy!" She tasted the word. "Now, when it pleases you, you find a
reading circle for me. And forty years ago when the children were morsels
and there was a Circle, did you stay home with them once so I could go?
Even once? You trained me well. I do not need others to enjoy. Others !"
Her voice trembled. "Because you want to be there with others. Already it
makes me sick to think of you always around others. Clown, grimacer,
floormat, yesman, entertainer, whatever they want of you."
And now it was he who turned the television loud so he need not hear.
Old scar tissue ruptured and the wounds festered anew. Chekhov indeed.
She thought without softness of that young wife, who in the deep night
hours while she nursed the current baby, and perhaps held another in her
lap, would try to stay awake for the only time there was to read. She would
feel again the weather of the outside on his cheek when, coming late from a
meet-
*Isaac Loeb Peretz, turn-of-the-century Russian writer of fiction in Yiddish.
 
 Page 37

ing, he would find her so, and stimulated and ardent, sniffing her skin, coax:
''I'll put the baby to bed, and youput the book away, don't read, don't read."
That had been the most beguiling of all the "don't read, put your book
away" her life had been. Chekhov indeed!
"Money?" She shrugged him off. "Could we get poorer than once we were?
And in America, who starves?"
But as still he pressed:
"Let me alone about money. Was there ever enough? Seven little onesfor
every penny I had to askand sometimes, remember, there was nothing. But
always I had to manage. Now you manage. Rub your nose in it good."
But from those years she had had to manage, old humiliations and terrors
rose up, lived again, and forced her to relive them. The children's needings;
that grocer's face or this merchant's wife she had had to beg credit from
when credit was a disgrace; the scenery of the long blocks walked around
when she could not pay; school coming, and the desperate going over the
old to see what could yet be remade; the soups of meat bones begged "for-
the-dog" one winter....
Enough. Now they had no children. Let him wrack his head for how they
would live. She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again
to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.
For in this solitude she had won to a reconciled peace.
Tranquillity from having the empty house no longer an enemy, for it stayed
cleannot as in the days when it was her family, the life in it, that had seemed
 
 Page 38

the enemy: tracking, smudging, littering, dirtying, engaging her in endless

defeating battleand on whom her endless defeat had been spewed.
The few old books, memorized from rereading; the pictures to ponder (the
magnifying glass superimposed on her heavy eyeglasses). Or if she wishes,
when he is gone, the phonograph, that if she turns up very loud and strains,
she can hear: the ordered sounds and the struggling.
Out in the garden, growing things to nurture. Birds to be kept out of the
pear tree, and when the pears are heavy and ripe, the old fury of work, for
all must be canned, nothing wasted.
And her once social duty (for she will not go to luncheons or meetings) the
boxes of old clothes left with her, as with a life-practised eye for finding
what is still wearable within the worn (again the magnifying glass
superimposed on the heavy glasses) she scans and sortsthis for rag or
rummage, that for mending and cleaning, and this for sending away.
Being able at last to live within, and not move to the rhythms of others, as
life had forced her to: denying; removing; isolating; taking the children one
by one; then deafening, half-blindingand at last, presenting her solitude.
And in it she had won to a reconciled peace.
Now he was violating it with his constant campaigning: Sell the house and
move to the Haven. (You sit, you sitthere too you could sit like a stone.) He
was making of her a battleground where old grievances tore. (Turn on your
ear buttonI am talking.) And stubbornly she resistedso that from wheedling,
reasoning, manipulation, it was bitterness he now started with.
 
 Page 39

And it came to where every happening lashed up a quarrel.

''I will sell the house anyway," he flung at her one night. "I am putting it up
for sale. There will be a way to make you sign."
The television blared, as always it did on the evenings he stayed home, and
as always it reached her only as noise. She did not know if the tumult was
in her or outside. Snap! she turned the sound off. "Shadows," she whispered
to him, pointing to the screen, "look, it is only shadows." And in a scream:
"Did you say that you will sell the house? Look at me, not at that. I am no
shadow. You cannot sell without me."
"Leave on the television. I am watching."
"Like Paulie, like Jenny, a four-year-old. Staring at shadows. You cannot
sell the house."
"I will. We are going to the Haven. There you would not hear the television
when you do not want it. I could sit in the social room and watch. You
could lock yourself up to smell your unpleasantness in a room by
yourselffor who would want to come near you?"
"No, no selling." A whisper now.
"The television is shadows. Mrs. Enlightened! Mrs. Cultured! A world
comes into your houseand it is shadows. People you would never meet in a
thousand lifetimes. Wonders. When you were four years old, yes, like
Paulie, like Jenny, did you know of Indian dances, alligators, how they use
bamboo in Malaya? No, you scratched in your dirt with the chickens and
thought Olshana* was the world. Yes, Mrs. Unpleasant, I will
* Olsen's invented name for a typical village of tsarist Russia.
 
 Page 40

sell the house, for there better can we be rid of each other than here.''
She did not know if the tumult was outside, or in her. Always a ravening
inside, a pull to the bed, to lie down, to succumb.
"Have you thought maybe Ma should let a doctor have a look at her?" asked
their son Paul after Sunday dinner, regarding his mother crumpled on the
couch, instead of, as was her custom, busying herself in Nancy's kitchen.
"Why not the President too?"
"Seriously, Dad. This is the third Sunday she's lain down like that after
dinner. Is she that way at home?"
"A regular love affair with the bed. Every time I start to talk to her."
Good protective reaction, observed Nancy to herself. The workings of hos-
til-ity.
"Nancy could take her. I just don't like how she looks. Let's have Nancy
arrange an appointment."
"You think she'll go?" regarding his wife gloomily. "All right, we have to
have doctor bills, we have to have doctor bills." Loudly: "Something hurts
you?"
She startled, looked to his lips. He repeated: "Mrs. Take It Easy, something
hurts?"
"Nothing. . . . Only you."
"A woman of honey. That's why you're lying down?"
"Soon I'll get up to do the dishes, Nancy."
"Leave them, Mother, I like it better this way."
"Mrs. Take It Easy, Paul says you should start ballet. You should go to see a
doctor and ask: how soon can you start ballet?"
 
 Page 41

''A doctor?" she begged. "Ballet?"

"We were talking, Ma," explained Paul, "you don't seem any too well. It
would be a good idea for you to see a doctor for a checkup."
"I get up now to do the kitchen. Doctors are bills and foolishness, my son. I
need no doctors."
"At the Haven," he could not resist pointing out, "a doctor is not bills. He
lives beside you. You start to sneeze, he is there before you open up a
Kleenex. You can be sick there for free, all you want."
"Diarrhea of the mouth, is there a doctor to make you dumb?"
"Ma. Promise me you'll go. Nancy will arrange it."
"It's all of a piece when you think of it," said Nancy, "the way she attacks
my kitchen, scrubbing under every cup hook, doing the inside of the oven
so I can't enjoy Sunday dinner, knowing that half-blind or not, she's going
to find every speck of dirt. ... ."
"Don't, Nancy, I've told youit's the only way she knows to be useful. What
did the doctor say?"
"A real fatherly lecture. Sixty-nine is young these days. Go out, enjoy life,
find interests. Get a new hearing aid, this one is antiquated. Old age is
sickness only if one makes it so. Geriatrics, Inc."
"So there was nothing physical."
"Of course there was. How can you live to yourself like she does without
there being? Evidence of a kidney disorder, and her blood count is low. He
gave her a diet, and she's to come back for follow-up and lab work. . . . But
he was clear enough: Number One prescriptionstart living like a human
being
. . . . When I think of your dad, who could really play the invalid with
 
 Page 42

that arthritis of his, as active as a teenager, and twice as much fun. . . .''
"You didn't tell me the doctor says your sickness is in you, how you live."
He pushed his advantage. "Life and enjoyments you need better than
medicine. And this diet, how can you keep it? To weigh each morsel and
scrape away each bit of fat, to make this soup, that pudding. There, at the
Haven, they have a dietician, they would do it for you."
She is silent.
"You would feel better there, I know it," he says gently. "There there is life
and enjoyments all around."
"What is the matter, Mr. Importantbusy, you have no card game or meeting
you can go to?"turning her face to the pillow.
For a while he cut his meetings and going out, fussed over her diet, tried to
wheedle her into leaving the house, brought in visitors:
"I should come to a fashion tea. I should sit and look at pretty babies in
clothes I cannot buy. This is pleasure?"
"Always you are better than everyone else. The doctor said you should
go out. Mrs. Brem comes to you with goodness and you turn her away."
"Because you asked her to, she asked me."
"They won't come back. People you need, the doctor said. Your own
cousins I asked; they were willing to come and make peace as if nothing
had happened... ."
"No more crushers of people, pushers, hypocrites,
 
 Page 43

around me. No more in my house. You go to them if you like.''

"Kind he is to visit. And you, like ice."
"A babbler. All my life around babblers. Enough !"
"She's even worse, Dad? Then let her stew a while," advised Nancy. "You
can't let it destroy you; it's a psychological thing, maybe too far gone for
any of us to help."
So he let her stew. More and more she lay silent in bed, and sometimes did
not even get up to make the meals. No longer was the tongue-lashing
inevitable if he left the coffee cup where it did not belong, or forgot to take
out the garbage or mislaid the broom. The birds grew bold that summer and
for once pocked the pears, undisturbed.
A bellyful of bitterness and every day the same quarrel in a new way and a
different old grievance the quarrel forced her to enter and relive. And the
new torment: I am not really sick, the doctor said it, then why do I feel so
sick?
One night she asked him: "You have a meeting tonight? Do not go. Stay . . .
with me."
He had planned to watch "This Is Your Life," but half sick himself from the
heavy heat, and sickening therefore the more after the brooks and woods of
the Haven, with satisfaction he grated:
"Hah, Mrs. Live Alone And Like It wants company all of a sudden. It
doesn't seem so good the time of solitary when she was a girl exile in
Siberia. 'Do not go. Stay with me.' A new song for Mrs. Free As A Bird.
Yes, I am going out, and while I am gone chew this aloneness good, and
think how you keep us both from where if you want people, you do not
need to be alone."
"Go, go. All your life you have gone without me."
 
 Page 44

After him she sobbed curses he had not heard in years, old-country curses
from their childhood: Grow, oh shall you grow like an onion, with your
head in the ground. Like the hide of a drum shall you be, beaten in life,
beaten in death. Oh shall you be like a chandelier, to hang, and to burn. . . .
She was not in their bed when he came back. She lay on the cot on the sun
porch. All week she did not speak or come near him; nor did he try to make
peace or care for her.
He slept badly, so used to her next to him. After all the years, old harmonies
and dependencies deep in their bodies; she curled to him, or he coiled to
her, each warmed, warming, turning as the other turned, the nights a long
embrace.
It was not the empty bed or the storm that woke him, but a faint singing.
She was singing. Shaking off the drops of rain, the lightning riving her
lifted face, he saw her so; the cot covers on the floor.
''This is a private concert?" he asked. "Come in, you are wet."
"I can breathe now," she answered; "my lungs are rich." Though indeed the
sound was hardly a breath.
"Come in, come in." Loosing the bamboo shades. "Look how wet you are."
Half helping, half carrying her, still faint-breathing her song.
A Russian love song of fifty years ago.
He had found a buyer, but before he told her, he called together those
children who were close enough to come. Paul, of course, Sammy from
New Jersey, Hannah from Connecticut, Vivi from Ohio.
With a kindling of energy for her beloved visitors,
 
 Page 45

she arrayed the house, cooked and baked. She was not prepared for the
solemn after-dinner conclave, they too probing in and tearing. Her
frightened eyes watched from mouth to mouth as each spoke.
His stories were eloquent and funny of her refusal to go back to the doctor;
of the scorned invitations; of her stubborn silence or the bile ''like a
Niagara"; of her contrariness: "If I clean it's no good how I cleaned; if I
don't clean, I'm still a master who thinks he has a slave."
(Vinegar he poured on me all his life; I am well marinated; how can I be
honey now?)
Deftly he marched in the rightness for moving to the Haven; their money
from social security free for visiting the children, not sucked into daily
needs and into the house; the activities in the Haven for him; but mostly the
Haven for her: her health, her need of care, distraction, amusement, friends
who shared her interests.
"This does offer an outlet for Dad," said Paul; "he's always been an active
person. And economic peace of mind isn't to be sneezed at, either. I could
use a little of that myself."
But when they asked: "And you, Ma, how do you feel about it?" could only
whisper:
"For him it is good. It is not for me. I can no longer live between people."
"You lived all your life for people," Vivi cried.
"Not with." Suffering doubly for the unhappiness on her children's faces.
"You have to find some compromise," Sammy insisted. "Maybe sell the
house and buy a trailer. After forty-seven years there's surely some way you
can find to live in peace."
 
 Page 46

''There is no help, my children. Different things we need."

"Then live alone!" He could control himself no longer. "I have a buyer for
the house. Half the money for you, half for me. Either alone or with me to
the Haven. You think I can live any longer as we are doing now?"
"Ma doesn't have to make a decision this minute, however you feel, Dad,"
Paul said quickly, "and you wouldn't want her to. Let's let it lay a few
months, and then talk some more."
"I think I can work it out to take Mother home with me for a while,"
Hannah said. "You both look terrible, but especially you, Mother. I'm going
to ask Phil to have a look at you."
"Sure," cracked Sammy. "What's the use of a doctor husband if you can't
get free service out of him once in a while for the family? And absence
might make the heart. . . you know."
"There was something after all," Paul told Nancy in a colorless voice. "That
was Hannah's Phil calling. Her gall bladder.... Surgery."
"Her gall bladder. If that isn't classic. 'Bitter as gall'talk of psychosom"
He stepped closer, put his hand over her mouth, and said in the same
colorless, plodding voice. "We have to get Dad. They operated at once. The
cancer was everywhere, surrounding the liver, everywhere. They did what
they could . . . at best she has a year. Dad . . . we have to tell him."

II
Honest in his weakness when they told him, and that she was not to know.
"I'm not an actor. She'll know
 
 Page 47

right away by how I am. Oh that poor woman. I am old too, it will break me
into pieces. Oh that poor woman. She will spit on me; 'So my sickness was
how I live.' Oh Paulie, how she will be, that poor woman. Only she should
not suffer.... I can't stand sickness, Paulie, I can't go with you.''
But went. And play-acted.
"A grand opening and you did not even wait for me. . . . A good thing
Hannah took you with her."
"Fashion teas I needed. They cut out what tore in me; just in my throat
something hurts yet. . . . Look! so many flowers, like a funeral. Vivi called,
did Hannah tell you? And Lennie from San Francisco, and Clara; and
Sammy is coming." Her gnome's face pressed happily into the flowers.
It is impossible to predict in these cases, but once over the immediate
effects of the operation, she should have several months of comparative
wellbeing.
The money, where will come the money?
Travel with her, Dad. Don't take her home to the old associations. The
other children will want to see her.
The money, where will I wring the money?
Whatever happens, she is not to know. No, you can't ask her to sign
papers to sell the house; nothing to upset her. Borrow instead, then after.
...
I had wanted to leave you each a few dollars to make life easier, as other
fathers do. There will be nothing left now. (Failure! you and your
"business is exploitation." Why didn't you make it when it could be
made?Is that what you're thinking of me, Sammy?)
 
 Page 48

Sure she's unreasonable, Dadbut you have to stay with her; if there's to
be any happiness in what's left of her life, it depends on you.
Prop me up, children, think of me, too. Shuffled, chained with her, bitter
woman. No Haven, and the little money going. . . . How happy she looks,
poor creature.
The look of excitement. The straining to hear everything (the new hearing
aid turned full). Why are you so happy, dying woman?
How the petals are, fold on fold, and the gladioli color. The autumn air.
Stranger grandsons, tall above the little gnome grandmother, the little spry
grandfather. Paul in a frenzy of picture-taking before going.
She, wandering the great house. Feeling the books; laughing at the maple
shoemaker's bench of a hundred years ago used as a table. The ear turned to
music.
''Let us go home. See how good I walk now." "One step from the hospital,"
he answers, "and she wants to fly. Wait till Doctor Phil says."
"Lookthe birds too are flying home. Very good Phil is and will not show it,
but he is sick of sickness by the time he comes home."
"Mrs. Telepathy, to read minds," he answers; "read mine what it says: when
the trunks of medicines become a suitcase, then we will go."
The grandboys, they do not know what to say to us. . . . Hannah, she runs
around here, there, when is there time for herself?
Let us go home. Let us go home.
 
 Page 49

Musing; gentlenessbut for the incidents of the rabbi in the hospital, and of
the candles of benediction.
Of the rabbi in the hospital:
Now tell me what happened, Mother.
From the sleep I awoke, Hannah's Phil, and he stands there like a devil in a
dream and calls me by name. I cannot hear. I think he prays. Go away,
please, I tell him, I am not a believer. Still he stands, while my heart knocks
with fright.
You scared him, Mother. He thought you were delirious.
Who sent him? Why did he come to me?
It is a custom. The men of God come to visit those of their religion they
might help. The hospital makes up the list for themrace, religionand you are
on the Jewish list.
Not for rabbis. At once go and make them change. Tell them to write: Race,
human; Religion, none.
And of the candles of benediction:
Look how you have upset yourself, Mrs. Excited Over Nothing. Pleasant
memories you should leave.
Go in, go back to Hannah and the lights. Two weeks I saw candles and said
nothing. But she asked me.
So what was so terrible? She forgets you never did, she asks you to light the
Friday candles and say the benediction like Phil's mother when she visits. If
the candles give her pleasure, why shouldn't she have the pleasure?
Not for pleasure she does it. For emptiness. Because his family does.
Because all around her do.
 
 Page 50

That is not a good reason too? But you did not hear her. For heritage, she
told you. For the boys, from the past they should have tradition.
Superstition! From our ancestors, savages, afraid of the dark, of themselves:
mumbo words and magic lights to scare away ghosts.
She told you: how it started does not take away the goodness. For centuries,
peace in the house it means.
Swindler! does she look back on the dark centuries? Candles bought instead
of bread and stuck into a potato for a candlestick? Religion that stifled and
said: in Paradise, woman, you will be the footstool of your husband, and in
lifepoor chosen Jewground under, despised, trembling in cellars. And
cremated. And cremated.*
This is religion's fault? You think you are still an orator of the 1905
revolution? ** Where are the pills for quieting? Which are they?
Heritage. How have we come from our savage past, how no longer to be
savagesthis to teach. To look back and learn what humanizesthis to teach.
To smash all ghettos that divide usnot to go back, not to go backthis to
teach. Learned books in the house, will humankind live or die, and she
gives to her boyssuperstition.
Hannah that is so good to you. Take your pill, Mrs. Excited For Nothing,
swallow.
* Alludes to Yiddish folk saying, the basis of Peretz's story. ''A Good Marriage." and to the
cremations in Nazi concentration camps.

** Broad uprising against the regime of Tsar Nicholas II that temporarily initiated a series of
democratizing concessions.
 
 Page 51

Heritage! But when did I have time to teach? Of Hannah I asked only hands
to help.
Swallow.
Otherwisemusing; gentleness.
Not to travel. To go home.
The children want to see you. We have to show them you are as thorny a
flower as ever.
Not to travel.
Vivi wants you should see her new baby. She sent the ticketsairplane
ticketsa Mrs. Roosevelt she wants to make of you. To Vivi's we have to go.
A new baby. How many warm, seductive babies. She holds him stiffly,
away from her, so that he wails. And a long shudder begins, and the sweat
beads on her forehead.
''Hush, shush," croons the grandfather, lifting him back. "You should
forgive your grandmamma, little prince, she has never held a baby before,
only seen them in glass cases. Hush, shush."
"You're tired, Ma," says Vivi. "The travel and the noisy dinner. I'll take you
to lie down."
(A long travel from, to, what the feel of a baby evokes.)
In the airplane, cunningly designed to encase from motion (no wind, no feel
of flight), she had sat severely and still, her face turned to the sky through
which they cleaved and left no scar.
So this was how it looked, the determining, the crucial sky, and this was
how man moved through it, remote above the dwindled earth, the concealed
human life. Vulnerable life, that could scar.
 
 Page 52

There was a steerage ship of memory that shook across a great, circular sea;
clustered, ill human beings; and through the thick-stained air, tiny fretting
waters in a window round like the airplane'ssun round, moon round. (The
round thatched roofs of Olshana.) Eye roundlike the smaller window that
framed distance the solitary year of exile when only her eyes could travel,
and no voice spoke. And the polar winds hurled themselves across snows
trackless and endless and whitelike the clouds which had closed together
below and hidden the earth.
Now they put a baby in her lap. Do not ask me, she would have liked to
beg. Enough the worn face of Vivi, the remembered grandchildren. I
cannot, cannot....
Cannot what? Unnatural grandmother, not able to make herself embrace a
baby.
She lay there in the bed of the two little girls, her new hearing aid turned
full, listening to the sound of the children going to sleep, the baby's fretful
crying and hushing, the clatter of dishes being washed and put away. They
thought she slept. Still she rode on.
It was not that she had not loved her babies, her children. The lovethe
passion of tendinghad risen with the need like a torrent; and like a torrent
drowned and immolated all else. But when the need was doneoh the power
that was lost in the painful damming back and drying up of what still
surged, but had nowhere to go. Only the thin pulsing left that could not
quiet, suffering over lives one felt, but could no longer hold nor help.
On that torrent she had borne them to their own lives, and the riverbed was
desert long years now. Not there would she dwell, a memoried wraith.
Surely that
 
 Page 53

was not all, surely there was more. Still the springs, the springs were in her
seeking. Somewhere an older power that beat for life. Somewhere
coherence, transport, meaning. If they would but leave her in the air now
stilled of clamor, in the reconciled solitude, to journey on.
And they put a baby in her lap. Immediacy to embrace, and the breath of
that past: warm flesh like this that had claims and nuzzled away all else and
with lovely mouths devoured; hot-living like an animalintensely and now;
the turning maze; the long drunkenness; the drowning into needing and
being needed. Severely she looked backand the shudder seized her again,
and the sweat. Not that way. Not there, not now could she, not yet. . . .
And all that visit, she could not touch the baby.
''Daddy, is it the . . . sickness she's like that?" asked Vivi. "I was so glad to
be having the babyfor her. I told Tim, it'll give her more happiness than
anything, being around a baby again. And she hasn't played with him once."
He was not listening, "Aahh little seed of life, little charmer," he crooned,
"Hollywood should see you. A heart of ice you would melt. Kick, kick. The
future you'll have for a ball. In 2050 still kick. Kick for your grandaddy
then."
Attentive with the older children; sat through their performances (command
performance; we command you to be the audience); helped Ann sort
autumn leaves to find the best for a school program; listened gravely to
Richard tell about his rock collection, while her lips mutely formed the
words to remember: igneous, sedi-
 
 Page 54

mentary, metamorphic; looked for missing socks, books, and bus tickets;
watched the children whoop after their grandfather who knew how to tickle,
chuck, lift, toss, do tricks, tell secrets, make jokes, match riddle for riddle.
(Tell me a riddle, Grammy. I know no riddles, child.) Scrubbed sills and
woodwork and furniture in every room; folded the laundry; straightened
drawers; emptied the heaped baskets waiting for ironing (while he or Vivi
or Tim nagged: You're supposed to rest here, you've been sick) but to none
tended or gave foodand could not touch the baby.
After a week she said: ''Let us go home. Today call about the tickets."
"You have important business, Mrs. Inahurry? The President waits to
consult with you?" He shouted, for the fear of the future raced in him. "The
clothes are still warm from the suitcase, your children cannot show enough
how glad they are to see you, and you want home. There is plenty of time
for home. We cannot be with the children at home."
"Blind to around you as always: the little ones sleep four in a room because
we take their bed. We are two more people in a house with a new baby, and
no help."
"Vivi is happy so. The children should have their grandparents a while, she
told to me. I should have my mommy and daddy. . . . "
"Babbler and blind. Do you look at her so tired? How she starts to talk and
she cries? I am not strong enough yet to help. Let us go home."
(To reconciled solitude.)
For it seemed to her the crowded noisy house was listening to her, listening
for her. She could feel it like a
 
 Page 55

great ear pressed under her heart. And everything knocked: quick constant
raps: let me in, let me in.
How was it that soft reaching tendrils also became blows that knocked?
C'mon, Grandma, I want to show you....
Tell me a riddle, Grandma. (I know no riddles.)
Look, Grammy, he's so dumb he can't even find his hands. (Dody and the
baby on a blanket over the fermenting autumn mould.)
I made themfor you. (Ann) (Flat paper dolls with aprons that lifted on
scalloped skirts that lifted on flowered pants; hair of yarn and great
ringed questioning eyes.)
Watch me, Grandma. (Richard snaking up the tree, hanging exultant,
free, with one hand at the top. Below Dody hunching over in
pretendcooking.) (Climb too, Dody, climb and look.)
Be my nap bed, Grammy. (The ''No!" too late.) Morty's abandoned
heaviness, while his fingers ladder up and down her hearing-aid cord to
his drowsy chant: eentsiebeentsiespider. (Children trust.)
It's to start off your own rock collection, Grandma. That's a trilobite
fossil, 200 million years old (millions of years on a boy's mouth) and
that one's obsidian, black glass.
Knocked and knocked.
Mother, I told you the teacher said we had to bring it back all filled out
this morning. Didn't you even ask Daddy? Then tell me which plan and
I'll check it: evacuate or stay in the city or wait for you to come and take
me away. (Seeing the look of
 
 Page 56

straining to hear.) It's for Disaster, Grandma. (Children trust.)

Vivi in the maze of the long, the lovely drunkenness. The old old noises:
baby sounds; screaming of a mother flayed to exasperation; children
quarreling; children playing; singing; laughter.
And Vivi's tears and memories, spilling so fast, half the words not
understood.
She had started remembering out loud deliberately, so her mother would
know the past was cherished, still lived in her.
Nursing the baby: My friends marvel, and I tell them, oh it's easy to be such
a cow. I remember how beautiful my mother seemed nursing my brother,
and the milk just flows . . . Was that Davy? It must have been Davy. . . .
Lowering a hem: How did you ever... when I think how you made
everything we wore... Tim, just think, seven kids and Mommy sewed
everything... do I remember you sang while you sewed? That white dress
with the red apples on the skirt you fixed over for me, was it Hannah's or
Clara's before it was mine?
Washing sweaters: Ma, I'll never forget, one of those days so nice you
washed clothes outside; one of the first spring days it must have been. The
bubbles just danced while you scrubbed, and we chased after, and you
stopped to show us how to blow our own bubbles with green onion stalks. .
. you always. . . .
''Strong onion, to still make you cry after so many years," her father said, to
turn the tears into laughter.
While Richard bent over his homework: Where is it now, do we still have it,
the Book of the Martyrs? It always seemed so, wellexalted, when you'd put
it on
 
 Page 57

the round table and we'd all look at it together; there was even a halo from
the lamp. The lamp with the beaded fringe you could move up and down;
they're in style again, pulley lamps like that, but without the fringe. You
know the book I'm talking about, Daddy, the Book of Martyrs, the first
picture was a bust of Spartacus . . . Socrates? I wish there was something
like that for the children, Mommy, to give them what you. . . . (And the
tears splashed again.)
(What I intended and did not? Stop it, daughter, stop it, leave that time. And
he, the hypocrite, sitting there with tears in his eyesit was nothing to you
then, nothing.)
... The time you came to school and I almost died of shame because of your
accent and because I knew you knew I was ashamed; how could I? . . .
Sammy's harmonica and you danced to it once, yes you did, you and Davy
squealing in your arms. . . . That time you bundled us up and walked us
down to the railway station to stay the night 'cause it was heated and we
didn't have any coal, that winter of the strike, you didn't think I remembered
that, did you, Mommy? . . . How you'd call us out to see the sunsets. . . .
Day after day, the spilling memories. Worse now, questions, too. Even the
grandchildren: Grandma, in the olden days, when you were little. . . .
It was the afternoons that saved.
While they thought she napped, she would leave the mosaic on the wall (of
children's drawings, maps, calendars, pictures, Ann's cardboard dolls with
their great ringed questioning eyes) and hunch in the girls' closet on the low
shelf where the shoes stood, and the girls' dresses covered.
 
 Page 58

For that while she would painfully sheathe against the listening house, the
tendrils and noises that knocked, and Vivi's spilling memories. Sometimes it
helped to braid and unbraid the sashes that dangled, or to trace the pattern
on the hoop slips.
Today she had jacks and children under jet trails to forget. Last night, Ann
and Dody silhouetted in the window against a sunset of flaming man-made
clouds of jet trail, their jacks ball accenting the peaceful noise of dinner
being made. Had she told them, yes she had told them of how they played
jacks in her village though there was no ball, no jacks. Six stones, round
and flat, toss them out, the seventh on the back of the hand, toss, catch and
swoop up as many as possible, toss again. . . .
Of stones (repeating Richard) there are three kinds: earth's fire jetting; rock
of layered centuries; crucibled new out of the old (igneous, sedimentary,
metamorphic). But there was that otherfrozen to black glass, never to
transform or hold the fossil memory ... (let not my seed fall on stone). There
was an ancient man who fought to heights a great rock that crashed back
down eternally *eternal labor, freedom, labor. . . (stone will perish, but the
word remain). And you, David, who with a stone slew, screaming: Lord,
take my heart of stone and give me flesh.**
*Alludes to the myth of Sisyphus. who was punished eternally in Tartarus for reporting the
whereabouts of Zeus. king of the gods, to the father of the maiden Zeus had seized.

**Alludes to the biblical story of David's triumph over the giant Philistine, Goliath; Samuel
1:17. The quotation, which Olsen heard in a black church, paraphrases Ezekiel 11: 19: ''I
shall remove the heart of stone from their bodies and give them a heart of flesh."
 
 Page 59

Who was screaming? Why was she back in the common room of the prison,
the sun motes dancing in the shafts of light, and the informer being brought
in, a prisoner now, like themselves. And Lisa leaping, yes, Lisa, the gentle
and tender, biting at the betrayer's jugular. Screaming and screaming.
No, it is the children screaming. Another of Paul and Sammy's terrible
fights?
In Vivi's house. Severely: you are in Vivi's house.
Blows, screams, a call: ''Grandma!" For her? Oh please not for her. Hide,
hunch behind the dresses deeper. But a trembling little body hurls itself
beside hersurprised, smothered laughter, arms surround her neck, tears rub
dry on her cheek, and words too soft to understand whisper into her ear (Is
this where you hide too, Grammy? It's my secret place, we have a secret
now).
And the sweat beads, and the long shudder seizes.
It seemed the great ear pressed inside now, and the knocking. "We have to
go home," she told him, "I grow ill here."
"It's your own fault, Mrs. Bodybusy, you do not rest, you do too much." He
raged, but the fear was in his eyes. "It was a serious operation, they told you
to take care . . . All right, we will go to where you can rest."
But where? Not home to death, not yet. He had thought to Lennie's, to
Clara's; beautiful visits with each of the children. She would have to rest
first, be stronger. If they could but go to Floridait glittered before him, the
never-realized promise of Florida. Califor-
 
 Page 60

nia: of course. (The money, the money, dwindling!) Los Angeles first for
sun and rest, then to Lennie's in San Francisco.
He told her the next day. ''You saw what Nancy wrote: snow and wind back
home, a terrible winter. And look at youall bones and a swollen belly. I
called Phil: he said: 'A prescription, Los Angeles sun and rest.'"
She watched the words on his lips. "You have sold the house," she cried,
"that is why we do not go home. That is why you talk no more of the
Haven, why there is money for travel. After the children you will drag me
to the Haven."
"The Haven! Who thinks of the Haven any more? Tell her, Vivi, tell Mrs.
Suspicious: a prescription, sun and rest, to make you healthy. . . . And how
could I sell the house without you?"
At the place of farewells and greetings, of winds of coming and winds of
going, they say their good-byes.
They look back at her with the eyes of others before them: Richard with her
own blue blaze; Ann with the nordic eyes of Tim; Morty's dreaming brown
of a great-grandmother he will never know; Dody with the laughing eyes of
him who had been her springtide love (who stands beside her now); Vivi's,
all tears.
The baby's eyes are closed in sleep.
Good-bye, my children.

III
It is to the back of the great city he brought her, to the dwelling places of
the cast-off old. Bounded by two lines
 
 Page 61

of amusement piers to the north and to the south, and between a long
straight paving rimmed with black benches facing the sandsands so wide
the ocean is only a far fluting.
In the brief vacation season, some of the boarded stores fronting the sands
open, and families, young people and children, may be seen. A little
tasselled tram shuttles between the piers, and the lights of roller coasters
prink and tweak over those who come to have sensation made in them.
The rest of the year it is abandoned to the old, all else boarded up and still;
seemingly empty, except the occasional days and hours when the sun, like a
tide, sucks them out of the low rooming houses, casts them onto the
benches and sandy rim of the walkand sweeps them into decaying
enclosures once again.
A few newer apartments glint among the low bleached squares. It is in one
of these Lennie's Jeannie has arranged their rooms. ''Only a few miles north
and south people pay hundreds of dollars a month for just this gorgeous air,
Grandaddy, just this ocean closeness."
She had been ill on the plane, lay ill for days in the unfamiliar room.
Several times the doctor came byleft medicine she would not take. Several
times Jeannie drove in the twenty miles from work, still in her Visiting
Nurse uniform, the lightness and brightness of her like a healing.
"Who can believe it is winter?" he asked one morning. "Beautiful it is
outside like an ad. Come, Mrs. Invalid, come to taste it. You are well
enough to sit in here, you are well enough to sit outside. The doctor said it
too."
 
 Page 62

But the benches were encrusted with people, and the sands at the sidewalk's
edge. Besides, she had seen the far ruffle of the sea: ''there take me," and
though she leaned against him, it was she who led.
Plodding and plodding, sitting often to rest, he grumbling. Patting the sand
so warm. Once she scooped up a handful, cradling it close to her better eye;
peered, and flung it back. And as they came almost to the brink and she
could see the glistening wet, she sat down, pulled off her shoes and
stockings, left him and began to run. "You'll catch cold," he screamed, but
the sand in his shoes weighed him downhe who had always been the agile
oneand already the white spray creamed her feet.
He pulled her back, took a handkerchief to wipe off the wet and the sand.
"Oh no," she said, "the sun will dry," seized the square and smoothed it flat,
dropped on it a mound of sand, knotted the kerchief corners and tied it to a
bag-"to look at with the strong glass" (for the first time in years explaining
an action of hers)and lay down with the little bag against her cheek, looking
toward the shore that nurtured life as it first crawled toward consciousness
the millions of years ago.
He took her one Sunday in the evil-smelling bus, past flat miles of blister
houses, to the home of relatives. Oh what is this? she cried as the light
began to smoke and the houses to dim and recede. Smog, he said, everyone
knows but you. . . . Outside he kept his arms about her, but she walked with
hands pushing the heavy air as if to open it, whispered: who has done this?
sat down suddenly to vomit at the curb and for a long while refused to rise.
 
 Page 63

One's age as seen on the altered face of those known in youth. Is this they
he has come to visit? This Max and Rose, smooth and pleasant, introducing
them to polite children, disinterested grandchildren, ''the whole family, once
a month on Sundays. And why not? We have the room, the help, the food."
Talk of cars, of houses, of success: this son that, that daughter this. And
your children? Hastily skimped over, the intermarriages, the obscure
work"my doctor son-in-law, Phil"all he has to offer. She silent in a corner.
(Car-sick like a baby, he explains.) Years since he has taken her to visit
anyone but the children, and old apprehensions prickle: "no incidents," he
silently begs, "no incidents." He itched to tell them. "A very sick woman,"
significantly, indicating her with his eyes, "a very sick woman." Their
restricted faces did not react. "Have you thought maybe she'd do better at
Palm Springs?" Rose asked. "Or at least a nicer section of the beach, nicer
people, a pool." Not to have to say "money" he said instead: "would she
have sand to look at through a magnifying glass?" and went on, detail after
detail, the old habit betraying of parading the queerness of her for laughter.
After dinnerthe others into the living room in men- or women-clusters, or
into the den to watch TV the four of them alone. She sat close to him, and
did not speak. Jokes, stories, people they had known, beginning of
reminiscence, Russia fifty-sixty years ago. Strange words across the
Duncan Phyfe table: hunger; secret meetings; human rights; spies;
betrayals; prison; escapeinterrupted by one of the grandchildren:
"Commercial's on; any Coke left? Gee, you're missing a real hair-raiser."
And then a granddaughter (Max proudly: "look at her, an American queen")
drove them home on
 
 Page 64

her way back to U.C.L.A. No incidentexcept that there had been no

incidents.
The first few mornings she had taken with her the magnifying glass, but he
would sit only on the benches, so she rested at the foot, where slatted bench
shadows fell, and unless she turned her hearing aid down, other voices
invaded.
Now on the days when the sun shone and she felt well enough, he took her
on the tram to where the benches ranged in oblongs, some with tables for
checkers or cards. Again the blanket on the sand in the striped shadows, but
she no longer brought the magnifying glass. He played cards, and she lay in
the sun and looked towards the waters; or they walkedtwo blocks down to
the scaling hotel, two blocks backpast chilihamburger stands, open-doored
bars, Next-to-New and perpetual rummage sale stores.
Once, out of the aimless walkers, slow and shuffling like themselves,
someone ran unevenly towards them, embraced, kissed, wept: ''dear friends,
old friends." A friend of hers, not his: Mrs. Mays who had lived next door
to them in Denver when the children were small.
Thirty years are compressed into a dozen sentences; and the present, not
even in three. All is told: the children scattered; the husband dead; she lives
in a room two blocks up from the sing halland points to the domed
auditorium jutting before the pier. The leg? phlebitis; the heavy breathing?
that, one does not ask. She, too, comes to the benches each day to sit. And
tomorrow, tomorrow, are they going to the community sing? Of course he
would have heard of it, everybody goesthe big doings they wait for all
week. They have
 
 Page 65

never been? She will come to them for dinner tomorrow and they will all go
together.
So it is that she sits in the wind of the singing, among the thousand various
faces of age.
She had turned off her hearing aid at once they came into the auditoriumas
she would have wished to turn off sight.
One by one they streamed by and imprinted on herand though the savage
zest of their singing came voicelessly soft and distant, the faces still
roaredthe faces densened the airchorded into
children-chants, mother-croons, singing of the chained love serenades,
Beethoven storms, mad Lucia's scream drunken joy-songs, keens for the
dead, worksinging
while from floor to balcony to dome a bare-footed sore-covered little
girl threaded the soundthronged tumult, danced her ecstasy of grimace
to flutes that scratched at a cross-roads village wedding
Yes, faces became sound, and the sound became faces; and faces and sound
became weightpushed, pressed
''Air"her hands claw his.
"Whenever I enjoy myself. . . ." Then he saw the gray sweat on her face.
"Here. Up. Help me, Mrs. Mays," and they support her out to where she can
gulp the air in sob after sob.
"A doctor, we should get for her a doctor."
"Tch, it's nothing," says Ellen Mays, "I get it all the time. You've missed the
tram; come to my place. Fix your hearing aid, honey . . . close . . . tea. My
view.
 
 Page 66

See, she wants to come. Steady now, that's how.'' Adding mysteriously:
"Remember your advice, easy to keep your head above water, empty things
float. Float."
The singing a fading march for them, tall woman with a swollen leg,
weaving little man, and the swollen thinness they help between.
The stench in the hall: mildew? decay? "We sit and rest then climb. My
gorgeous view. We help each other and here we are."
The stench along into the slab of room. A washstand for a sink, a box with
oilcloth tacked around for a cupboard, a three-burner gas plate. Artificial
flowers, colorless with dust. Everywhere pictures foaming: wedding, baby,
party, vacation, graduation, family pictures. From the narrow couch under a
slit of window, sure enough the view: lurching rooftops and a scallop of
ocean heaving, preening, twitching under the moon.
"While the water heats. Excuse me ... down the hall." Ellen Mays has gone.
"You'll live?" he asks mechanically, sat down to feel his fright; tried to pull
her alongside.
She pushed him away. "For air," she said; stood clinging to the dresser.
Then, in a terrible voice:
After a lifetime of room. Of many rooms.
Shhh.
You remember how she lived. Eight children. And now one room like a
coffin.
She pays rent!
Shrinking the life of her into one room like a coffin Rooms and rooms like
this I lie on the quilt and hear them talk
Please, Mrs. Orator-without-Breath.
Once you went for coffee I walked I saw A
 
 Page 67

Balzac a Chekhov to write it Rummage Alone On scraps

Better old here than in the old country!
On scraps Yet they sang like like Wondrous! Humankind one has to believe
So strong for what? To rot not grow?
Your poor lungs beg you. They sob between each word.
Singing. Unused the life in them. She in this poor room with her pictures
Max You The children Everywhere unused the life And who has meaning?
Century after century still all in us not to grow?
Coffins, rummage, plants: sick woman. Oh lay down. We will get for you
the doctor.
''And when will it end. Oh, the end." That nightmare thought, and this time
she writhed, crumpled against him, seized his hand (for a moment again the
weight the soft distant roaring of humanity) and on the strangled-for breath,
begged: "Man ... we'll destroy ourselves?"
And looking for answer-in the helpless pity and fear for her (for her) that
distorted his face-she understood the last months, and knew that she was
dying.

IV
"Let us go home," she said after several days.
"You are in training for a cross-country run? That is why you do not even
walk across the room? Here, like a prescription Phil said, till you are
stronger from the operation. You want to break doctor's orders?"
She saw the fiction was necessary to him, was
 
 Page 68

silent; then: ''At home I will get better. If the doctor here says?"
"And winter? And the visits to Lennie and to Clara? All right," for he saw
the tears in her eyes, "I will write Phil, and talk to the doctor."
Days passed. He reported nothing. Jeannie came and took her out for air,
past the boarded concessions, the hooded and tented amusement rides, to
the end of the pier. They watched the spent waves feeding the new, the gulls
in the clouded sky; even up where they sat, the wind-blown sand stung.
She did not ask to go down the crooked steps to the sea.
Back in her bed, while he was gone to the store, she said: "Jeannie, this
doctor, he is not one I can ask questions. Ask him for me, can I go home?"
Jeannie looked at her, said quickly: "Of course, poor Granny. You want
your own things around you, don't you? I'll call him tonight.... Look, I've
something to show you," and from her purse unwrapped a large cookie,
intricately shaped like a little girl. "Look at the curlscan you hear me well,
Granny?and the darling eyelashes. I just came from a house where they
were baking them."
"The dimples, there in the knees," she marveled, holding it to the better
light, turning, studying, "like art. Each singly they cut, or a mold?"
"Singly," said Jeannie, "and if it is a child only the mother can make them.
Oh Granny, it's the likeness of a real little girl who died yesterdayRosita.
She was three years old. Pan del Muerto, the Bread of the Dead. It was the
custom in the part of Mexico they came from."
Still she turned and inspected. "Look, the hollow
 
 Page 69

in the throat, the little cross necklace. . . . I think for the mother it is a good
thing to be busy with such bread. You know the family?''
Jeannie nodded. "On my rounds. I nursed... Oh Granny, it is like a party;
they play songs she liked to dance to. The coffin is lined with pink velvet
and she wears a white dress. There are candles. . . . ."
"In the house?" Surprised, "They keep her in the house?"
"Yes, said Jeannie, "and it is against the health law. The father said it will be
sad to bury her in this country; in Oaxaca they have a feast night with
candles each year; everyone picnics on the graves of those they loved until
dawn."
"Yes, Jeannie, the living must comfort themselves." And closed her eyes.
"You want to sleep, Granny?"
"Yes, tired from the pleasure of you. I may keep the Rosita? There stand it,
on the dresser, where I can see; something of my own around me."
In the kitchenette, helping her grandfather unpack the groceries, Jeannie
said in her light voice:
"I'm resigning my job, Grandaddy."
"Ah, the lucky young man. Which one is he?"
"Too late. You're spoken for." She made a pyramid of cans, unstacked, and
built again.
"Something is wrong with the job?"
"With me. I can't be"she searched for the word-"What they call professional
enough. I let myself feel things. And tomorrow I have to report a family. . .
." The cans clicked again. "It's not that, either. I just don't know what I want
to do, maybe go back to school, maybe go to art school. I thought if you
 
 Page 70

went to San Francisco I'd come along and talk it over with Momma and
Daddy. But I don't see how you can go. She wants to go home. She asked
me to ask the doctor.''
The doctor told her himself. "Next week you may travel, when you are a
little stronger." But next week there was the fever of an infection, and by
the time that was over, she could not leave the beda rented hospital bed that
stood beside the double bed he slept in alone now.
Outwardly the days repeated themselves. Every other afternoon and
evening he went out to his newfound cronies, to talk and play cards. Twice
a week, Mrs. Mays came. And the rest of the time, Jeannie was there.
By the sickbed stood Jeannie's FM radio. Often into the room the shapes of
music came. She would lie curled on her side, her knees drawn up, intense
in listening (Jeannie sketched her so, coiled, convoluted like an ear), then
thresh her hand out and abruptly snap the radio mutestill to lie in her
attitude of listening, concealing tears.
Once Jeannie brought in a young Marine to visit, a friend from high-school
days she had found wandering near the empty pier. Because Jeannie asked
him to, gravely, without self-consciousness, he sat himself crosslegged on
the floor and performed for them a dance of his native Samoa.
Long after they left, a tiny thrumming sound could be heard where, in her
bed, she strove to repeat the beckon, flight, surrender of his hands, the
fluttering footbeats, and his low plaintive calls.
Hannah and Phil sent flowers. To deepen her
 
 Page 71

pleasure, he placed one in her hair. ''Like a girl," he said, and brought the
hand mirror so she could see. She looked at the pulsing red flower, the
yellow skull face; a desolate, excited laugh shuddered from her, and she
pushed the mirror awaybut let the flower burn.
The week Lennie and Helen came, the fever returned. With it the excited
laugh, and incessant words. She, who in her life had spoken but seldom and
then only when necessary (never having learned the easy, social uses of
words), now in dying, spoke incessantly.
In a half-whisper: "Like Lisa she is, your Jeannie. Have I told you of Lisa
who taught me to read? Of the highborn she was, but noble in herself. I was
sixteen; they beat me; my father beat me so I would not go to her. It was
forbidden, she was a Tolstoyan.* At night, past dogs that howled, terrible
dogs, my son, in the snows of winter to the road, I to ride in her carriage
like a lady, to books. To her, life was holy, knowledge was holy, and she
taught me to read. They hung her. Everything that happens one must try to
understand why. She killed one who betrayed many. Because of betrayal,
betrayed all she lived and believed. In one minute she killed, before my
eyes (there is so much blood in a human being, my son), in prison with me.
All that happens, one must try to understand.
"The name?" Her lips would work. "The name that was their pole star; the
doors of the death houses fixed to open on it; I read of it my year of penal
servitude. Thuban !" very excited, "Thuban, in ancient
* Follower of the novelist Tolstoy, who opposed the private ownership of property and
supported the dignity of peasant life.
 
 Page 72

Egypt the pole star. Can you see, look out to see it, Jeannie, if it swings
around our pole star that seems to us not to move.
''Yes, Jeannie, at your age my mother and grandmother had already buried
children . . . yes, Jeannie, it is more than oceans between Olshana and you .
. . yes, Jeannie, they danced, and for all the bodies they had they might as
well be chickens, and indeed, they scratched and flapped their arms and
hopped.
"And Andrei Yefimitch, who for twenty years had never known of it and
never wanted to know, said as if he wanted to cry: but why my dear friend
this malicious laughter?" Telling to herself half-memorized phrases from
her few books. "Pain I answer with tears and cries, baseness with
indignation, meanness with repulsion . . . for life may be hated or wearied
of, but never despised." *
Delirious: "Tell me, my neighbor, Mrs. Mays, the pictures never lived, but
what of the flowers? Tell them who ask: no rabbis, no ministers, no priests,
no speeches, no ceremonies: ah, falselet the living comfort themselves. Tell
Sammy's boy, he who flies, tell him to go to Stuttgart and see where Davy
has no grave. And what? . . . And what? where millions have no gravessave
air."
In delirium or not, wanting the radio on; not seeming to listen, the words
still jetting, wanting the music on. Once, silencing it abruptly as of old, she
began to cry, unconcealed tears this time. "You have pain, Granny?" Jeannie
asked.
*Both passages come from Chekhov, "Ward No. 6."
 
 Page 73

''The music," she said, "still it is there and we do not hear; knocks, and our
poor human ears too weak. What else, what else we do not hear?"
Once she knocked his hand aside as he gave her a pill, swept the bottles
from her bedside table: "no pills, let me feel what I feel," and laughed as on
his hands and knees he groped to pick them up.
Nighttimes her hand reached across the bed to hold his.
A constant retching began. Her breath was too faint for sustained speech
now, but still the lips moved:
When no longer necessary to injure others*
Pick pick pick Blind chicken
As a human being responsibility**
"David!" imperious, "Basin!" and she would vomit, rinse her mouth, the
wasted throat working to swallow, and begin the chant again.
She will be better off in the hospital now, the doctor said.
He sent the telegrams to the children, was packing her suitcase, when her
hoarse voice startled. She had roused, was pulling herself to sitting.
"Where now?" she asked. "Where now do you drag me?"
*From Chekhov's "Rothschild's Fiddle."

** From letter by Ida Lerner, Olsen's mother: "As a human being who carries responsibility
for action, I think as a duty to the community we must try to understand each other."
 
 Page 74

''You do not even have to have a baby to go this time," he soothed, looking
for the brush to pack. "Remember, after Davy you told meworthy to have a
baby for the pleasure of the ten-day rest in the hospital?"
"Where now? Not home yet?" Her voice mourned. "Where is my home?"
He rose to ease her back. "The doctor, the hospital," he started to explain,
but deftly, like a snake, she had slithered out of bed and stood swaying,
propped behind the night table.
"Coward," she hissed, "runner."
"You stand," he said senselessly.
"To take me there and run. Afraid of a little vomit."
He reached her as she fell. She struggled against him, half slipped from his
arms, pulled herself up again.
"Weakling," she taunted, "to leave me there and run. Betrayer. All your life
you have run."
He sobbed, telling Jeannie. "A Marilyn Monroe to run for her virtue. Fifty-
nine pounds she weighs, the doctor said, and she beats at me like a
Dempsey. Betrayer, she cries, and I running like a dog when she calls; day
and night, running to her, her vomit, the bed-pan. . . ."
"She needs you, Grandaddy," said Jeannie. "Isn't that what they call love?
I'll see if she sleeps, and if she does, poor worn-out darling, we'll have a
party, you and I: I brought us rum babas."
They did not move her. By her bed now stood the tall hooked pillar that
held the solutionsblood and dex-
 
 Page 75

troseto feed her veins. Jeannie moved down the hall to take over the
sickroom, her face so radiant, her grandfather asked her once: ''you are in
love?" (Shameful the joy, the pure overwhelming joy from being with her
grandmother; the peace, the serenity that breathed.) "My darling escape,"
she answered incoherently, "my darling Granny"as if that explained.
Now one by one the children came, those that were able. Hannah, Paul,
Sammy. Too late to ask: and what did you learn with your living, Mother,
and what do we need to know?
Clara, the eldest, clenched:
Pay me back, Mother, pay me back for all you took from me. Those
others you crowded into your heart. The hands I needed to be for you,
the heaviness, the responsibility.
Is this she? Noises the dying make, the crablike hands crawling over the
covers. The ethereal singing.
She hears that music, that singing from childhood; forgotten soundnot
heard since, since. . . . And the hardness breaks like a cry: Where did we
lose each other, first mother, singing mother?
Annulled: the quarrels, the gibing, the harshness between; the fall into
silence and the withdrawal.
I do not know you, Mother. Mother, I never knew you.
Lennie, suffering not alone for her who was dying, but for that in her which
never lived (for that which in him might never come to live). From him too,
 
 Page 76

unspoken words: good-bye Mother who taught me to mother myself.

Not Vivi, who must stay with her children; not Davy, but he is already here,
having to die again with her this time, for the living take their dead with
them when they die.
Light she grew, like a bird, and, like a bird, sound bubbled in her throat
while the body fluttered in agony. Night and day, asleep or awake (though
indeed there was no difference now) the songs and the phrases leaping.
And he, who had once dreaded a long dying (from fear of himself, from
horror of the dwindling money) now desired her quick death profoundly, for
her sake. He no longer went out, except when Jeannie forced him; no longer
laughed, except when, in the bright kitchenette, Jeannie coaxed his laughter
(and she, who seemed to hear nothing else, would laugh too, conspiratorial
wisps of laughter).
Light, like a bird, the fluttering body, the little claw hands, the beaked
shadow on her face; and the throat, bubbling, straining.
He tried not to listen, as he tried not to look on the face in which only the
forehead remained familiar, but trapped with her the long nights in that little
room, the sounds worked themselves into his consciousness, with their
punctuation of death swallows, whimpers, gurglings.
Even in reality (swallow) life's lack of it
Slaveships deathtrains clubs eeenough
The bell summon what enables
 
 Page 77

78,000 in one minute (whisper of a scream)

78,000 human beings we'll destroy ourselves? *
''Aah, Mrs. Miserable," he said, as if she could hear, "all your life working,
and now in bed you lie, servants to tend, you do not even need to call to be
tended, and still you work. Such hard work it is to die? Such hard work?"
The body threshed, her hand clung in his. A melody, ghost-thin, hovered on
her lips, and like a guilty ghost, the vision of her bent in listening to it,
silencing the record instantly he was near. Now, heedless of his presence,
she floated the melody on and on.
"Hid it from me," he complained, "how many times you listened to
remember it so?" And tried to think when she had first played it, or first
begun to silence her few records when he came nearbut could reconstruct
nothing. There was only this room with its tall hooked pillar and its swarm
of sounds.
No man one except through others
Strong with the not yet in the now
Dogma dead war dead one country
"It helps, Mrs. Philosopher, words from books? It helps?" And it seemed to
him that for seventy years she had hidden a tape recorder, infinitely
microscopic, within her, that it had coiled infinite mile on mile, trapping
every song, every melody, every word read, heard,
*The italicized passage contains references to the ships that transported slaves from Africa to
America, to the trains that took millions of Jews and other Nazi victims to the concentration
camps, and to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
 
 Page 78

and spokenand that maliciously she was playing back only what said
nothing of him, of the children, or their intimate life together.
''Left us indeed, Mrs. Babbler," he reproached, "you who called others
babbler and cunningly saved your words. A lifetime you tended and loved,
and now not a word of us, for us. Left us indeed? Left me."
And he took out his solitaire deck, shuffled the cards loudly, slapped them
down.
Lift high banner of reason (tatter of an orator's voice)
justice freedom light
Humankind life worthy capacities
Seeks (blur of shudder) belong human being
"Words, words," he accused, "and what human beings did you seek around
you, Mrs. Live Alone, and what humankind think worthy?"
Though even as he spoke, he remembered she had not always been isolated,
had not always wanted to be alone (as he knew there had been a voice
before this gossamer one; before the hoarse voice that broke from silence to
lash, make incidents, shame hima girl's voice of eloquence that spoke their
holiest dreams). But again he could reconstruct, image, nothing of what had
been before, or when, or how, it had changed.
Ace, queen, jack. The pillar shadow fell, so, in two tracks; in the mirror
depths glistened a moonlike blob, the empty solution bottle. And it worked
in him: of reason and justice and freedom . . . Dogma dead: he remembered
the full quotation, laughed bitterly. "Hah, good you do not know what you
say; good Victor Hugo died and did not see it, his twentieth century."
 
 Page 79

Deuce, ten, five. Dauntlessly she began a song of their youth of belief:
These things shall be, a loftier race
than e'er the world hath known shall rise
with flame of freedom in their souls
and light of knowledge in their eyes
King, four, jack ''In the twentieth century, hah!"
They shall be gentle, brave and strong
to spill no drop of blood, but dare
all . . .
on earth and fire and sea and air
"To spill no drop of blood, hah! So, cadaver, and you too, cadaver Hugo, 'in
the twentieth century ignorance will be dead, dogma will be dead, war will
be dead, and for all mankind one countryof fulfilment?' Hah!"
And every life (long strangling cough) shall be a song *
The cards fell from his fingers. Without warning, the bereavement and
betrayal he had sheltered compounded through the yearshidden even from
himselfrevealed itself,
uncoiled,
released,
sprung
*The italicized passages are all fragments from Hugo's "These Things Shall Be." The last
verse is: "New arts shall bloom of loftier mould,/ And mightier music thrill the skies,/ And
every life shall be a song/ When all the earth is paradise."
 
 Page 80

and with it the monstrous shapes of what had actually happened in the
century.
A ravening hunger or thirst seized him. He groped into the kitchenette,
switched on all three lights, piled a tray-''you have finished your night
snack, Mrs. Cadaver, now I will have mine." And he was shocked at the
tears that splashed on the tray.
"Salt tears. For free. I forgot to shake on salt?"
Whispered: "Lost, how much I lost."
Escaped to the grandchildren whose childhoods were childish, who had
never hungered, who lived unravaged by disease in warm houses of many
rooms, had all the school for which they cared, could walk on any street,
stood a head taller than their grandparents, towered abovebeautiful skins,
straight backs, clear straightforward eyes. "Yes, you in Olshana," he said to
the town of sixty years ago, "they would seem nobility to you."
And was this not the dream then, come true in ways undreamed? he asked.
And are there no other children in the world? he answered, as if in her
harsh voice.
And the flame of freedom, the light of knowledge?
And the drop, to spill no drop of blood?

And he thought that at six Jeannie would get up and it would be his turn to
go to her room and sleep, that he could press the buzzer and she would
come now; that in the afternoon Ellen Mays was coming, and this time they
would play cards and he could marvel at how rouge can stand half an inch
on the cheek; that in the evening the doctor would come, and he could beg
him to be merciful, to stop the feeding solutions, to let her die.
 
 Page 81

To let her die, and with her their youth of belief out of which her bright,
betrayed words foamed; stained words, that on her working lips came
stainless.
Hours yet before Jeannie's turn. He could press the buzzer and wake her to
come now; he could take a pill, and with it sleep; he could pour more
brandy into his milk glass, though what he had poured was not yet touched.
Instead he went back, checked her pulse, gently tended with his knotty
fingers as Jeannie had taught.
She was whimpering; her hand crawled across the covers for his.
Compassionately he enfolded it, and with his free hand gathered up the
cards again. Still was there thirst or hunger ravening in him.
That world of their youthdark, ignorant, terrible with hate and diseasehow
was it that living in it, in the midst of corruption, filth, treachery,
degradation, they had not mistrusted man nor themselves; had believed so
beautifully, so . . . falsely?
''Aaah, children," he said out loud, "how we believed, how we belonged."
And he yearned to package for each of the children, the grandchildren, for
everyone, that joyous certainty, that sense of mattering, of moving and
being moved, of being one and indivisible with the great of the past, with all
that freed, ennobled. Package it, stand on corners, in front of stadiums and
on crowded beaches, knock on doors, give it as a fabled gift.
"And why not in cereal boxes, in soap packages?" he mocked himself.
"Aah. You have taken my senses, cadaver."
Words foamed, died unsounded. Her body writhed; she made kissing
motions with her mouth. (Her lips moving as she read, pouring over the
Book
 
 Page 82

of Martyrs, the magnifying glass superimposed over the heavy eyeglasses.)

Still she believed? ''Eva!" he whispered. "Still you believed? You lived by
it? These Things Shall Be?"
"One pound soup meat," she answered distinctly, "one soup bone."
"My ears heard you. Ellen Mays was witness: 'Humankind ... one has to
believe.'" Imploringly: "Eva!"
"Bread, day-old." She was mumbling. "Please, in a wooden box ... for
kindling. The thread, hah, the thread breaks. Cheap thread"and a gurgling,
enormously loud, began in her throat.
"I ask for stone; she gives me breadday-old." He pulled his hand away,
shouted: "Who wanted questions? Everything you have to wake?" Then
dully, "Ah, let me help you turn, poor creature."
Words jumbled, cleared. In a voice of crowded terror:
"Paul, Sammy, don't fight.
"Hannah, have I ten hands?
"How can I give it, Clara, how can I give it if I don't have?"
"You lie," he said sturdily, "there was joy too." Bitterly: "Ah how cheap you
speak of us at the last."
As if to rebuke him, as if her voice had no relationship with her flaring
body, she sang clearly, beautifully, a school song the children had taught her
when they were little; begged:
"Not look my hair where they cut...."
(The crown of braids shorn.)* And instantly he
* Reference to the Orthodox Jewish custom of cutting off the bride's hair and replacing it
with a wig, and to the cutting off of prisoners' hair in Siberia.
 
 Page 83

left the mute old woman poring over the Book of the Martyrs; went past the
mother treading at the sewing machine, singing with the children; past the
girl in her wrinkled prison dress, hiding her hair with scarred hands, lifting
to him her awkward, shamed, imploring eyes of love; and took her in his
arms, dear, personal, fleshed, in all the heavy passion he had loved to rouse
from her.
''Eva!"
Her little claw hand beat the covers. How much, how much can a man
stand? He took up the cards, put them down, circled the beds, walked to the
dresser, opened, shut drawers, brushed his hair, moved his hand bit by bit
over the mirror to see what of the reflection he could blot out with each
move, and felt that at any moment he would die of what was unendurable.
Went to press the buzzer to wake Jeannie, looked down, saw on Jeannie's
sketch pad the hospital bed, with her; the double bed alongside, with him;
the tall pillar feeding into her veins, and their hands, his and hers, clasped,
feeding each other. And as if he had been instructed he went to his bed, lay
down, holding the sketch (as if it could shield against the monstrous shapes
of loss, of betrayal, of death) and with his free hand took hers back into his.
So Jeannie found them in the morning.
That last day the agony was perpetual. Time after time it lifted her almost
off the bed, so they had to fight to hold her down. He could not endure and
left the room; wept as if there never would be tears enough.
Jeannie came to comfort him. In her light voice she said: Grandaddy,
Grandaddy don't cry. She is not there, she promised me. On the last day, she
said she
 
 Page 84

would go back to when she first heard music, a little girl on the road of the
village where she was born. She promised me. It is a wedding and they
dance, while the flutes so joyous and vibrant tremble in the air. Leave her
there, Grandaddy, it is all right. She promised me. Come back, come back
and help her poor body to die.
For my mother, my father,
and
Two of that generation
Seevya and Genya*
Infinite, dauntless, incorruptible
Death deepens the wonder
* Seevya Dinkin and Genya Gorelick, two activist immigrant women of Olsen's parents'
generation. Genya Gorelick was an orator in the 1905 Revolution.
 
 Page 85

Background to the Story

 
 Page 87

TILLIE OLSEN

Silences in Literature
Originally an unwritten talk, spoken from notes at the Radcliffe Institute in
1962 as part of a weekly colloquium of members. Edited from the taped
transcription, it appears here as published in Harper's Magazine, October
1965.
(Several omitted lines have been restored; an occasional name or phrase and
a few footnotes have been added.)

Silences
Literary history and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for
years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing
to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at
all.
What is it that happens with the creator, to the creative process, in that
time? What are creation's needs for full functioning? Without intention of
or pretension to literary scholarship, I have had special need to learn all I
could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to
let writing die over and over again in me.
These are not natural silenceswhat Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the
tedious agony)that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in
the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the
unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. In the
old, the obvious parallels: when the seed strikes stone; the soil will not
sustain; the spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestation; the
frost comes premature.
The great in achievement have known such silencesThomas Hardy,
Melville, Rimbaud, Gerard Manley Hopkins. They tell us little as to why or
how the creative working atrophied and died in themif ever it did.
From Silences (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1978), 5-21. Introductory
 note and all footnotes are Olsen's.
 
 Page 88

''Less and less shrink the visions then vast in me," writes Thomas Hardy in
his thirty-year ceasing from novels after the Victorian vileness to his Jude
the Obscure. ("So ended his prose contributions to literature, his
experiences having killed all his interest in this form"the official
explanation.) But the great poetry he wrote to the end of his life was not
sufficient to hold, to develop the vast visions which for twentyfive years
had had expression in novel after novel. People, situations,
interrelationships, landscapethey cry for this larger life in poem after poem.
It was not visions shrinking with Hopkins, but a different torment. For
seven years he kept his religious vow to refrain from writing poetry, but the
poet's eye he could not shut, nor win "elected silence to beat upon [his]
whorled ear." "I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a poem which
now I realised on paper," he writes of the first poem permitted to end the
seven years' silence. But poetry ("to hoard unheard; be heard, unheeded")
could be only the least and last of his heavy priestly responsibilities.
Nineteen poems were all he could produce in his last nine yearsfullness to
us, but torment pitched past grief to him, who felt himself "time's eunuch,
never to beget."
Silence surrounds Rimbaud's silence. Was there torment of the unwritten;
haunting of rhythm, of visions; anguish at dying powers, the seventeen
years after he abandoned the unendurable literary world? We know only
that the need to write continued into his first years of vagabondage; that he
wrote:
Had I not once a youth pleasant, heroic, fabulous enough to write on leaves of gold: too
much luck. Through what crime, what error, have I earned my present weakness? You who
maintain that some animals sob sorrowfully, that the dead have dreams, try to tell the story of
my downfall and my slumber. I no longer know how to speak.*

That on his deathbed, he spoke again like a poet-visionary.

* A Season in Hell.
 
 Page 89

Melville's stages to his thirty-year prose silence are clearest. The presage in
his famous letter to Hawthorne, as he had to hurry Moby Dick to an end:
I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-
growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,that, I fear, can seldom be mine.
Dollars damn me. . . . What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,it will not pay. Yet,
altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash . . .

Reiterated in Pierre, writing ''that book whose unfathomable cravings drink

his blood . . . When at last the idea obtruded that the wiser and profounder
he should grow, the more and the more he lessened his chances for bread."
To be possessed; to have to try final hash; to have one's work met by "drear
ignoring"; to be damned by dollars into a Customs House job; to have only
weary evenings and Sundays left for writing
How bitterly did unreplying Pierre feel in his heart that to most of the great works of
humanity, their authors had given not weeks and months, not years and years, but their
wholly surrendered and dedicated lives.

Is it not understandable why Melville began to burn work, then ceased to

write it, "immolating [it] . . . sealing in a fate subdued"? And turned to
occasional poetry, manageable in a time sense, "to nurse through night the
ethereal spark." A thirty-year night. He was nearly seventy before he could
quit the customs dock and again have full time for writing, start back to
prose. "Age, dull tranquilizer," and devastation of "arid years that filed
before" to work through. Three years of tryings before he felt capable of
beginning Billy Budd (the kernel waiting half a century); three years more
to his last days (he who had been so fluent), the slow, painful, never
satisfied writing and re-writing of it. *
* "Entering my eighth decade [I come] into possession of unobstructed leisure ... just as, in
the course of nature, my vigor sensibly declines. What little of
 
 Page 90

Kin to these years-long silences are the hidden silences; work aborted,
deferred, deniedhidden by the work which does come to fruition. Hopkins
rightfully belongs here; almost certainly William Blake; Jane Austen, Olive
Schreiner, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka; Katherine Anne
Porter, many other contemporary writers.
Censorship silences. Deletions, omissions, abandonment of the medium (as
with Hardy); paralyzing of capacity (as Dreiser's ten-year stasis on Jennie
Gerhardt after the storm against Sister Carrie). Publishers' censorship,
refusing subject matter or treatment as ''not suitable" or "no market for."
Self-censorship. Religious, political censorshipsometimes spurring
inventivenessmost often (read Dostoyevsky's letters) a wearing attrition.
The extreme of this: those writers physically silenced by governments.
Isaac Babel, the years of imprisonment, what took place in him with what
wanted to be written? Or in Oscar Wilde, who was not permitted even a
pencil until the last months of his imprisonment?
Other silences. The truly memorable poem, story, or book, then the writer
ceasing to be published.** Was one work all the writers had in them (life
too thin for pressure of material, renewal) and the respect for literature too
great to repeat themselves? Was it "the knife of the perfectionist attitude in
art and life" at their throat? Were the conditions not present for establishing
the habits of creativity (a young Colette who lacked a Willy to lock her in
her room each day)? oras instanced over and overother claims, other
responsibilities so writing could not be first? (The writer of a class, sex,
color still marginal in literature, and whose coming to written voice at all
against complex odds is exhausting achievement.) It is an eloquent
commentary that this one-book si-
it is left, I husband for certain matters as yet incomplete and which indeed may never be
completed." Billy Budd never was completed; it was edited from drafts found after Melville's
death.

*As Jean Toomer (Cane); Henry Roth (Call It Sleep); Edith Summers Kelley (Weeds).
 
 Page 91

lence has been true of most black writers; only eleven in the hundred years
since 1850 have published novels more than twice. *
There is a prevalent silence I pass by quickly, the absence of creativity
where it once had been; the ceasing to create literature, though the books
may keep coming out year after year. That suicide of the creative process
Hemingway described so accurately in ''The Snows of Kilimanjaro":
He had destroyed his talent himselfby not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he
believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by
sloth, by snobbery, by hook and by crook; selling vitality, trading it for security, for comfort.

No, not Scott Fitzgerald. His not a death of creativity, not silence, but what
happens when (his words) there is "the sacrifice of talent, in pieces, to
preserve its essential value."
Almost unnoted are the foreground silences, before the achievement.
(Remember when Emerson hailed Whitman's genius, he guessed correctly:
"which yet must have had a long foreground for such a start.") George Eliot,
Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Richardson,
Elizabeth Madox Roberts, A. E. Coppard, Angus Wilson, Joyce Caryall
close to, or in their forties before they became published writers;
Lampedusa, Maria Dermout (The Ten Thousand Things), Laura Ingalls
Wilder, the "children's writer," in their sixties. ** Their capacities evident
early in the "being one on whom nothing is lost"; in other writers' qualities.
Not all struggling and anguished, like Anderson, the foreground years;
some needing the immobilization of long illness or loss, or the sudden
lifting of responsibility to make writing necessary, make writing possible;
others waiting circumstances and encouragement (George Eliot, her Henry
Lewes; Laura Wil-
* Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America, 1958.

**Some other foreground silences: Elizabeth (Mrs.) Gaskell, Kate Chopin, Cora Sandel,
Cyrus Colter, Hortense Calisher.
 
 Page 92

der, a writer-daughter's insistence that she transmute her storytelling gift

onto paper).
Very close to this last grouping are the silences where the lives never came
to writing. Among these, the mute inglorious Miltons: those whose waking
hours are all struggle for existence; the- barely educated; the illiterate;
women. Their silence the silence of centuries as to how life was, is, for
most of humanity. Traces of their making, of course, in folk song, lullaby,
tales, language itself, jokes, maxims, superstitionsbut we know nothing of
the creators or how it was with them. In the fantasy of Shakespeare born in
deepest Africa (as at least one Shakespeare must have been), was the ritual,
the oral storytelling a fulfillment? Or was there restlessness, indefinable
yearning, a sense of restrictions? Was it as Virginia Woolf in A Room of
One's Own guessesabout women?
Genius of a sort must have existed among them, as it existed among the working classes,*
but certainly it never got itself onto paper. When, however, one reads of a woman possessed
by the devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a remarkable man who had a
remarkable mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, or
some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor, crazed with the torture her gift
had put her to.

Rebecca Harding Davis whose work sleeps in the forgotten (herself as a

woman of a century ago so close to remaining mute), also guessed about the
silent in that time of the twelve-hour-a-day, six-day work week. She writes
of the illiterate ironworker in Life in the Iron Mills who sculptured great
shapes in the slag: ''his fierce thirst for beauty, to know it, to create ii, to be
something other than he isa passion of pain"; Margret Howth in the textile
mill:
There were things in the world, that like herself, were marred, did not understand, were
hungry to know.... Her

* Half of the working classes are women.

 
 Page 93

eyes quicker to see than ours, delicate or grand lines in the homeliest things. . . . Everything
she saw or touched, nearer, more human than to you or me. These sights and sounds did not
come to her common; she never got used to living as other people do.

She never got used to living as other people do. Was that one of the ways it
was?
So some of the silences, incomplete listing of the incomplete, where the
need and capacity to create were of a high order.
Now, what is the work of creation and the circumstances it demands for full
functioningas told in the journals, letters, notes, of the practitioners
themselves: Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, André Gide, Virginia
Woolf; the letters of Flaubert, Rilke, Joseph Conrad; Thomas Wolfe's Story
of a Novel, Valéry's Course in Poetics. What do they explain of the
silences?
''Constant toil is the law of art, as it is of life," says (and demonstrated)
Balzac:
To pass from conception to execution, to produce, to bring the idea to birth, to raise the child
laboriously from infancy, to put it nightly to sleep surfeited, to kiss it in the mornings with
the hungry heart of a mother, to clean it, to clothe it fifty times over in new garments which it
tears and casts away, and yet not revolt against the trials of this agitated lifethis unwearying
maternal love, this habit of creationthis is execution and its toils.

"Without duties, almost without external communication," Rilke specifies,

"unconfined solitude which takes every day like a life, a spaciousness
which puts no limit to vision and in the midst of which infinities surround."
Unconfined solitude as Joseph Conrad experienced it:
For twenty months I wrestled with the Lord for my creation . . . mind and will and
conscience engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day ... a lonely struggle in a great
isolation from the world. I suppose I slept and ate the food put
 
 Page 94

before me and talked connectedly on suitable occasions, but I was never aware of the even
flow of daily life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless affection.

So there is a homely underpinning for it all, the even flow of daily life made
easy and noiseless.
''The terrible law of the artist"says Henry James"the law of fructification, of
fertilization. The old, old lesson of the art of meditation. To woo
combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of
attention and meditation."
"That load, that weight, that gnawing conscience," writes Thomas Mann
That sea which to drink up, that frightful task ... The will, the discipline and self-control to
shape a sentence or follow out a hard train of thought. From the first rhythmical urge of the
inward creative force towards the material, towards casting in shape and form, from that to
the thought, the image, the word, the line, what a struggle, what Gethsemane.

Does it become very clear what Melville's Pierre so bitterly remarked on,
and what literary history bears outwhy most of the great works of humanity
have come from lives (able to be) wholly surrendered and dedicated? How
else sustain the constant toil, the frightful task, the terrible law, the
continuity? Full self: this means full time as and when needed for the work.
(That time for which Emily Dickinson withdrew from the world.)
But what if there is not that fullness of time, let alone totality of self? What
if the writers, as in some of these silences, must work regularly at
something besides their own workas do nearly all in the arts in the United
States today.
I know the theory (kin to "starving in the garret makes great art") that it is
this very circumstance which feeds creativity. I know, too, that for the
beginning young, for some who have such need, the job can be valuable
access to life they would not otherwise know. A few (I think of the doctors,
the incomparables: Chekhov and William Carlos Williams) for special
reasons sometimes manage both. But the actuality
 
 Page 95

testifies: substantial creative work demands time, and with rare exceptions
only full-time workers have achieved it.*Where the claims of creation
cannot be primary, the results are atrophy; unfinished work; minor effort
and accomplishments; silences. (Desperation which accounts for the
mountains of applications to the foundations for grantsundivided timein the
strange bread-line system we have worked out for our artists.)
Twenty years went by on the writing of Ship of Fools, while Katherine
Anne Porter, who needed only two, was ''trying to get to that table, to that
typewriter, away from my jobs of teaching and trooping this country and of
keeping house." "Your subconscious needed that time to grow the layers of
pearl," she was told. Perhaps, perhaps, but I doubt it. Subterranean forces
can make you wait, but they are very finicky about the kind of waiting it
has to be. Before they will feed the creator back, they must be fed,
passionately fed, what needs to be worked on. "We hold up our desire as
one places a magnet over a composite dust from which the particle of iron
will suddenly jump up," says Paul Valéry. A receptive waiting, that means,
not demands which prevent "an undistracted center of being." And when
the response comes, availability to work must be immediate. If not used at
once, all may vanish as a dream; worse, future creation be endangeredfor
only the removal and development of the material frees the forces for
further work.
There is a life in which all this is documented: Franz Kafka's. For every one
entry from his diaries here, there are fifty others
*This does not mean that these full-time writers were hermetic or denied themselves social or
personal life (think of James, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Balzac, Joyce, Gide, Colette, Yeats, Woolf,
etc. etc.); nor did they, except perhaps at the flood, put in as many hours daily as those doing
more usual kinds of work. Three to six hours daily have been the norm ("the quiet, patient,
generous mornings will bring it") Zola and Trollope are famous last-century examples of the
four hours; the Paris Review interviews disclose many contemporary ones.

Full-timeness consists not in the actual number of hours at one's desk, but in that writing is
one's major profession, practiced habitually, in freed, protected, undistracted time as needed,
when it is needed.
 
 Page 96

that testify as unbearably to the driven stratagems for time, the work lost (to
us), the damage to the creative powers (and the body) of having to deny,
interrupt, postpone, put aside, let work die.
''I cannot devote myself completely to my writing," Kafka explains (in
1911). "I could not live by literature if only, to begin with, because of the
slow maturing of my work and its special character." So he worked as an
official in a state insurance agency, and wrote when he could.
These two can never be reconciled. . . . If I have written something one evening, I am afire
the next day in the office and can bring nothing to completion. Outwardly I fulfill my office
duties satisfactorily, not my inner duties however, and every unfulfilled inner duty becomes a
misfortune that never leaves. What strength it will necessarily drain me of.

1911
No matter how little the time or how badly I write, I feel approaching the imminent
possibility of great moments which could make me capable of anything. But my being does
not have sufficient strength to hold this to the next writing time. During the day the visible
world helps me; during the night it cuts me to pieces unhindered. . . . In the evening and in
the morning, my consciousness of the creative abilities in me then I can encompass. I feel
shaken to the core of my being. Calling forth such powers which are then not permitted to
function.

. . . which are then not permitted to function . . .

1911
I finish nothing, because I have no time, and it presses so within me.

1912
When I begin to write after such a long interval, I draw the words as if out of the empty air. If
I capture one, then I have just this one alone, and all the toil must begin anew.
 
 Page 97

1914
Yesterday for the first time in months, an indisputable ability to do good work. And yet wrote
only the first page. Again I realize that everything written down bit by bit rather than all at
once in the course of the larger part is inferior, and that the circumstances of my life
condemn me to this inferiority.

1915
My constant attempt by sleeping before dinner to make it possible to continue working
[writing] late into the night, senseless. Then at one o'clock can no longer fall asleep at all, the
next day at work insupportable, and so I destroy myself.

1917
Distractedness, weak memory, stupidity. Days passed in futility, powers wasted away in
waiting. . . . . Always this one principal anguishif I had gone away in 1911 in full possession
of all my powers. Not eaten by the strain of keeping down living forces.

Eaten into tuberculosis. By the time he won through to himself and time for
writing, his body could live no more. He was forty-one.
I think of Rilke who said, ''If I have any responsibility, I mean and desire it
to be responsibility for the deepest and innermost essence of the loved
reality [writing] to which I am inseparably bound"; and who also said,
"Anything alive that makes demands, arouses in me an infinite capacity to
give it its due, the consequences of which completely use me up." These
were true with Kafka, too, yet how different their lives. When Rilke wrote
that about responsibility, he is explaining why he will not take a job to
support his wife and baby, nor live with them (years later will not come to
his daughter's wedding nor permit a two-hour honeymoon visit lest it break
his solitude where he awaits poetry). The "infinite capacity" is his
explanation as to why he cannot even bear to have a dog. Extremeand
justified. He protected his creative powers.
 
 Page 98

Kafka's, Rilke's ''infinite capacity," and all else that has been said here of the
needs of creation, illuminate women's silence of centuries. I will not repeat
what is in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, but talk of this last
century and a half in which women have begun to have voice in literature.
(It has been less than that time in Eastern Europe, and not yet, in many parts
of the world.)
In the last century, of the women whose achievements endure for us in one
way or another,* nearly all never married (Jane Austen, Emily Brontë,
Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne
Jewett) or married late in their thirties (George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Charlotte Brontë, Olive Schreiner). I can think of only four
(George Sand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Elizabeth
Gaskell) who married and had children as young women. ** All had
servants.
In our century, until very recently, it has not been so different. Most did not
marry (Selma Lagerlof, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Gertrude Stein,
Gabriela Mistral, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Charlotte Mew, Eudora Welty,
Marianne Moore) or, if married, have been childless (Edith Wharton,
Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, H. H.
Richardson, Elizabeth Bowen, Isak Dinesen. Katherine Anne Porter, Lillian
Hellman, Dorothy Parker). Colette had one child (when she was forty). If I
include Sigrid Undset, Kay Boyle, Pearl Buck, Dorothy Canfield Fisher,
that will make a small group who had more than one child. All had
household help or other special circumstances.
Am I resaying the moldy theory that women have no need, some say no
capacity, to create art, because they can "create" babies? And the additional
proof is precisely that the few women who have created it are nearly all
childless? No.
The power and the need to create, over and beyond reproduction, is native
in both women and men. Where the gifted among women (and men) have
remained mute, or have
*"One Out of Twelve" has a more extensive roll of women writers of achievement.

** I would now add a fifthKate Chopinalso a foreground silence.

 
 Page 99

never attained full capacity, it is because of circumstances, inner or outer,

which oppose the needs of creation.
Wholly surrendered and dedicated lives; time as needed for the work;
totality of self. But women are traditionally trained to place others' needs
first, to feel these needs as their own (the ''infinite capacity"); their sphere,
their satisfaction to be in making it possible for others to use their abilities.
This is what Virginia Woolf meant when, already a writer of achievement,
she wrote in her diary:
Father's birthday. He would have been 96, 96, yes, today; and could have been 96, like other
people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine.
What would have happened? No writing, no books;inconceivable.

It took family deaths to free more than one woman writer into her own
development. * Emily Dickinson freed herself, denying all the duties
expected of a woman of her social position except the closest family ones,
and she was fortunate to have a sister, and servants, to share those. How
much is revealed of the differing circumstances and fate of their own as-
great capacities, in the diaries (and lives) of those female bloodkin of great
writers: Dorothy Wordsworth, Alice James, Aunt Mary Moody Emerson.
And where there is no servant or relation to assume the responsibilities of
daily living? Listen to Katherine Mansfield in the early days of her
relationship with John Middleton Murry, when they both dreamed of
becoming great writers: **
* Among them: George Eliot, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mrs. Gaskell, Kate Chopin, Lady
Gregory, Isak Dinesen. Ivy Compton-Burnett finds this the grim reason for the emergence of
British women novelists after World War I: ". . . The men were dead, you see, and the women
didn't marry so much because there was no one for them to marry, and so they had leisure,
and, I think, in a good many cases they had money because their brothers were dead, and all
that would tend to writing, wouldn't it, being single, and having some money, and having the
timehaving no men, you see."

** Already in that changed time when servants were not necessarily a part of the furnishings
of almost anyone well educated enough to be making literature.
 
 Page 100

The house seems to take up so much time.... I mean when I have to clean up twice over or
wash up extra unnecessary things, I get frightfully impatient and want to be working
[writing]. So often this week you and Gordon have been talking while I washed dishes. Well
someone's got to wash dishes and get food. Otherwise ''there's nothing in the house but eggs
to eat." And after you have gone I walk about with a mind full of ghosts of saucepans and
primus stoves and "will there be enough to go around?" And you calling, whatever I am
doing, writing, "Tig, isn't there going to be tea? It's five o'clock."

I loathe myself today. This woman who superintends you and rushes about slamming doors
and slopping water and shouts "You might at least empty the pail and wash out the tea
leaves." ... O Jack, I wish that you would take me in your arms and kiss my hands and my
face and every bit of me and say, "It's all right, you darling thing, I understand."

A long way from Conrad's favorable circumstances for creation: the flow of
daily life made easy and noiseless.
And, if in addition to the infinite capacity, to the daily responsibilities, there
are children?
Balzac, you remember, described creation in terms of motherhood. Yes, in
intelligent passionate motherhood there are similarities, and in more than
the toil and patience. The calling upon total capacities; the reliving and new
using of the past; the comprehensions; the fascination, absorption, intensity.
All almost certain death to creation(so far).
Not because the capacities to create no longer exist, or the need (though for
a while, as in any fullness of life, the need may be obscured), but because
the circumstances for sustained creation have been almost impossible. The
need cannot be first. It can have at best, only part self, part time. (Unless
someone else does the nurturing. Read Dorothy Fisher's "Babushka
Farnham" in Fables for Parents.) More than in any other human
relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly
interruptable, responsive, responsible. Children need one now (and
remember, in our society, the family must often try to be the center for love
and health the outside world is not). The very fact that these are
 
 Page 101

real needs, that one feels them as one's own (love, not duty); that there is no
one else responsible for these needs, give them primacy. It is distraction,
not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity,
spasmodic, not constant toil. The rest has been said here. Work interrupted,
deferred, relinquished, makes blockageat best, lesser accomplishment.
Unused capacities atrophy, cease to be.
When H. H. Richardson, who wrote the Australian classic Ultima Thule,
was asked why shewhose children, like all her people, were so profoundly
writtendid not herself have children, she answered: ''There are enough
women to do the childbearing and childrearing. I know of none who can
write my books." I remember thinking rebelliously, yes, and I know of none
who can bear and rear my children either. But literary history is on her side.
Almost no mothersas almost no part-time, part-self personshave created
enduring literature . . . so far.
If I talk now quickly of my own silencesalmost presumptuous after what
has been told hereit is that the individual experience may add.
In the twenty years I bore and reared my children, usually had to work on a
paid job as well, the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.
Nevertheless writing, the hope of it, was "the air I breathed, so long as I
shall breathe at all." In that hope, there was conscious storing, snatched
reading, beginnings of writing, and always "the secret rootlets of
reconnaissance."
When the youngest of our four was in school, the beginnings struggled
toward endings. This was a time, in Kafka's words, "like a squirrel in a
cage: bliss of movement, desperation about constriction, craziness of
endurance."
Bliss of movement. A full extended family life; the world of my job
(transcriber in a diary-equipment company); and the writing, which I was
somehow able to carry around within me through work, through home.
Time on the bus, even when I had to stand, was enough; the stolen moments
at work, enough; the deep night hours for as long as I could stay awake,
after the kids were in bed, after the household tasks were done, sometimes
during. It is no accident that the first work I considered publishable began:
"I stand here ironing,
 
 Page 102

and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.''
In such snatches of time I wrote what I did in those years, but there came a
time when this triple life was no longer possible. The fifteen hours a daily
realities became too much distraction for the writing. I lost craziness of
endurance. What might have been, I don't know; but I applied for, and was
given, eight months' writing time. There was still full family life, all the
household responsibilities, but I did not have to hold an eight-hour job. I
had continuity, three full days, sometimes moreand it was in those months I
made the mysterious turn and became a writing writer.
Then had to return to the world of work, someone else's work, nine hours,
five days a week.
This was the time of festering and congestion. For a few months I was able
to shield the writing with which I was so full, against the demands of jobs
on which I had to be competent, through the joys and responsibilities and
trials of family. For a few months. Always roused by the writing, always
denied. "I could not go to write it down. It convulsed and died in me. I will
pay."
My work died. What demanded to be written, did not. It seethed, bubbled,
clamored, peopled me. At last moved into the hours meant for sleeping. I
worked now full time on temporary jobs, a Kelly, a Western Agency girl
(girl!), wandering from office to office, always hoping to manage two, three
writing months ahead. Eventually there was time.
I had said: always roused by the writing, always denied. Now, like a woman
made frigid, I had to learn response, to trust this possibility for fruition that
had not been before. Any interruption dazed and silenced me. It took a long
while of surrendering to what I was trying to write, of invoking Henry
James's "passion, piety, patience," before I was able to reestablish work.
When again I had to leave the writing, I lost consciousness. A time of
anesthesia. There was still an automatic noting that did not stop, but it was
as if writing had never been. No fever, no congestion, no festering. I ceased
being peopled, slept well and dreamlessly, took a "permanent" job. The few
pieces that had been published seemed to have vanished like
 
 Page 103

the not-yet-written. I wrote someone, unsent: ''So long they fed each
othermy life, the writing;the writing or hope of it, my life-; but now they
begin to destroy." I knew, but did not feel the destruction.
A Ford grant in literature, awarded me on nomination by others, came
almost too late. Time granted does not necessarily coincide with time that
can be most fully used, as the congested time of fullness would have been.
Still, it was two years.
Drowning is not so pitiful as the attempt to rise, says Emily Dickinson. I do
not agree, but I know whereof she speaks. For a long time I was that
emaciated survivor trembling on the beach, unable to rise and walk. Said
differently, I could manage only the feeblest, shallowest growth on that
devastated soil. Weeds, to be burned like weeds, or used as compost. When
the habits of creation were at last rewon, one book went to the publisher,
and I dared to begin my present work. It became my center, engraved on it:
"Evil is whatever distracts." (By now had begun a cost to our family life, to
my own participation in life as a human being.) I shall not tell the "rest,
residue, and remainder" of what I was "leased, demised, and let unto" when
once again I had to leave work at the flood to return to the Time-Master, to
business-ese and legalese. This most harmful of all my silences has ended,
but I am not yet recovered; may still be a one-book silence.
However that will be, we are in a time of more and more hidden and
foreground silences, women and men. Denied full writing life, more may
try to "nurse through night" (that parttime, part-self night) "the ethereal
spark," but it seems to me there would almost have had to be "flame on
flame" first; and time as needed, afterwards; and enough of the self, the
capacities, undamaged for the rebeginnings on the frightful task. I would
like to believe this for what has not yet been written into literature. But it
cannot reconcile for what is lost by unnatural silences.
1962
 
 Page 105

TILLIE OLSEN

Personal Statement
(Accompanying an Exhibition of Books and Manuscripts by
Writers from the Stanford University Creative Writing Program)

This is about sources, wellsprings, and the enabling gift of circumstances in

the eight temporal, infinite, Stanford months when I ''made the mysterious
turn and became a writing writer." And something of these accompanying
scraps, notings, mss. pages.
I did not come to our writing class that late September day in 1955 as the
others came. I was a quarter of a century older. I had had no college. I came
from that common, everyday, work, mother, eight-hour-daily job, survival
(and yes, activist) world seldom the substance of literature.
I came heavy freighted with a lifetime of ever-accumulating material, the
sense of unwritten lives which cried to be written. I came from a twenty-
year silence "when the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist. . . .
. Nevertheless there was conscious storing, snatched reading, beginnings of
writing, and always the secret rootlets of reconnaissance."
I came as stranger; of the excluded. I came as the exiled homesick come
homemy home, where literature, writers, writing had centrality, had being. I
came to Dick and Ann Scowcroft, the Mirrielees sisters, my to-be first and
dearest
From First Drafts, Last Drafts: Forty Years of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford.
Prepared by William McPheron, with the assistance of Amor Towles (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Libraries, 1989), 63-66.
 
 Page 106

writer friend, Hannah Green; to the hovering presence of Stegner (then on

leave), and to unnamed others who embodied that centralityand remain
living sustenance to this day.
I came to circumstanced time.
We met two afternoons a week in the Jones Room, around an oval, an egg-
shaped table (shape of new life in creation) encircled by walls solid with
books. A writer's library, carefully gleaned, gathered together as if to
concentrate for us, incite us to what makes our medium incomparable. The
imperishable, the good, side by side with letters, lives, journals of their
creatorsilluminating, intertwining, the ways of their begetting, the joys . . .
labor of their creation.
Encircled, bulwarked so, we practiced writing companionship: read what
we had written, listened to each other, talked writing, vivified. Or so it was
for me. Enormous had been my morningwith books and notebook in the
library, or with the Jones Room books; enormous and yielding would be my
late afternoon and evening for I would stay until the last train. When it was
possible, I rode from home (San Francisco) with my new friend, Hannah
Green, and for the first time had occasion to read aloud, hear in my ears,
sounds, rhythms, silences of the written. I read what I had long loved or just
come to love: from Verga's Little Tales of Sicily to which Hannah had
introduced me; all of Cather's ''Wagner Matinee," Glaspell's "Jury of Her
Peers," Chekhov's "Gusev," "Rothschild's Fiddle," "Ward #6"among other
treasures. And I was in a frenzy, a passion, of starved intense reading,
copying; observing, noting, putting together; reremembering; writingin this
vast strange freedom of wholly my-own time.
In those circumstanced months, in that writing air, in the comradeship of
books and writing human beings; in that freed time (for all that there was
still full family life, responsibilities)in contrast to the years it took for the
writing of "I Stand Here Ironing", the first "Hey Sailor, What Ship?"I came
to facility. I made "Hey Sailor" publishable. I wrote all of "O Yes." I began,
finished, the first third of "Tell Me a Riddle." Although I did not know it
then, I was also gathering, even writing, what would later become substance
and actual page after page of Silences ("this book was not written, it was
har-
 
 Page 107

vested'')and comprehensions, lines, paragraphs in other work accomplished

the years since.
Little remains of the makings of what came to publication. Here are
samplings of the scraps and pages that remain of the loosenings, the
wellings just as they came, the practicing of freedom which perhaps made
the facility possible; the rounding out and completion of a thought, a story
kernel, a notingwhere before could only be one word, a scrawl of line, in
thieved minutesto leave some deposit, to affirm that there still lived in me a
writer being.
1955-56. Profound earthquake years, presage yearsfor me, for my country,
for our world (therefore also for me). Forty-three years old then, born in
1912 or 1913, I had lived through such periods before, but only now had I
time to try to comprehend them, record their impress as they occurred, even
try to shape into literature. As I tried in "Oh Yes", "Tell Me a Riddle."
1955-56: Year of writing resurrection for meyet year of arterial closeness to
death and dyings of four of the human beings ineradicably dearest to me:
my mother, my father-inlaw Avrum, Seevya, and Genya (whose last days of
dying are inscribed in "Tell Me a Riddle"). All four of that great vanishing
generation whose vision, legacy of beliefin one human race, in infinite
human potentiality which never yet had had circumstances to blossom, in
the ever-recurring movement of humanity against what degrades and
maimsI tried to embed in that novella.
Year for me of overwhelming realizationdeath-occasionedof the
vulnerability and transcience and dearness of life. World year of escalating
nuclear threatand seeming defeat for the petition movement of millions the
earth over to totally disarm; only Picasso's peace dove, created as symbol
for us, seemingly remaining.
1955-56: Presage year indeed for our country. Year that began still in the
McCarthyite shadow of fear; of pervasive cynical belief that actions with
others against wrong were personally suspect, would only end in more
grievous wrong; year of proclamation that the young were a "silent
generation," future "organization men."
 
 Page 108

Caught in the press of family obligations and without the money to buy books, Olsen got into the
practice of copying quotations from library books onto 3 x 5 cards. These, she explains, ''I could
 carry with me for available moments to re-read, ponder, or learn by heart. Yes they have come
stained over the years, dog-eared, torntacked (as still they sometimes are) over sink or stove during
tasks, or over my work desk, or still habitually pulled out to re-read while on the bus or waiting
somewhere."
In addition to transcribing quotations from canonical authors, Olsen also carefully compiles
"evidence of the . . . way language
(Caption continued on next page)
 
 Page 109

Year of the Supreme Court decision against segregation ''which generates

feelings of inferiority"; of Rosa Parks, Birmingham, Little Rock. Year of the
first happenings of the freedom movements against wrong which were to
convulse and mark our nation and involve numberless individual lives.
So was burgeoned "O Yes" ("Baptism"). So was begun "Tell Me A Riddle."
(Both sourced in the years before as well.)
Other wellsprings fed:
I was again migrating from one world into anotherand in more than the
twice-a-week commute to Stanford. It had been so with me, unarticulated,
in my youthhood when I crossed the tracks to Omaha's academic high
school. It was so now with me, as it was happening in my children's lives. I
was freshly experiencing, re-experiencing that terrible agony, harm, of
having to live in a class/sex/race separating circumscribed time, when those
among whom we are born, live, work, those with whom we are most deeply
bonded, cannot journey along with us into that other world of books, of
more enabling circumstances for use, development of innate capacities.
I was living more and more, too, in the world of written language (some of
it consummately used) (though the sound of written language, spoken aloud
in class, read to Hannah, my own words spoken to myself while writing,
was coming often into my ears).
For years, for nearly a lifetime, in love, in wonder, in envy, I had noted,
kept evidence of the other consummate way language is, has been, used: the
older, more universal oral/ aural-by "ordinary" human beings denied the
written form.
(continued from previous page)
is, has been used" by America's different cultural groups. Her sensitivity to different modes of speech
is evident here on a large blue sheet that records the distinctive words and syntax of black San
Francisco diction. This material, gathered together from years of jottings, is integral to the story "O
Yes," which is set in a black Baptist church and reflects Olsen's special interest in strains of
American English which for racial and class reasons are often excluded from the written medium.
Her respect for the integrity of diverse ethnic voices signals the democracy of Olsen's art, which
celebrates diversity within its unifying vision of human community. (Exhibition Notes)
 
 Page 110

On scraps, in notes, in memory-and now, in my Stanford time, typed up,

garnered together: remarkable phrasings, expressions, song lines, wisdoms,
characterizations heard, spoken, sometimes sung, by unwritten, unwriting
others in my life.
I had circumstanced time. I had profoundest need-to encompass, make
tangible, visible (I hoped indelible) all the above. So did ''O Yes" come to
be. So was begun, and one-third finished, "Tell Me a Riddle."
Then-had to return back to that uncircumstanced world of what silences.
 
 Page 111

Critical Essays
 
 Page 113

LINDA RAY PRATT

The Circumstances
of Silence:
Literary Representation
and Tillie Olsen's
Omaha Past
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
ADRIENNE RICH,
"Diving into the Wreck"

Tillie Olsen's Silences addresses "the relationship of circumstancesincluding

class, color, sex; the times, climate into which one is bornto the creation of
literature" (xi). Olsen's primary concern is with those conditions that stop
women from writing, but implicit in her pursuit of "unnatural silences" is
the question of how situations affect what one writes. Like Virginia Woolf,
Olsen is aware of how difficult it is for a woman to achieve a "totality of
self" that can escape such circumstances as "anxieties, shamings," "the
leeching of belief," indeed, all the "punitive difference in circumstances, in
history" that damage and inhibit the capacity to write
From The Critical Response to Tillie Olsen, ed. Kay Hoyle Nelson and Nancy Huse
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), 229-243.
 
 Page 114

(Silences 263, 27). Olsen candidly discusses those things that affected her
opportunity to write, but Silences does not explore the relationship between
her circumstances and what she did write. Many readers presume a
connection exists between her fiction and her life, and Olsen has
acknowledged that her stories may be in some sense ''profoundly
autobiographical" and that as a writer she dwells in the past. Most of the
story of Olsen's past in the radical Jewish community of Omaha, Nebraska,
has not been published before.1 In a series of interviews about her Omaha
years, Olsen recalled her early life and the use she has made of it in the
fiction.2These accounts illuminate the autobiographical representation in
the work, but also significant is what she does not use. Many of the
ideological and ethnic circumstances which influenced the young Tillie
Lerner are themselves silenced in the literary form.
Olsen's long residency in San Francisco and the general absence of a
defined place in much of her work obscure the particulars of her heritage.
Readers who know her through "I Stand Here Ironing" are often unaware of
the author's Jewish background, and she rejects being categorized as a
Jewish writer. Only the couple in "Tell Me a Riddle" are Jewish, and she
has said many times that they represent a type and not her particular
parents. Few readers associate her with Nebraska and fewer still with the
Russian Jewish and socialist community in Omaha. Tillie Lerner grew up in
the immigrant working class that settled in north Omaha, a neighborhood
once populated by many Jewish businesses and now the center of the city's
Black community. The stories in Tell Me a Riddle (1961) and her novel of
Depression life, Yonnondio (1974), draw heavily on her family's life in
Omaha but usually without the specifics of a setting or ethnic culture. The
Holbrooks in Yonnondio are abstractions of the Depression's working-class
poor, and the Jewish couple in "Tell Me a Riddle" live in an unnamed city.
Yet Olsen grew up in a distinct kind of midwestern Jewish community
where "the times, climate into which one is born" composed the often harsh
"circumstances" of poverty, bias, and marginalization.
Olsen's belief that the valorizing of the individual self is patriarchal and
central to the ethics of capitalism influences her rejection of a self-oriented
autobiographical form. Her po-
 
 Page 115

litical belief in one international community of human beings limits the

emphasis she is willing to put on ethnic and regional identities. In addition
to the conscious role ideologies of politics, gender, and selfhood play in
determining form, her responses to the painful nature of her past may also
create the need for fictional abstractions and silences. In my interviews with
Olsen she frequently returned to two themes: the richness of her radical past
in a family of active socialists, and the pain and embarrassment that went
with being poor and different, even within one's own ethnic group. The
Lerner family story is, in retrospect, representative of a certain kind of
Jewish leftwing life among immigrants to the United States. Olsen
recognizes her family as a significant type of their generation, but when she
was living that life, she often felt a sense of rebellion and alienation. Yet,
the intensity of these years makes it her most important subject.
Discussing the autobiographical content of Olsen's work is difficult for her
because not writing autobiographically is ''what I'm all about" as an author
who believes in "one human race without religion." "Should a writer write
autobiography is a modern question," she says, noting that earlier authors
were not scrutinized for the elements of their life in every piece of fiction
they wrote. Yet, she characterizes her story "I Stand Here Ironing" as "close
to autobiography," "O Yes" as "profound autobiography," and "Tell Me a
Riddle" as "very, very autobiographical." "Autobiography takes many
forms," Olsen comments, and explains that often the autobiographical
elements in her stories are "probably deeper things" than the details of
experiences and places. Her novel Yonnondio has some close parallels with
her family's history, but she "was not writing an autobiographical novel"
when she composed it. "I was not writing an immigrant saga," Olsen has
commented in response to questions about the lack of ethnic or religious
identity attributed to the novel's fictional Holbrook family. The novel was
not "entirely different," however, and "a large part of it was what was in the
neighborhood." Two questions I hope to examine are 1) what is the
autobiographical experience out of which the author builds this fictional
world? and 2) what does it mean for the literature that much of that
experience is silenced in the fictional representation?3
 
 Page 116

I
Midwestern urban Jewish communities such as the one in Omaha were
smaller than their East Coast counterparts and increasingly remote from
involvement with radical politics and the labor movement. The socialist
beliefs which many Eastern European Jews such as Olsen's parents brought
to the Great Plains were perhaps more susceptible to the pressure of
acculturation and assimilation in an environment such as Omaha where a
tradition of conservative politics, agrarian economics, and a largely
homogeneous white Western European population dominated. Though
many other Omaha Jews share the same Russian socialist background, the
Omaha Jewish community developed westward out of the urban center of
the city and into the suburban middle class. This migration out of the urban
neighborhoods and up the economic ladder was already underway in the
late 1920s when Tillie Lerner was a student at Omaha's Central High.
Working-class socialists such as the Lerners were separated by ideology
from the mainstream of the local Jewish community. Socialist Jews often
had different economic attitudes and did not participate in the religious life
around the synagogues. Radical Jews often rejected religion, and Olsen has
described her father as ''incorruptibly atheist to the last day of his life"
(Rubin 3). Within a Jewish community already smaller and more isolated
than those in large urban centers, Olsen's place was further marginalized
when she broke with her family's socialism to become a communist. Olsen
tried not to embarrass her family with her communism, and she sometimes
used aliases in her political work. In school she was aware of painful class
differences compounded by being Jewish, working class, immigrant, poor,
and female. Tillie Lerner's Omaha background of estrangement and
alienation was a painful contradiction to her family's dream of an
international society in which the comradeship of humanity transcended the
divisions of race, ethnicity, and religion.
Olsen's parents came to the United States at a time when efforts were
underway to relocate Jewish immigrants outside the urban areas of the East
Coast. Samuel and Ida Lerner had met in Russia but did not begin their
family until
 
 Page 117

they settled on a farm near Mead, Nebraska. Samuel was from Odessa; Ida
from Minsk. The family memory is that they had first met in Minsk where
Samuel had gone to work for the Bund, the Jewish socialist movement
organized in Russia in 1897 and devoted to secular Yiddish culture and
internationalism.4After the failure of the 1905 Revolution in which they had
participated, they fled Russian prisons and met again in New York. After
working at least through 1907 with the Socialist Party in New York, Samuel
made his way to Omaha where other socialist Jews from Minsk and Odessa
had already settled.5
The family history before 1918 is unclear. For a time the Lerners were
tenant farmers in the Mead, Nebraska, area, but Olsen reports that at least
one year was spent in Colorado where her father worked in the
mines.6Olsen remembers that in Mead the children were harassed on their
way to school because her father opposed the war and wouldn't buy bonds.
Yonnondio draws on memories of the farm and mining years. The novel
begins in a mining community in Wyoming, but the family moves on to
South Dakota where they fail at farming and from there to a packing house
city like Omaha. Unlike Anna in the novel, Olsen's mother spoke little
English and was isolated in the rural community. The farm years were
''terrible for my mother," Olsen said. Her father "loved being on the land,"
but her mother "had a hunger for a larger life" and desired to leave it. After
the move to Omaha Ida Lerner studied English in one of the many night
classes that schools such as Kellom Elementary ran for immigrants. Some
passages from an exercise her mother wrote in 1924 as part of her English
class assignment suggest Ida's own sense of social values, maternal
responsibility, and literary bent. The essay, dated December 10, 1924, and
addressed to "Dear Teacher" reads in part:
I am glad to study with ardor but the children wont let me, they go to bed late so it makes me
tired, and I cant do my lessons. It is after ten o'clock my head dont work it likes to have rest.
But I am in a sad mood I am sitting in the warm house and feel painfull that winter claps in to
my heart. I see the old destroyed houses of the people from the old country. I
 
 Page 118

hear the wind blow through them with the disgusting cry why the poor creatures ignore him,
dont protest against him, that souless wind dont no, that they are helples have no material to
repair the houses and no clothes to cover up their bodies, and so the sharp wind echo cry falls
on the window, and the windows original sing with silver-ball tears seeing all the poor
shivering creatures dressed in rags with frozen fingers and feverish hungry eyes.

Ida Lerner closes this essay with sentiments that begin, ''So as a human
being who carries responsibility for action I think as a duty to the
community we shall try to understand each other." The character of Eva in
"Tell Me a Riddle" echoes many of these sentiments, and she also shares the
same sense of opportunities curtailed by the burdens of childcare. Olsen
used a phrase from her mother's essay in "Tell Me a Riddle" where Eva's
fragmented ruminations include the words, "As a human being
responsibility."
The family probably moved to Omaha no later than 1917. Olsen believes
that they initially settled in South Omaha, the meat packing area of the city,
but the first record of their Omaha residence is at 2512 Caldwell, the
family's permanent home in North Omaha (Omaha City Directory, 1918).
North Omaha was the section where Omaha's Jews clustered in the first two
decades of the century. South Omaha, the center of the meat packing
industry, was directly connected by 24th Street to the North Omaha area
where the Lerners lived. Both areas were populated by ethnic and minority
groups that migrated to the city to work in packing. Though not themselves
in meat packing, the Lerners lived among packing house workers in a
period of intense labor unrest in the industry.
In 1918 Samuel Lerner's occupation was listed in the City Directory as
peddler. In 1920-23 Olsen's father worked at the Silver Star Confectionery
at 1604 North 24th Street, one of many small Jewish businesses in the area
at that time. Olsen's memory of shelling almonds for the candies her father
made appears in some discarded pages of the Yonnondio manuscript where
it became Mazie's experience. An unpublished fragment of the manuscript
reads as follows:
 
 Page 119

And then Mazie had a ''job" for two weeks. Annamae told her about it, for just shelling
almonds two blocks away she could get a quarter a day. Bitterly Anna ordered Mazie not to
think about it, but then thought of Monday and the insurance man, and the 60¢ made her say
yes. It wont hurt the kid, Jim had insisted. So Mazie sat at a high table in a top room filled
with steam from the boiling nuts and the oil, her hands in hot water, peeling the almonds.
Snap, snap, her fingers seemed independent of her body, red little animals snapping at brown
skin.

After the confectionery failed, Sam Lerner worked as a painter and paper
hanger.7
As socialist Jews, the Lerners built their lives around political circles
instead of the synagogue. Sam was active in his union, and both Sam and
Ida were active in Workmen's Circles, a national Jewish socialist
organization with several chapters in Omaha. The Lerners were founding
members of the Omaha Workmen's Circle, Branch 626, in 1920, and also
helped found branches in Sioux City, Lincoln, and Des Moines. The
Workmen's Circles served as political, social, and cultural centers for Jews
whose socialist views and lack of traditional religious beliefs placed them
outside the religious community. The Circles provided such traditional
services of fraternal organizations as insurance policies, burial benefits, and
retirement homes.
As part of the Workmen's Circles the Lerners helped to build Omaha's first
Labor Lyceum at 22nd and Clark Streets. After the original labor lyceum
was sold for public housing in the 1930s, Olsen's parents helped to build a
new Labor Lyceum in 1940 at 31st and Cuming Street. No longer
encompassed by small children, Ida Lerner was apparently active in this
period, and some Omaha Jews recall her participation in Workmen's Circle
activities. Both Sam and Ida spoke at the dedication ceremonies of the new
Labor Lyceum which became the center for the district conferences of the
Workmen's Circle. Sam Lerner was a president of the Midwest District
Committee.
The family's socialist activities were often in support of the labor struggles
in the packing houses. Olsen recalls the
 
 Page 120

impact of the packing house strike of 1921-22 on her family, especially her
father.8By the 1920's the Socialist Party in the midwest had lost most of the
members it had before World War I, but Olsen's father continued to be
active.9He was secretary of the Nebraska Socialist Party and in 1928 was
the party's candidate for lieutenant governor of the state. Family life was
centered around party activities. On Sundays the children attended the
socialist Sunday School and sang of the worker's struggles from the
Socialist Sunday School Song Book. Their house was a stopping point for
prominent socialists, Wobblies, and others on the Left who were traveling
through Omaha.
Olsen's memories of her high school years are a mixture of the pleasures of
discovering literature and the pain of recognizing her own marginalization.
She had both teachers whom she credits with ''saving" her and teachers that
taught her painful lessons in class differences. Despite her socialist home,
Olsen has said that she "didn't really learn about class until I 'crossed the
tracks' to Central High School."10 At Central, the best high school in the
state, the curriculum was "college prep" and some of the students were from
prominent and wealthy families in Omaha. As children of working-class
Jewish immigrants, the Lerners were, she says, "aliens in that school."
Olsen remembers the striking contrasts in dress and ways, and that most
students carried clean pocket handkerchiefs while the Lerner children had
to make do with clean rags. "There were those things that were class
differences that I had never encountered first hand," she recalls.
Olsen singled out two teachers who had a strong influence on herSara Vore
Taylor who taught English and Autumn Davies who taught Civics. Taylor
introduced her to Coleridge, De Quincey, and Sir Thomas Browne. "I still
have her old stylebook," Olsen says. Taylor was also interested in recent
poetry and urged students to go hear Carl Sandburg when he was in Omaha.
Davies was "interested in my mind" and wanted Olsen to go to college.
Despite occasional trouble with a few teachers because she would not
silence her unorthodox and questioning mind, Tillie was praised for the
humor column "Central Squeaks" which she wrote in the high school paper
under the name "Tillie the Toiler." After the 1934 publication of "The Iron
Throat" in Partisan Review, the Central
 
 Page 121

High Register published an article on her literary success just six years after
graduation. The paper notes that the column ''Squeaks" "as run by Tillie was
entirely natural and unhampered by rule." The article also noted her recent
arrest "at the home of Communist friends" in California and that she was
awaiting trial.
Although some of her teachers encouraged her mind, Olsen also recalls the
anti-Semitism of others. The difficulty of her position as a Jew was perhaps
compounded by also being part of a known radical family and by her own
occasionally disruptive classroom behavior. A letter to her in 1934 from her
brother Gene gives us an insight into the anti-Semitic climate she found at
school. The occasion of the letter from Gene was her arrest in California. At
the time of the incident she was receiving her first serious attention as a
writer after the publication of "The Iron Throat." Gene's letter expresses his
concern that her arrest might make the Omaha papers and give the "anti-
semites" a "chance to say 'see what happens to the revolutionary Jew."' He
urges her to think what it would mean to succeed as a writer and imagines a
moment of vindication: "It would be the greatest happiness of my life to go
to [name of teacher] and throw the book on her desk and say 'look what the
revolutionary Jew has done now."' These sentiments strongly suggest the
discrimination the Lerner children felt in school and the desire to prove
themselves worthy of their heritage.11 It also suggests the pressure to
vindicate her family through her success as a writer, a need that may enter
into Olsen's hesitation in publishing and her silencing of details that would
reveal her family to be a major subject.
Olsen's "Tell Me a Riddle" mirrors the Russian Jewish political and
intellectual values that Olsen learned at home. "There has been a real
eclipsing of the beliefs of Jews of this generation," she has observed, but
they were people who saw their lives as committed to the liberation of an
international human community. Some members of the Omaha Jewish
community characterized the Russian socialist Jews as "a kind of
intelligentsia," but as the community changed, those Jews who remained
socialist and communist were less influential and less visible to the broader
community.
Olsen broke with the family's socialism when she
 
 Page 122

joined the Young Communist League in 1931, a decision her parents could
not approve. Although her parents were not happy with her decision, she
says her decision to join the YCL ''was not a rebellion against my home.
My decision to join the YCL was rooted absolutely out of the beliefs in our
house." Her break with her parents' views paralleled in many ways the splits
taking place in the Socialist Party during the early days of the American
Communist Party.12 The decline of the Socialist Party after World War I
may have contributed to the younger generation's interest in communism.
From the early 1920s communists and communist laborites had groups in
Omaha, and some former socialists had aligned themselves with them (W.
Pratt, "Socialism on the Northern Plains" 2729). Tillie's case was not unlike
that of others whose parents had been socialists in the 1900-1919 period but
the children grew up to be communists in the 1924-1939 period. Despite the
unhappiness of her family at her decision, Olsen recalls her father saying to
her mother, "Well, she didn't join the capitalist class." "My mother would
have said, 'Never join the floggers against the flogged.' She always taught
us that."
Because her family, well known as socialists in the community, disapproved
of her communist affiliation, Olsen sometimes used aliases in her political
work. The front page story of the Feb. 6, 1932 Omaha Bee-News features
photographs of a "peaceful and small" crowd of about 100 members of the
Omaha Council of the Unemployed marching to present their demands to
Acting Mayor Arthur Westergard. Tillie Olsen identified herself as the
woman speaker in one of the pictures under the name of "Theta Larimore,
2023 Burt Street," who is quoted as "shouting" "What becomes of the
women who lose their jobs? Save their respectability." In 1934 when she
was arrested in California she apparently used the name "Teresa Landale."
After joining the YCL she worked in packing houses and factories in
Kansas City and St. Joseph, Missouri. In Kansas City she was arrested for
leafleting and jailed for five months. After she was released she returned to
Omaha to recover her health, but by late 1932 Tillie Lerner left Omaha, first
to Faribault, Minnesota, where she began writing Yonnondio, and then to
California where she lives today.
The Lerner family history in Omaha ends in the late
 
 Page 123

1940s except for one sister who lived in Omaha until the 1980s. In the
housing shortage after World War II Sam and Ida Lerner sold their home on
Caldwell Street and moved to the Washington, D.C., area where Tillie's
brother Harry lives. Tillie's mother died in January 1956, and her father died
in a Workmen's Circle retirement home in Media, Pennsylvania, in
February 1974.

II
The details of Olsen's family life and the identifying of incidents and
characters that appear in her fiction give us an insight to how the work is
autobiographical. Two points stand out: the extensive degree to which the
work draws on family experience, and the centrality of the early period of
her life to her fictional imagination. Yonnondio sets a pattern that reappears
throughout much of her work. Here the plot recasts experiences of her own
family, the mother and child characters reflecting memories of her mother
and herself, but the family as a whole is generalized to represent a type.
Olsen commented that she identified with Mazie but that Mazie was ''not a
reader" and Tillie was. Mazie was also not "freaky in the same sense that I
was freaky." Mazie's response to the evening star and her school were the
kinds of "deeper things" about the character that were autobiographical.
Olsen's comment suggests that specific traits of Mazie were different but
that Mazie's emotional responses are the "deeper" autobiographical part. Yet
specific personal experiences and persons from her youth also appear in the
novel. Mr. Caldwell, the farmer in the novel who wants to give the child
some books, was, according to Olsen, mainly based on Dr. Alfred Jefferson,
one of several socialists the family knew. Jefferson was a physician who
"loved talking to my mother and was good to me. He was interested that we
read." The character of Jeff, "the little Negro boy" who hears a humming in
his head "that would blend into music" (Yonnondio 91), was based on Jeff
Crawford, the son of Suris and Mattie Crawford, the Black family who
were neighbors to the Lerners on Caldwell Street, and whose daughter, Joe
Eva, was Tillie's close girlhood friend. According to the City Directory,
Suris Crawford worked as a
 
 Page 124

butcher at Armours. The story ''O Yes" in Tell Me a Riddle also reflects the
friendship between the two families.
Olsen's memory of the city in Yonnondio is that she merged details from
Omaha, Kansas City, and St. Joseph, all places where she worked briefly in
meat packing. The details of the city, unnamed in the novel except that the
father says the family may "go to Omahaget on at the slaughterhouse,"
closely parallel the geography of South Omaha. Like the unnamed city in
the novel, Omaha lies just west of the Missouri River on a series of bluffs
with the packing plants in a shallow valley. The viaduct in the novel which
the workers cross going to the packinghouse is like the Q Street viaduct
which connects the ethnic neighborhoods on the bluffs to the packing
houses and stock yards in the valley. The Armours plant is described in the
novel as "way down, like a hog, a great hulk of a building wallowed.
ARMOURS gray letters shrieked" (85). Photographs of the Omaha area
from the 1930s and 1940s show a massive packing house in the center of
the district with "Armours" spelled in large letters across the wall. In
Yonnondio "the children can lie on their bellies near the edge of the cliff and
watch the trains and freights, the glittering railroad tracks, the broken
bottles dumped below, the rubbish moving on the littered belly of the river"
(61-62). The bluffs on the eastern edge of Omaha overlook the river, and a
railroad track runs beside the river. Though the old meat packing district in
Kansas City also was near the river, the placement of bluffs, factories, and
streets in the novel all fit the topography of Omaha. Olsen's fictional intent
seems to be that the Holbrooks and the city where they live function
generically, but the mass of detail in the family history and the setting
suggests that the fictional representation is also specific. The fictionalizing
obliterates the ethnic, regional, and political details that would locate the
story in a more defined historical context.
The story "O Yes" also draws on Olsen's childhood friendship with the
Black child next door, but here she combines it with similar incidents in the
lives of her own children. The story tells of two twelve-year-old girls, one
white and one Black, whose friendship dissolves when they reach the age at
which race and class consciousness begin to divide school
 
 Page 125

children. Olsen says that ''the story is fiction, but it is rooted in the real."
The names of popular musicians date the story from her children's youth,
but the memories of the Black church come from Olsen's own girlhood. In
the story the white child is shocked at the intensity of the emotion in the
Black church. "That sound and the church" in Olsen's mind were Calvary
Baptist Church, located in Omaha at 25th and Hamilton Streets between
1901-1923, where she sometimes went to hear the music on summer nights.
She used this material as the recitation in Alva's mind in the story. The
Black church, she remembers, was "a certain kind of community where you
could let things out."
Olsen has repeatedly stated that Eva and David in "Tell Me a Riddle" are
not specifically her parents, but the history of Sam and Ida Lerner, socialists
from Russia in 1905, parents of six children, active in the union, selling
their house and retiring to a Workmen's Circle home, suggests how deeply
rooted this story is in the lives of her parents. Many other Russian Jews of
their generation came to the United States after the 1905 Revolution, but
numerous details specific to her family fit the fictional characters. David
and Eva have been married forty-seven years, and in 1956 when Olsen's
mother died, her parents, who apparently had been united in Nebraska
sometime between 1908 and 1910, had been together approximately forty-
seven years. David and Eva have six living children, as did the Lerners.
Like Sam Lerner, David was "an official" who had helped organize and run
the Workmen's Circles. At one point when David is trying to convince Eva
to sell the house, he tells her about the reading circles in the retirement
home, and she says, "And forty years ago when the children were morsels
and there was a Circle, did you stay home with them once so I could go?,"
an apparent reference to the Workman's Circle. Some of Eva's words are
Olsen's mother's, as we have seen in the essay written by Ida. Olsen told me
that the episode in Yonnondio in which Anna takes time from her laundry to
teach her children how to blow bubbles with a green onion is based on a
memory of her mother. This memory reappears in "Tell Me a Riddle" when
Vivi recalls how Eva, also while washing clothes, taught her how to blow
bubbles:
 
 Page 126

Washing sweaters: Ma, I'll never forget, one of those days so nice you washed clothes
outside; one of the first spring days it must have been. The bubbles just danced while you
scrubbed, and we chased after, and you stopped to show us how to blow our own bubbles
with green onion stalks.

Looking at the text from the background of Olsen's Omaha life suggests
that family and personal experiences are the crucial ground of her fiction.
Yet much of the ethnic and radical past that she remembers so vividly and
emotionally in interviews is distanced or dropped in the fiction. In
Yonnondio the ''unlimn'd" who "disappear" and fade from "the cities, farms,
factories" fade within the novel whose epigram promises to recall them. As
abstractions of the Depression poor, the Holbrooks lack history, community,
and beliefs, all of which were integral to the way of life among packing
town families. "Tell Me a Riddle" reflects the Russian past before David
and Eva's immigration but does not reflect the fifty years of ongoing
political commitment in her parents' lives. Like the Holbrooks, David and
Eva stand for a type within a generation but just what "type" can never be
clear when characters lose so much context. These characters dramatize the
pathos of lives constrained by poverty, of women whose energies are
depleted by child care and housework, but the rich texture of a place, a
heritage, and active beliefs that have historically given substance to
immigrant culture, including the Lerner family of Omaha, are largely
absent.

III
Olsen's decision to create characters who represent in the abstract the
experiences of many fulfills her ideological and artistic principles, but her
writing is most powerful when it escapes the generic and becomes
culturally specific. The brilliant clarity given David and Eva's Jewish
language and the poignancy of the lost youth in Russia contrast sharply
with the featureless pathos of the Holbrooks. The closer Olsen writes to
autobiography, the finer her work, as the weaknesses in "Requa" may also
illustrate. The autobiographical background also suggests that family life is
her essential subject. Para-
 
 Page 127

doxically, however, her art often silences much of the richness in her
imaginative sources. If the early years appear to be a major touchstone for
her imagination, her often painful recollections in the interviews suggest
that Omaha is where the silencing began. In those early years Olsen learned
the lessons of discrimination on the basis of class, ethnicity, and gender.
Olsen remembers both the strength she found in a socialist home and the
marginalization she felt as a poor Jew who was also radical, female, and
literary. Her tentative place in the wider community was underscored when
her decision to join the Communist Party created anger and embarrassment
at home. Those ''circumstances" described in Silences that "blight" and
damage the young woman writer match those she felt "in the vulnerable girl
years" growing up in Omaha. Silences gives us "the barest of indications as
to vulnerabilities, balks, blights; reasons for lessenings and silencings" that
affect the young woman who hopes to write:
Anxieties, shamings. "Hidden injuries of class." Prevailing attitudes toward our people as
"lower class," "losers," (they just didn't have it); contempt for their lives and the work they
do .... the blood struggle for means: . . . . classeconomic circumstance; problems of being in
the first generation of one's family to come to writing (263-64).

If these are the circumstances that silence creativity, it may also follow that
the artist may wish to silence the silencers, may, indeed, have to silence
them in order to write at all. When I asked about the power the past holds
for her, Olsen said, "I certainly still dwell in that world in my writing."
Like Adrienne Rich's speaker, Olsen's stories "circle silently/about the
wreck" amid "the evidence of damage," "back to this scene" (Rich 24). The
self that speaks, the artist in the woman, must counter that which silences.
The particular eloquence of Olsen's work is in her portraits of women who
survive with enough intact to be themselves in a world that does not open
for them. In "I Stand Here Ironing" the mother explains what she did and
could not do to protect her vulnerable daughter, Emily, a sensitive and
artistic child "of depression, of war, of fear." Though the past "will never
total," the mother
 
 Page 128

believes that in Emily ''there is still enough left to live by" (Riddle 20-21).
Perhaps this story can be seen as a metaphor for Olsen's own mothering of
her artistic self, one without the "totality of self" that may exist where the
past was full of love and wisdom, but one with "enough left" to build on
what was strong and spoke of survival. And like the young Omaha woman
who used aliases
when she did her communist work, Olsen's fiction functions like an alias,
too. Names are changed and events reformed, sometimes to universalize the
specific; sometimes to protect herself and her family from the scrutiny that
accompanies overt autobiography; and sometimes, perhaps, to distance the
anguish of being marginalized by the surrounding world. The pain of being
viewed as a radical in one's own ethnic community, as a troublesome Jew at
school, and as a disappointment in one's own family may well leave one
haunted by the past but unable to embrace it, remembering all the places
and faces, and yet unwilling to speak their names.

Notes
1. Deborah Rosenfelt's "From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and Radical
Tradition" examines her radical past after Olsen had moved to California.
2. Personal interview December 30, 1990. This essay is based largely on a
set of interviews and correspondence that began in the fall of 1987 and
continued through 1991. In addition to telephone interviews, the two
longest of which occurred on February 13, 1988, and Dec. 30, 1990, Olsen
provided a number of newspaper clippings, family letters, manuscript
fragments, and miscellaneous documents from her past. I wish to express
my gratitude to Olsen for her generosity in sharing her memories and
allowing me to use these materials. An earlier sketch of the Lerner family
was published locally as "Tillie Olsen's Omaha Heritage: A History
Becomes Literature" in Memories of the Jewish Midwest: Journal of the
Nebraska Jewish Historical Society (Fall 1989), 1-16.
3. Most of the criticism on autobiographical novels defines the genre from
male-centered works such as David Copperfield. More useful to me were
works on women's autobiography, especially
 
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Sidonie Smith's A Poetics of Women's Autobiography, and the essays in

Shari Benstock's The Private Self and Estelle C. Jelinek's Women's
Autobiography.
4. Olsen has discussed her understanding of the Bund and ''what I feel is my
Yiddishkeit, my Jewish heritage" in the interview article by Rubin. See also
Howe, World of Our Fathers, 17.
5. Carol Gendler's M.A. thesis, "The Jews of Omaha," University of
Nebraska-Omaha (1986), is the most extensive local history. See also Our
Story: Recollections of Omaha's Early Jewish Community 1885-1925, eds.
Jonathan Rosenbaum and Patricia O'Conner-Seger, with Carol Gendler, for
personal accounts, including several of immigrants from Minsk and Odessa.
6. All six of the Lerner children were born in Nebraska and attended
Omaha's Central High. The first four (Tillie was the second in order) were
apparently born on the farm, the last two in Omaha, though Tillie remains
uncertain exactly where and when she was born. Previously published
accounts that give a specific date, usually January 14, 1913, are inaccurate,
according to Olsen, who unsuccessfully researched her birth date a few
years ago when she applied for a passport.
7. The City Directory lists his occupation as "painter" beginning in 1925.
8. The strike was part of a nationwide effort that ended in the breakup of the
union in South Omaha. For details, see William C. Pratt, "'Union Maids' in
Omaha Labor History, 1887-1945."
9. See William C. Pratt, "Socialism on the Northern Plains, 1900-1924," for
a detailed account of the Party at this time.
10. Zelenka, n.p. In Silences Olsen calls Central High her "first College-of-
Contrast" (vii).
11. Another brother, Harry, was active in the Workmen's Circle. In 1940 he
was Secretary of the Omaha Workmen's Circle, Branch 690E, and wrote an
editorial for the Labor Lyceum Journal honoring the dedication of the new
Labor Lyceum. The editorial is entitled, "Shall Youth Be Away?" and urges
his generation to join the Workmen's Circles and learn to appreciate what it
had meant to the parents. I wish to thank Mrs. Morris Fellman of Omaha for
making this booklet available to me.
12. Minnesota author Meridel Le Sueur is another case of children of well
known socialist parents who joined the Communist Party in the 1920's.
Both Le Sueur and "Tillie Lerner" signed
 
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the ''Call for an American Writers' Congress" in 1935. See Linda Ray Pratt,
"Woman Writer in the CP," for details of Le Sueur's CP involvement.

Works Cited
Benstock, Shari, ed. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's
Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. 1988.
Gendler, Carol. "The Jews of Omaha." University of Nebraska-Omaha,
1968.
Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976.
Jelinek, Estelle C., ed. Women's Autobiography. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1980.
Olsen, Tillie. Silences. New York. Delacorte Press, 1978.
_____. Tell Me a Riddle. New York: Dell, 1961.
_____.Yonnondio: From the Thirties. New York: Dell, 1974.
Pratt, Linda Ray. "Tillie Olsen's Omaha Heritage: A History Becomes
Literature." Memories of the Jewish Midwest: A Journal of the Nebraska
Jewish Historical Society (Fall 1989): 1-16.
_____. "Woman Writer in the CP: The Case of Meridel Le Sueur." Women's
Studies 14 (1988): 247-64.
Pratt, William C. "Socialism on the Northern Plains, 1900-1924." South
Dakota History. 18 (Summer 1988): 1-35.
_____. "'Union Maids' in Omaha Labor History, 1887-1945." In
Perspectives: Women in Nebraska History. Lincoln: Nebraska Department
of Education and Nebraska State Council for the Social Studies, 1984, 202-
03.
Rich, Adrienne, Diving into the Wreck. New York: Norton, 1973.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan, and Patricia O'Conner-Seger, eds., with Carol
Gendler. Our Story: Recollections of Omaha's Early Jewish Community
1885-1925, Omaha Section of the National Council of Jewish Women,
1981.
Rosenfelt, Deborah. "From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and Radical Tradition."
Feminist Studies 7 (Fall 1981): 371-406.
Rubin, Naomi. "A Riddle of History for the Future." Sojourner (June 1983):
3-4, 18.
 
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Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the

Fictions of Self Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987.
Zelenka, Julia. ''Old Neighborhood Stays With Her." Omaha World Herald.
August 5, 1980.
 
 Page 133

DEBORAH SILVERTON ROSENFELT

From the Thirties:

Tillie Olsen and
the Radical Tradition
This paper focuses on Tillie Olsen's experience as a woman, a writer, and an
activist in the Old Left of the 1930s. It grew out of my view of Olsen's life
and art as an important link between that earlier radical tradition and
contemporary feminist culture. This perspective, of course, is only one lens
through which to look at her life and art, magnifying certain details and
diminishing others. In dwelling on Olsen's political activities and in placing
her work in the context of a ''socialist feminist" literary tradition, I have, as
Olsen herself has pointed out to me, given insufficient weight to two poles
of her life and art. On the one hand, there was the dailiness of her life,
characterized most of the time less by political activism or participation in
the leftist literary milieu than by the day-to-day struggles of a first-
generation, working-class mother simply to raise and support a familythe
kind of silencing that takes priority in all of her own writings. On the other
hand, there was her sense of affinity as an artist with traditions of American
and world literature that lie outside the "socialist feminist" literary tradition
as I have defined it.
The latter point, especially, needs clarification. Obviously, literary traditions
are not demarcated by clear boundaries. Some works of literature, by virtue
of their art and scope, transcend the immediate filiations of their authors to
become
From Feminist Studies 7, no. 3 (Fall 1981): 371-406.
 
 Page 134

part of a ''great tradition" of their ownnot in an idealistic sense, but as

models which inspire and challenge later writers, regardless of their
political commitments. Olsen's work is part of this "great tradition," both in
its sources and in its craft. Then too, in some eras of intense political
activity, such as the thirties or the sixties, writers whose essential concerns
are not explicitly political or whose work takes other directions when the
era has ended may be temporarily drawn into a leftist political milieu. Edna
St. Vincent Millay, Katherine Anne Porter, Mary McCarthy, and Dorothy
Parker were among the women writers associated, in the thirties, with the
Left; in our own era, writers like Adrienne Rich and Susan Griffinclose to
Olsen both as friends and as artistsinitially shared connections and visions
with the New Left, subsequently articulating values and world views partly
in opposition to it.
Yet the definition of a "socialist feminist" tradition is, I think, legitimate and
useful, for it does identify writers who, like Olsen, shared a certain kind of
consciousness, an engagement with the political issues of their day, and an
involvement in a progressive political and cultural movement. It also
enables us to examine the connections between the radical cultural
traditions of the past and those our own era is creating, questioning that
earlier heritage when necessary, but acknowledging also the extent to which
we as contemporary feminists are its heirs.1
I could not have written this paper without Tillie Olsen's assistance,
although its emphasis, its structure, and any errors in fact and interpretation
are my responsibility. Over the past two years, Olsen has granted me access
to some of her personal papersjournals, letters, and unpublished
manuscripts. Both she and her husband, Jack Olsen, have been generous in
sharing their recollections of life in the thirties. In fall 1980, Olsen
responded with a detailed critique to an earlier version of this paper.2Some
of her comments called for a simple correction of factual inaccuracies;
some questioned my interpretations of her experience. The paper in its
present form incorporated many, although not all, of her suggestions for
revision.
This paper, then, is part of an ongoing dialogue about issues that matter
very much to both Tillie Olsen and myself:
 
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the relationship of writing to political commitment: the ''circumstances"a

favorite Olsen wordof class and sex and their effect on sustained creative
activity, literary or political; and the strengths and weaknesses of the radical
cultural tradition in this country.
· · ·
Tillie Olsen's fiction and essays have been widely acknowledged as major
contributions to American literature and criticism. Her work has been
particularly valued by contemporary feminists, for it has contributed
significantly to the task of reclaiming women's achievements and
interpreting their lives. In 1961, she published the collection of four stories,
Tell Me a Riddle (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott), each story focusing on the
relationships between family members or friends; each revealing the
injuries inflicted by poverty, racism, and the patriarchal order; each
celebrating the endurance of human love and will. In 1974, she published
Yonnondio: From the Thirties (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour
Lawrence), the first section of a novel about a working-class family, told
mostly from the point of view of the daughter, Mazie. Begun in the thirties,
then put away, this novel was finally revised forty years later "in arduous
partnership" with "that long ago young writer."3 In 1978, she published her
collected essays in Silences (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour
Lawrence), a sustained prose poem about the silences that befall writers and
those who would be writersespecially, although not exclusively, women;
especially, although not exclusively those who must also struggle for sheer
survival. In addition to being a gifted writer and critic, Olsen is also a
teacher who has helped to democratize the literary canon by calling
attention to the works of Third World writers, working-class writers, and
women.
Olsen's importance to contemporary women who read and write or who
write about literature is widely acknowledged. Yet although her work has
been vital for feminists today, and although one article does discuss her
background in some depth,4 few of Olsen's contemporary admirers realize
the extent to which her consciousness, vision, and choice of sub-
 
 Page 136

ject are rooted in an earlier heritage of social strugglethe communist Old

Left of the thirties and the tradition of radical political thought and action,
mostly socialist and anarchist, that dominated the Left in the teens and
twenties. Not that we can explain the eloquence of her work in terms of its
sociopolitical origins, not even that left-wing politics and culture were the
single most important influences on it, but that its informing consciousness,
its profound understanding of class and sex and race as shaping influences
on people's lives, owes much to that earlier tradition. Olsen's work, in fact,
may be seen as part of a literary lineage so far unacknowledged by most
contemporary critics: a socialist feminist literary tradition.
Critics such as Ellen Moers and Elaine Showalter have identified a literary
tradition of women writers who read one another's work, corresponded with
one another about everything from domestic irritations to the major issues
of the day, and looked to one another for strength, encouragement, and
insight.5Literary historians like Walter Rideout and Daniel Aaron have
traced the outlines of a radical literary tradition in America, composed of
two waves of twentieth-century writers influenced by socialism in the early
years, by communism in the thirties, who had in common ''an attempt to
express a predominantly Marxist view toward society."6At the intersections
of these larger traditions is a line of women writers, associated with the
American Left, who unite a class consciousness and a feminist
consciousness in their lives and creative work, who are concerned with the
material circumstances of people's lives, who articulate the experiences and
grievances of women and of other oppressed groupsworkers, national
minorities, the colonized and the exploitedand who speak out of a defining
commitment to social change.
In fiction this tradition extends from turn of the century socialists like
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Vida Scudder, and Susan Glaspell, through such
thirties Old Left women as Meridel Le Sueur, Tess Slesinger, Josephine
Herbst, Grace Lumpkin, and Ruth McKenney, to contemporary writers with
early ties to the civil rights and antiwar movements and the New Left:
Marge Piercy, Grace Paley, Alice Walker, and others. Although the specific
political affiliations of these writers
 
 Page 137

have varied from era to era and from individual to individual, the questions
they raise have been surprisingly consistent. These range from basic
questions about how to survive economically to more complex ones, such
as how to understand the connections and contradictions between women's
struggles and those struggles based on other categories and issues, or how
to find a measure of emotional and sexual fulfillment in a world where
egalitarian relationships are more ideal than real. Sometimes as in Gilman's
Herland, published serially in The Forerunner in the midteens, or Piercy's
Woman on the Edge of Time, these writers try to imagine socialist feminist
utopias. More often, as with the women writers associated with the Left,
especially the Communist party, in the 1930s, their work constitutes a sharp
critique of the present. Sometimes, as in Agnes Smedley's Daughter of
Earth, Slesinger's The Unpossessed, Piercy's Small Changes, much of Alice
Walker's fiction, and, implicitly Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle, that critique
includes a sharp look from a woman's point of view at the sexual politics of
daily life in the political milieus with which these authors were associated.
Olsen's relationship to her political milieu in the 1930s most concerns me
here, for this paper is not so much a literary analysis of Olsen's work as it is
a study of her experience in the Left in the years when she first began to
write for publication. I will first give a brief overview of Olsen's
background and life in those years, focusing on the roots of both her
political commitment and her creative work, and then identify a series of
central contradictions inherent in her experience. In thus imposing a
paradigmatic order on Olsen's individual experience, I have tried, not
always successfully, to maintain a balance between fidelity to the
idiosyncracies of the individual life and the identification of patterns
applicable to the experience of other women artists in leftist movements
then and now.
Tillie Olsen's parents, Samuel and Ida Lerner, were involved in the 1905
revolution in Russia, fleeing to the United States when it failed and settling
in Nebraska. Her father, in addition to working at a variety of jobs,
including farming, paperhanging, and packing house work, became state
secretary of the
 
 Page 138

Nebraska Socialist Party, running in the midtwenties as the socialist

candidate for the state representative from his district. Tillie Lerner, second
oldest of six children in this depression-poor family, dropped out of high
school in Omaha after the eleventh grade to go to workalthough, as she is
careful to remind people who today take their degrees for granted, this
means that she went further in school than most of the women of her
generation. Given the radical political climate of her home, it is not
surprising that she too would have become active, first writing skits and
musicals for the Young People's Socialist League, and subsequently, at
seventeen, joining the Young Communist League (YCL), the youth
organization of the Communist party. During most of her mid and late
teens, she worked at a variety of jobs, took increasing responsibility as a
political organizer, and continued to lead an ardent inner literary and
intellectual life, in spite of the interruption of her formal schooling. In the
draft of a letter to Philip Rahv, editor of the Partisan Review, apparently in
response to his request for biographical information, she later drew a swift
self-portrait:
Father state secretary Socialist party for years.
Education, old revolutionary pamphlets, laying around house,
(including liberators), and YCL.
Jailbird-''violating handbill ordinance"
Occupations: Tie presser, hack writer..., model, housemaid,
ice cream packer, book clerk.

To this catalogue of occupations she might have added packing house work,
waitressing, and working as a punch-press operator.
Although essentially accurate, this self-portrait does reflect some irony,
some self-consciousness in the delineation of the pure working-class artist
educated only in revolutionary literature and the "school of life." In fact,
even as a young woman, Olsen was an eager reader, regularly visiting the
public library and second-hand bookstores in Omaha. She recalls today that
she was determined to read everything in the fiction category in the library,
making it almost through the M's. She also borrowed books from the
socialist doctor who took care of
 
 Page 139

the family and from the Radcliffe graduate for whom she worked for
several months as a mother's helper. Olsen's earliest journal, written when
she was sixteen, in addition to recording the more predictable emotions,
events, and relationships of adolescence, shows a familiarity with an
extraordinary variety of literaturepopular fiction, the nineteenthcentury
romantics, contemporary poets ranging from Carl Sandberg to Edna St.
Vincent Millay. Although remarkably eclectic, her reading was predisposed
toward what she calls ''the larger tradition of social concern"American
populists like Walt Whitman; European social critics like Ibsen, Hugo, the
early Lawrence, and especially Katherine Mansfield; black writers like W.
E. B. DuBois and Langston Hughes; American women realists like
Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Willa Cather, and Ellen Glasgow; as well as
leftists like Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Mike Gold, Guy Endore; and
socialist feminists like Olive Schreiner, whose Story of An African Farm
she refers to in the journal as "incredibly my book," and Agnes Smedley,
whose Daughter of Earth she would later bring to the attention of the
Feminist Press and a new generation of readers.
As she explains in her notes to The Feminist Press edition of Rebecca
Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills (1972), she first read that work in a
volume of bound Atlantic Monthly's bought in an Omaha junkshop when
she was fifteen. Davis's work, she writes, said to her: "Literature can be
made out of the lives of despised people," and "You, too, must write."
Olsen's journals indicate that from a very early age, perhaps even before she
read Life in the Iron Mills, she consciously and carefully apprenticed herself
to the craft of writing. Her early journal is filled with resolutions for a
future as a writer, expressions of despair at her own inarticulateness, and
frequent humorous deprecations of her own attempts at poetic prose:
"PhooeyI was just being literary."
Several passages show her grappling too with the critical and social issues
raised by the journals of the Left:
I read the Modern Quarterly today, and all the while I was thinkingChrist, how ignorant, how
stupid I am. Paragraphs I had to read over, names as unknown to me as Uranus to
 
 Page 140

man; ideas that were untrodden, undiscovered roads to me; words that might have been
Hindu, so unintelligible they seemed ... But there was an article substantiating my what I
thought insane conclusions about the future of art.

She does not elaborate on her ''insane conclusions" but the Modern
Quarterly at the time was a nonsectarian Marxist journal, with a manifesto
that, in Daniel Aaron's words, "denied the distinction between intellectual
and worker and between pure art and propaganda and committed the
magazine to Socialism." Its editor, V. G. Calverton, boasted that he printed
"almost every left wing liberal and radical who had artistic aspirations";7the
several references to the magazine scattered through Olsen's journal
indicate that she was a regular reader, as she had been even earlier of The
Liberator, the eclectically socialist journal of art and politics edited by Max
Eastman. In another passage, the sixteen-year-old Olsen urges herself to
take a stand on an almost comical array of global issues-issues, however
that would continue to occupy her throughout her life:
Have been reading Nietszche & Modern Quarterly. I must write out, clearly and concisely,
my ideas on things. I vacillate so easily. And I am so-so sloppy in my mental thinking. What
are my true opinions, for instance, on socialism, what life should be, the future of literature,
true art, the relation between the sexes, where are we going. ... Yes, I must write it out,
simply so I will know, not flounder around like a flying fish, neither in air or in water.

Later: That's quite simple to say, but there are so few things one can be sure and definite
about-so often I am pulled both ways-& I can't have a single clear cut opinion. There are so
few things I have deep, unalterable convictions about.

The clear opinions and deep convictions would come a year later through
her disciplined work and study in the Young Communist League. Her own
writings before that timesome stories and many poems-are not on the whole
political. The poems I examined, some interspersed in her journals,
 
 Page 141

some typed drafts, tend to be romantic, lyrical, full of the pain of lost or
unrequited love, the anguish of loneliness, and the mysteries of nature,
especially the winds and snows of the Nebraska winters. Several express
deep love and affection for a female friend, and one describes a bond with
her younger sister. Olsen says that there were other poems, now lost, on
political themes like the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. Mostly,
though, these early poems are the effusions of an intense, imaginative
young woman as influenced by the romantic traditions of nineteenth-
century poetry and its twentieth-century practitioners like Millay as by the
''larger tradition of social concern."
Olsen's decision to join the YCL in 1931 was a turning point; for the next
year and a half she dedicated much of her energy to political work. She was
sent from Omaha to Kansas City, where she attended the party school for
several weeks, formed close ties to political comrades like the working-
class women Fern Pierce and "Red" Allen, whom she helped to support by
working in a tie factory, and became involved in an unhappy relationship
with a party organizer. It was during this time that she was sent to the
Argentine Jail for passing out leaflets to packing house workers. She was
already sick at the time, having contracted pleurisy from working in front of
an open window at the tie factory with a steam radiator in front of it; in jail,
she became extremely ill and in 1932 was sent back to Omaha.
During this time, her poems begin to acquire different subjects, a different
quality. They still focus on personal experience and emotion, including the
anguish of an abortion or miscarriage and the bitterness of misplaced or
betrayed love. But now she sometimes interweaves political metaphors to
express emotional states. One such poem begins with the speaker sitting
"hunched by the window,/watching the snow trail down without lightness."
The poem goes on:
The branches of trees writhe like wounded animals,
like small frightened bears the buds curve their backs to the
white onslaught,
and I think of what a Wobbly told me of his third degree,
no violent tortures, but exquisitely, civilized,
 
 Page 142

a gloved palm lightly striking his cheek,

in a few minutes it was a hammer of wind pounding nails of
hail,
in fifteen a sledge, in twenty, mountains rearing against his
cheek...
Somehow, seeing the constant minute blow of the snow on
the branches,
and their shudder, this story falters into my mind,
with some deeper, untranslatable meaning behind it,
something I can not learn.

The untranslatable meaning finally has something to do with the

wisdom
of covering the dead, the decaying,
the swell and stir of the past, the leaves of old hope, with
inexorable snow,
Of stripping bare and essential the illusions of leaves,
leaves that were moved by any wind.

This poem uses the landscape in a traditional way as a mirror for the
speaker's state of mind, bleak but resolute, from which she can draw a
lesson for living, but it complicates the natural imagery by attributing to a
snowfall the implacable, impersonal characteristics of the professional
interrogator an analogy accessible only to someone with a certain kind of
political experience and sympathy. The analogy doesn't quite work, because
ultimately the inexorable snow has something redeeming in it, as the
political interrogation does not; yet the parallel between the speaker and the
Wobbly, both of whom must remain firm under onslaught, gives the poem a
social as well as a natural dimension and suggests that its writer was
struggling for both personal and political reasons to discipline the chaos of
her emotions.
During this period of intense political organizing, Olsen began to have the
''deep, unalterable convictions" she had earlier wished for, and she took
herself to task for the relative absence of a political dimension in most of
her earlier work:
 
 Page 143

The rich things I could have said are unsaid, what I did write anyone could have written.
There is no Great God Dough, terrible and harassing, in my poems, nothing of the
common hysteria of 300 girls every 4:30 in the factory, none of the bitter humiliation of
scorching a tie; the fear of being late, of ironing a wrinkle in, the nightmare of the kids at
home to be fed and clothed, the rebelliousness, the tiptoe expectation and searching, the
bodily nausea and weariness ... yet this was my youth.8

Late in 1932, Olsen moved to Faribault, Minnesota, a period of retreat from

political and survival work to allow her recovery time from the illness that
by now had become incipient tuberculosis. It was there at nineteen that she
began to write Yonnondio, the novel that for the first time would give full
expression to ''the rich things" in her own and her family's experience. She
became pregnant in the same month that she started writing, and bore a
daughter before her twentieth birthday. In 1933, she moved to California,
continuing her connection with the YCL in Stockton, Los Angeles, and San
Francisco. She also continued to writepoems and reportage and more of the
novel that would become Yonnondio. In 1936 she began to live with her
comrade in the YCL, Jack Olsen, whom she eventually married; in the
years that followed, she bore three more daughters and worked at a variety
of jobs to help support them. Gradually she stopped writing fiction,
concentrating on raising the children and working, but remained an activist
into the forties, organizing work related to war relief for the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO), serving as president of the California CIO's
Women's Auxiliary, writing a column for People's World, and working in
nonleftist and nonunion organizations related to childcare and education,
including the Parent-Teacher Association. During the late forties and fifties,
she and her family endured the soul-destroying harassment typically
directed at leftists and thousands of suspected leftists during that period. It
was not until the midfifties that Olsen began writing again, her style less
polemic, more controlled, her vision deepened by the years, her
consciousness still profoundly political. In the years that followed, she
 
 Page 144

produced the works which most of us know her for today: the stories in Tell
Me a Riddle; Yonnondio, finally published in 1974, polished and organized,
but not substantially rewritten; and the essays gathered and expanded in
Silences.
As Elinor Langer has remarked, when Olsen began to write again in the
fifties, it was not as a woman who had lived her life as an artist but as an
artist who had lived her life as a woman.9Yet in those turbulent years of the
early to midthirties, Olsen lived fully as artist, as activist, as worker, and as
woman/wife/mother, though often suffering from the conflicting demands,
always having to give primacy to one part of her being at the expense of
another.10 In examining the political contexts of Olsen's life in the Left in
the thirties, I will consider the ways her participation both limited and
nurtured her as a woman and an artist. I will focus on three basic
contradictions confronting her as an activist, a writer, and a woman in the
Left in those years.
First, the Left required great commitments of time and energy for political
work, on the whole valuing action over thought, deed over word; yet it also
validated the study and production of literature and art, providing a first
exposure to literature for many working-class people, fostering an
appreciation of a wide range of socially conscious literature, and offering
important outlets for publication and literary exchange. Second, although
much left-wing criticism, especially by Communist Party writers, was
narrowly prescriptive about the kind of literature contemporary writers
should be producing, it also inspiredalong with the times themselvesa social
consciousness in writers that deepened their art. Third, for a woman in the
thirties, the Left was a profoundly masculinist world in many of its human
relationships, in the orientation of its literature, and even in the language
used to articulate its cultural criticism; simultaneously, the Left gave serious
attention to women's issues, valued women's contributions to public as well
as to private life, and generated an important body of theory on the Woman
Question.
The first contradiction, of course, affected both male and female writer-
activists on the Left. Then as now, the central
 
 Page 145

problem for an activist trying to be a writer was simply finding the time to
write. In the section of Silences called ''Silencesits Varieties," Olsen has a
brief entry labeled Involvement under the larger heading, "Political
Silences": "When political involvement takes priority, though the need and
love for writing go on. Every freedom movement has, and has had, its roll
of writers participating at the price of their writing" (9). Olsen has spoken
little of these silences compared with the fullness of her analysis of other
kinds of silencesnot those freely chosen, but those imposed by the burdens
of poverty, racial discrimination, female roles. Partly this disproportion
exists because, in her own life, and the lives of so many others, the
compelling necessity to work for paythe circumstance of class, and the all-
consuming responsibilities of homemaking and motherhoodthe
circumstance of gender, clearly have been the major silencers, and if I do
not speak of them at length here, it is because Olsen herself has done so,
fully and eloquently. Partly also, I suspect, she has not wanted to be misread
as encouraging a withdrawal from political activism for the sake of "art" or
self-fulfillment. Yet this little passage could well allude to her own dilemma
in the thirties.
The dilemma, as she points out now, was sharper for her as a working-class
woman and a "grass roots" activist involved in daily workplace struggles
than for those professionals who were already recognized as writers, who
participated in the movement primarily by writing, and whose activity as
writers was sometimes even supported by federally funded projects like the
Works Projects Administration. Except for the interlude in 1932 in Faribault
and another withdrawal from political activity in Los Angeles in 1935,
another "good writing year," Olsen's political work came first throughout
the early and midthirtiesalong with the burdens of survival work and,
increasingly, domestic work; and it required the expenditure of time and
energy such work always demands. As a member of the YCL in the
Midwest, she wrote and distributed leaflets in the packing houses, helped
organize demonstrations, walked in picket lines, attended classes and
meetings, and wrote and directed political plays and skits. In high school,
she had written a prize-winning humor column called "Squeaks"; in the
YCL, she recalls, she was able to use her
 
 Page 146

particular kind of humor and punning to great effect with the living
audiences who came to the league's performances.
The nature of Olsen's commitment in the early thirties emerges with
particular clarity in a letter she received from a fellow YCL organizer and
close friend, as she recuperated from her illness in Omaha, ostensibly on
leave for two months from league duties. The letter praises her growth as an
organizer, but reprimands her for being ''too introspective." It is full of
friendly advice and firm pressure:
Read. Read things that will really be of some help to you. The Daily Worker every day ... the
Young Worker. All the new pamphlets ... and really constructive books.... You'll have time to
now, and you've got to write skits and plays for the League. This you can do for the League,
and it will be a great help ... have only one thing in mindrecovery, and work in the League,
and if you pull thru, and are working in the League again in a few months, I will say that as a
Communist you have had your test.

The letter concludes by asking her how the play is coming, and urging her
to rush it as soon as possible, then adds a postscript: "How about a song for
the song-writing contest?"
Reflecting on this letter in her journal, Olsen attributes to its author "full
understanding of what it means to me to leave now." She goes on to
condemn herself for "the paths I have worn of inefficiency, procrastination,
idle planning, lack of perseverance," adding, "Only in my League work did
these disappear, I have that to thank for my reconditioning." She expresses
her wish to write in a more disciplined way, but adds: "I must abolish word
victories ... let me feel nothing till I have had actionwithout action feeling
and thot are disease. . . ." The point is not, then, that insensitive and rigid
communist bureaucrats imposed unreasonable demands on party members,
but rather that rank-and-file communists made these demands on
themselves, because they believed so deeply in the liberating possibilities of
socialism; the necessity for disciplined, organized action; and the reality of
the revolutionary process, in which their participation was essential. The
times themselves instilled a sense of urgency and pos-
 
 Page 147

sibility: a depression at home, with all its concomitant anguishes of hunger,

poverty, unemployment; the rise of fascism in Europe with its threat of
world war; the example of a successful revolution in the Soviet Union and
the feeling of connection with the revolutionary movements there and in
other countries, such as China. Like many progressive people, Olsen felt
herself to be part of a valid, necessary, and global movement to remake the
world on a more just and humane model. If the Left in those years,
especially the circles in which Olsen moved, tended to value action over
thought, deed over word, there were good reasons.
Olsen's comments today about the author of this letter and her other
movement friends suggest both the depth of her commitment to them and
the feelings of difference she sometimes experienced as an aspiring writer.
What becomes clear in her comments is that for her, political work with
such women was a matter of class loyalty. She could not, then or later, leave
the ''ordinary" people to lead a "literary" life.
They were my dearest friends, but how could they know what so much of my writing self
was about? They thought of writing in the terms in which they knew it. They had become
readers, like so many working class kids in the movement, but there was so much that fed me
as far as my medium was concerned that was closed to them. They read the way women read
today coming into the women's movement who don't have literary backgroundreading for
what it says about their lives, or what it doesn't say. And they loved certain writings because
of truths, understandings, affirmations, that they found in them. . . . It was not a time that my
writing self could be first. . . . We believed that we were going to change the world, and it
looked as if it was possible. It was just after Hindenberg turned over power to Hitlerand the
enormity of the struggle demanded to stop what might result from that was just beginning to
be evident. . . . And I did so love my comrades. They were all blossoming so. These were the
same kind of people I'd gone to school with, who had quit, as was common in my generation,
around the eighth grade . . . whose development had seemed stopped, though I had known
such inherent capacity in them. Now I was seeing that
 
 Page 148

evidence, verification of what was latent in the working class. It's hard to leave something
like that.

For Olsen, then, the relationship between the intellectual and the working
class was far more than an academic question, for she herself belonged to
one world by birth and commitment and was drawn to the other by her gift
and love for language and literature. Both the ''intellectual" activities of
reading and writing and the struggles of working people to improve the
quality of their lives were essential to her. The problem was how to
combine them. "These next months," she wrote in her Faribault journal, at
last with some free time before her,
I shall only care about my sick bodyto be a good Bolshevik I need health first. Let my mind
stagnate further, let my heart swell with neurotic emotions that lie clawing inside like a
splinterafterwards, the movement will clean that out. First, a strong body. . . . I don't know
what it is in me, but I must write too. It is like creating white hot irons in me & then pulling
them out. . . so slowly, oh so slowly.

In beginning to write Yonnondio, Olsen hoped to link her writing and her
political commitment. But the chaotic years that followedthe moving back
and forth, the caring and working for her family, and the political tasksgave
her little opportunity for sustained literary work. Her most intense political
involvement during these years centered around the San Francisco Maritime
strike of 1934, which spread from San Francisco up and down the Western
Seaboard to become the first important general strike of the era. She helped
put out the Longshoremen's publication, the Waterfront Worker, did errands
and relief work, and got arrested for "vagrancy" while visiting the
apartment of some of the YCL members involved in the strike, going to jail
for the second time.
Passages from her journal in these years include frustration at the amount of
time required for housework and political work, agonized self-criticisms at
not being able to write regularly in a more disciplined way, sometimes
anger at the necessity to write specifically pieces on demand, often guilt
 
 Page 149

because no matter what the choice of labor, something is always left

undone:
Struggled all day on the Labor Defender article. Tore it up in disgust. It is the end for me of
things like that to writeI can't do itit kills me ... Why should I loathe myselfwhy the guilt . . .

All the writing that Olsen did publish in the 1930s came out in 1934. That
year two poems were published in the Daily Worker and reprinted in The
Partisan. One was based on a letter in the New Masses by a Mexican-
American woman from Texas, detailing the horrors of work in the garment
industry sweatshops of the Southwest, and the other celebrated the spirit of
the Austrian socialists killed by the Dollfus government. 11 ''The Iron
Throat," the first chapter of Yonnondio, was published the same year in The
Partisan Review,12as were "The Strike" and "Thousand-Dollar Vagrant,"
two essays based on her involvement in the San Francisco dock strike. 13In
"The Strike," one of the best pieces of reportage in an era noted for
excellence in that genre, the conflict between her "writer self" and her
activist self emerges strongly, here transformed into rhetorical strategy. The
essay, in the published version, begins:
Do not ask me to write of the strike and the terror. I am not on a battlefield, and the
increasing stench and smoke sting the eyes so it is impossible to turn them back into the past.
You leave me only this night to drop the bloody garment of Todays, to cleave through the
gigantic events that have crashed one upon the other, to the first beginning. If I could go
away for a while, if there were time and quiet, perhaps I could do it. All that has happened
might resolve into order and sequence, fall into neat patterns of words. I could stumble back
into the past and slowly, painfully rear the structure in all its towering magnificence, so that
the beauty and heroism, the terror and significance of those days, would enter your heart and
sear it forever with the vision. 14

Toward the end of the essay, the writer explains that she was not on the
literal battlefield herself, but in headquarters,
 
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typing, ''making a metallic little pattern of sound in the air, because that is
all I can do, because that is all I am supposed to do." The conclusion is
another apology for her incapacity to do justice to the magnitude of the
strike:
Forgive me that the words are feverish and blurred. You see, if I had time I could go away.
But I write this on a battlefield. The rest, the General Strike, the terror, and arrests and jail,
the songs in the night, must be written some other time, must be written later. . . . But there is
so much happening now . . . . 15

The conflict here is partly between her role as a writer, in this case a
reporter doing her job, and her guilt at not being on the real battlefield
herselfbetween the word and the deed. But more important is the conflict
between two kinds of writing: the quick, fervent, impressionistic report
from the arena of struggle, and the leisured, carefully structured and
sustained rendering of the "beauty and heroism, the terror and significance"
of those daysa rendering that, ironically, would require for its full
development a withdrawal from the struggle.
For a committed leftist in the thirties, political action, with all its demands
on time and energy, had to take priority over intellectual work, yet the
atmosphere on the Left did value and nurture literature in a variety of ways.
Olsen would have been a reader in any case, but her friends in the YCL in
Kansas City were among the many working-class people inspired by the
movement to read broadly for the first time. And Olsen's own reading,
eclectic though it was, was to some extent guided, extended, and informed
by left-wing intellectual mentors such as the critics of The Liberator, the
New Masses, and the Modern Quarterly. She recalls today that the Left
was enriching in the sense that . . . in the movement people were reading like mad. There was
as in any movement a looking for your ancestors, your predecessors . . .

There was a burst of black writers. ... I knew about W. E. B. DuBois before, but because the
movement was so conscious of race, of color, we were reading all the black writers, books
 
 Page 151

like Arna Bontemps' Black Thunder; Langston Hughes. We read Ting Ling, we read Lu
Hsun, we read the literature of protest that was beginning to be written in English out of
South Africa; we read B. Traven; writers from every country. The thirties was a rich, an
international, period.... And from whatever country or color this was considered to be part of
our literature.

Being part of the Left milieu, then, gave Olsen, a working-class woman
from Omaha, a sense of belonging to an international intellectual as well as
political community.
The literary establishment of the Left was receptive to and supportive of the
efforts of new, young writers like Olsen. The Communist party sponsored
the development of cultural associations called the John Reed Clubs,
established specifically to encourage young, unknown writers and
artists.16And there were outlets for publication like the New Masses and the
various organs of the local John Reed Clubs, including the Partisan Review
in New York and The Partisan in San Francisco, in both of which Olsen
published. Her work was well received and much admired. Joseph North, a
respected Left critic, compared her ability to portray working-class life in
''The Iron Throat" favorably to Tess Slesinger's rendering of the East Coast
intelligentsia in her first novel, The Unpossessed (1934).17 Robert Cantwell
praised "The Iron Throat" in The New Republic as "a work of early genius."
18 A number of editors and publishers sought her out after its publication,
and eventually she made arrangements with Bennett Cerf at Random House
for the publication of Yonnondio on its completion, although at the time she
could not be reached because she was in jail for her participation in the
dock strike, becoming something of a cause célbre. In New York, Heywood
Broun chaired a protest meeting over her arrest, irritating her and her jailed
comrades who had not published anything and were therefore not getting all
this national attention.
After her release from jail, she visited Lincoln Steffens and Ella Winter,
who had invited her to their home in Carmel, California. This was her first
experience, she recalls now, with that kind of urbane, sophisticated literary
atmosphere. Steffens encouraged her to write the other essay associated
with
 
 Page 152

the strike, ''Thousand-Dollar Vagrant," which describes her arrest in

deliberately tough, colloquial language. The following year, she was invited
to attend the American Writers Congress in New York, where she marched
in a parade side by side with Mike Gold and James T. Farrell, Nelson
Algren and Richard Wright, and where she was one of a very few women to
address the assembly, which included most of the major writers of the
day.19A drawing of her, a cartooned profile of a lean, intense young woman,
was one of a few portraits of American women writers to appear among the
myriad renderings of male literary personages in the May 7, 1935, issue of
New Masses that reported on the congress.20
Clearly, though Olsen's involvement in the Left as an activist, coupled with
the other demands on her workermother life, took time, energy, and
commitment that might in another milieu and another era have gone into
her writing, and although her closest friends in the midwestern movement
did not always understand her literary aspirations, the atmosphere of the
Left as a whole did encourage her. The Left provided networks and organs
for intellectual and literary exchange, gave her a sense of being part of an
international community of writers and activists engaged in the same
revolutionary endeavor, and recognized and valued her talent.
The second contradiction I will consider is closely related to the first and
third; in using it as a bridge between them, I will turn first to the way in
which Left critical theory validated and supported Olsen's subject and
vision before suggesting how some of its tenets ran counter to and perhaps
impeded the development of her particular artistic gift.
Literary criticism flourished on the Left in the thirties, and writers like
Gold, editor of the New Masses and one of the most influential of
Communist party critics, and Farrell, a leading critic and writer for the
increasingly independent Partisan Review, as well as a novelist, hotly
debated such issues as the role of the artist in revolutionary struggle, the
applications of Marxist thought to American literature, and the proper
nature and functions of literature in a revolutionary movement.21 As Olsen's
early journals indicate, she followed such discussions with intense interest.
There was much in the
 
 Page 153

spirit even of the more dogmatic, party-oriented criticism to encourage her

own writing.
Left critical theory accorded an honored place to the committed writer, the
writer capable of expressing the struggles and aspirations of working-class
people or of recording the decline of capitalism. Critical debates often
centered on the best literary modes for accomplishing this purpose. The
dominant critical theory on the communist Left in the early thirties was
proletarian realism, a theory which even nonsectarian leftists eventually
viewed as far too limited. Nevertheless, its basic premisethat fiction should
show the sufferings and struggles and essential dignity of working-class
people under capitalism and allow readers to see the details of their lives
and workencouraged young working-class writers like Olsen to write of
their own experiences and confirmed her early perception that art can be
based on the lives of ''despised people." This theory told writers that their
own writing could and should be a form of action in itself; art was to be a
weapon in the class struggle.22
All of Olsen's published writing during the early thirties is consistent with
this view of the functions of literature. Her developing craft now had an
explicitly political content which grew out of her own experience and was
confirmed by major voices in the Left literary milieu. All of it expresses
outrage at the exploitation of the working class and a fierce faith in the
transformative power of the coming revolution. One need only compare the
poem, "I Want You Women up North to Know,"23 with the passage from her
poetry cited earlier to see that the growing clarity of her literary and
political convictions gave her work a scope and an assuredness that it had
lacked earlier.
This poem juxtaposes the desperate situation of Mexican-American women
workers and the families they struggle unsuccessfully to support with that
of the "women up north" who consume the products of their labor. As
Selma Burkom and Margaret Williams have noted, the poem faithfully
constructs the details of their daily lives while its central metaphor
"transforms the women themselves . . . into the clothing they embroiderthey
become the product of their labor."24The poem is artful as well as
polemical; its free-verse form is deliberately experimental, its subtler
ironies woven into
 
 Page 154

the fabric of diction and metaphor, its structure tight, its portraits clearly
individuated. On one level, it is metapoetry, that is, poetry about art, for it
specifically contrasts its own purpose and visionto document the realities of
these women's lives and to offer a Marxist interpretation of the causes of
and solutions to their sufferingwith the consciousness of the ''bourgeois
poet" who would find in the movement of their hands only a source of
aesthetic pleasure.
On the other hand, the polemicism of the poem, especially the didactic
interpolations of the speaker, represented a kind of writing that Olsen
herself gradually rejected. The same issues arise in her work on Yonnondio,
her most important literary effort during the thirties. In the rest of this paper
I will focus on that novel, for its evolution reveals with special clarity the
contradictory nature of Olsen's experience in the Left.
Olsen's earliest journals, before she joined the YCL, speak of her wish to
write about her family and people like them. After her year and a half of
intense involvement, she begins to do so in a serious, disciplined way,
writing in her Faribault journal as she works on the early chapters: "O
Mazie & Will & Ben. At last I write out all that has festered in me so
longthe horror of being a working-class child& the heroism, all the respect
they deserve." Familiarity with the political and critical theory of the Left
combined with and applied to her own experience gave her the coherent
world view, the depth of consciousness, and the faith in her working-class
subject essential to a sustained work of fiction.
Set in the 1920s, the novel's lyrical prose traces the Holbrook family's
desperate struggle for survival over a twoand-a-half-year period, first in a
Wyoming mining town, then on a farm in the Dakotas, finally in a Midwest
cityOmaha, perhapsreeking with the smell of the slaughterhouses. In
Yonnondio, as in Olsen's later work, the most powerful theme is the tension
between human capacity and creativitythe drive to know, to assert, to
create, which Olsen sees as innate in human lifeand the social forces and
institutions that repress and distort that capacity. Olsen's understanding of
those social forces and institutions clearly owes a great deal to her
 
 Page 155

tutelage in the Left. The struggles of her central characters dramatize the
ravages of capitalism on the lives of working peopleminers, small farmers,
packing house workers, and their familieswho barely make enough to
survive no matter how hard they work, and who have not yet learned to
seek control over the conditions of their workplaces or the quality of their
lives.
Unfortunately for all of us, she never finished the novel. Its title, taken from
the title of a Whitman poem, is a Native American word meaning ''lament
for the lost"; it is an elegy, I think, not only for the Holbrooks, but also for
Olsen's own words lost between the midthirties and late fifties, for the
incompleteness of the novel itself. The demands on Olsen already discussed
would have been reason enough for her not having completed the novel in
those hectic years; what she wrote, after all, she wrote before she was
twenty-five, in the interstices of her activist-worker-mother life. Yet I
suspect that she was wrestling with at least one other problem that made
completion difficult. For although Olsen's immersion in the theory and
political practice of the Marxist Left and her exposure to its literature and
criticism gave her a sense of the importance of her subject and strengthened
the novel's social analysis, the dominant tenets of proletarian realism also
required a structure, scope, resolution, and political explicitness in some
ways at odds with the particular nature of her developing craft.
What we have today is only the beginning of the novel that was to have
been. In Olsen's initial plan, Jim Holbrook was to have become involved in
a strike in the packing houses, a strike that would draw out the inner
strength and courage of his wife Anna, politicize the older children as well,
and involve some of the women in the packing plant as strike leaders in this
essential collective action. Embittered by the length of the strike and its lack
of clear initial success, humiliated by his inability to support his family, Jim
Holbrook was finally to have abandoned them. Anna was to die trying to
give herself an abortion. Will and Mazie were to go West to the Imperial
Valley in California, where they would themselves become organizers.
Mazie was to grow up to become an artist, a writer
 
 Page 156

who could tell the experiences of her people, her mother especially living in
her memory. In Mazie's achievement, political consciousness and personal
creativity were to coalesce.
The original design for the novel would have incorporated most of the
major themes of radical fiction at that time. Walter Rideout's study, The
Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954, classifies proletarian novels
of the thirties into four types: the strike novel, the novel of conversion to
communism, the bottom dog novel, and the novel documenting the decay of
the middle class. He also mentions certain typical subthemes: anti-
Semitism, black-and-white relationships, episodes in American history, and
the life of the communist organizer.25Yonnondio would have been both a
strike novel and a novel of political conversion, and it would have touched
on relationships between whites and people of color and on the life of the
communist organizer. It would have fulfilled also a major tenet of
proletarian realismthat proletarian fiction should demonstrate revolutionary
optimism, including elements predicting the inevitable fall of capitalism
and the rise of the working class to power.
Proletarian fiction, in other words, was supposed to show not only the
sufferings of working-class people, but also their triumphs. When Meridel
Le Sueur, for example, published an account of the helpless sufferings of
poor women in 1932, she was attacked by Whittaker Chambers in the New
Masses, in a note appended to Le Sueur's article, for her ''defeatist attitude"
and "non-revolutionary spirit."26"There is horror and drabness in the
Worker's life, and we will portray it," wrote Mike Gold in the New Masses
in 1930, in an article defining proletarian realism, "but we know this is not
the last word; we know ... that not pessimism, but revolutionary elan will
sweep this mess out of the world forever."27
Olsen, too, wanted to incorporate this optimism, indeed, it was central to
her initial conception of the novel.
Characters [she writes in her journal when she was beginning Yonnondio]. Wonderful
characters. Hard, bitter, & strong. O communismhow you come to those of whom I will write
is more incredible beautiful than manna. You wipe
 
 Page 157

the sweat from us, you fill our bellies, you let us walk and think like humans.

She immediately cautions herself, ''Not to be so rhetorical or figurative or

whatever it is"a struggle against didactic rhetoric that would characterize
her work on the novel itself. Olsen maintained throughout her work on
Yonnondio in the thirties her commitment to show the transformative power
of Communismher commitment, that is, to "revolutionary optimism," but as
her craft developed she felt less and less satisfied with telling about the
coming revolutionand more and more concerned with showing how people
come to class consciousness in "an earned way, a bone way." She gradually
rejected the political explicitness that alone was enough to win praise for
literary work in the more sectarian Left criticism, but she had a hard time
incorporating the essential vision of systematic social change in other ways.
The "revolutionary elan" in the opening chapters of Yonnondio still partakes
of the didacticism she ultimately rejected. It comes less through the events
or characterizations than from the voice of the omniscient narrator, who in
the first five chapters provides both political analysis and revolutionary
prophecy. In the first chapter, this voice comments on the life of thirteen-
year-old Andy Kvaternick, on his first day in the mines:
Breathe and lift your face to the night, Andy Kvaternick. Trying so vainly ... to purge your
bosom of the coal dust. Your father had dreams. You too, like all boys, had dreamsvague
dreams of freedom and light. . . . The earth will take those too....

Someday the bowels will grow monstrous and swollen with these old tired dreams, swell and
break, and strong fists batter the fat bellies, and skeletons of starved children batter them. . . .
(14)

In the second chapter, the voice becomes ironic as it comments on a scene

where women wait at the mouth of a mine
 
 Page 158

for word of their men after an accident. Like ''I Want the Women up North
To Know," this passage attacks the modernist aesthetic, which elevates a
concern for form over a concern for subject, yet it also argues that Olsen's
subject itself is worthy of the transformations of enduring art.
And could you not make a cameo of this and pin it onto your aesthetic hearts? So sharp it is,
so clear, so classic. The shattered dusk, the mountain of culm, the tipple; clean line, bare
beauty....

Surely it is classical enough for youthe Greek marble of the women, the simple, flowing lines
of sorrow, carved so rigid and eternal. (30)

And the voice goes on to prophesy revolution against the companies and the
system they represent: "Please issue a statement: quick, or they start to
batter through with the fists of strike, with the pickax of revolution" (31).
In chapter 5, we hear the voice of the revolutionary prophet twice. The first
passage comments on the life of young Jim Tracy, Jim Holbrook's codigger
in a sewer, who quits when the contractor insists that two men must do the
amount of digging previously done by several. Here, the voice is at first
scathingly satiric, pointing out how Tracy will be victimized by his own
naive belief in the shibboleths of American culture-"the bull about
freedomofopportunity," and predicting Tracy's inevitable descent into the
hell of unemployment, hunger, cold, vagrancy, prison, death; damned
forever for his apostasy to "God Job." The passage concludes with an
apology to Jim, in which the narrator speaks with the collective "we" of the
revolutionists:
I'm sorry, Jim Tracy, sorry as hell we weren't stronger and could get to you in time and show
you that kind of individual revolt was no good, kid, no good at all, you had to bide your time
and take it till there were enough of you to fight it all together on the job, and bide your time,
and take it till the day millions of fists clamped in yours, and you could wipe out the
 
 Page 159

whole thing, and a human could be a human for the first time on earth. (79)

This is the voice that concludes the chapter, too, as Jim Holbrook sits in the
kitchen holding his daughter Mazie after Anna has had a miscarriage,
bitterly condemning himself for not seeing her illness, bitterly aware that he
has no access to the food and medicine and care the doctor has prescribed
for Anna and Baby Bess:
No, he could speak no more. And as he sat there in the kitchen with Mazie against his heart
... the things in his mind so vast and formless, so terrible and bitter, cannot be spoken, will
never be spokentill the day that hands will find a way to speak this: hands. (95)

In these interpolations, Olsen was deliberately experimenting with the form

of the novel, not unlike Dos Passos, whom she had earlier read. Rachel
Blau DuPlessis suggests that Olsen has appropriated certain modernist
techniques here to turn dialectically against modernism.28On the other
hand, the prophetic irony of these passages, the imagery of hands and fists
uniting in revolution, characterize much of the writing of the leftists during
this period; this is the tone and imagery that appear at the conclusion of
Olsen's two published poems and that predominate in ''The Strike." In any
case, these passages add a dimension of "revolutionary elan" not present in
the early events of the novel itself. The narrator sees more, knows more,
than the characters, about the causes of and remedies for their suffering, and
the voice is the device used to incorporate that knowledge into the novel.
Olsen's correspondence indicates that she was aware of a disjunction
between that voice and the increasingly more lyric, less didactic tone and
texture of the whole. In March 1935, John Strachey, whom she had met in
Carmel and to whom she had sent the first three chapters of Yonnondio for
evaluation and advice, wrote to her in Venice, California: "As to advice,
personally I like both your styles of writing, and I am in favor of having the
interpolations in the book." Their "agit-prop" quality was increasingly at
odds with the direction
 
 Page 160

in which Olsen's art was growing. It was developing gradually away from
the didacticism that made the incorporation of ''revolutionary elan"
relatively easy and toward a more lyrical, less explicit mode, at its best
when lingering on the details of daily life and work, exploring the
interactions between individual growth, personality, and social
environment, and laying bare the ruptures and reconciliations of family life.
As the novel progressed, as the characters acquired a life and being of their
own, Olsen, I think, found herself unable to document the political vision of
social revolution as authentically and nonrhetorically as she was able to
portray the ravages of circumstance on families and individuals and the
redeeming moments between them. She did not want to write didactically.
She wanted to write a politically informed novel that would also be great
art. The problem is that the subtlety and painstaking craft of her evolving
style did not lend themselves readily to a work of epic scope, and she was
increasingly unwilling to rely on shortcuts like the narrative interpolations
to tell rather than show political context and change. In any case, she had
trouble extending the novel in its intended direction. In a note on its
progress from sometime in the midthirties, she writes: "Now it seems to me
the whole revolutionary part belongs in another novel . . . and I can't put out
one of those 800 page tomes."
I think that there was a tension, too, between two themes: the awakening
class consciousness that was the central drama of her time, and her other
essential theme, the portrait of the artist as a young girl-not an inevitable
conflict based on inconsistent possibilities, for Olsen's own experience
embraced both processes, but a writing tension, based on the difficulty of
merging the two themes in a cohesive fictive structure. Yet the more
"individualistic," subjective, and domestic concernsthe intellectual and
psychological development of the young girl, the complicated familial
relationships, the lyrical vision of regeneration through love between
mother and childwould not have been acceptable to Olsen or the critical
establishment of the Left without the projected Marxian resolution that
showed working-class people taking power collectively over their own
lives. In other words, Olsen had so fully internalized the Left's vision of
what proletarian litera-
 
 Page 161

ture could and should do to show the coming of a new society that she did
not even consider then the possibility of a less epic and for her, more
feasible structure. Nor could she be content simply to accord centrality to
the familial interactions and the stubborn growth of human potential in that
unpromising soil, leaving the tensions between human aspiration and social
oppression unresolved. So Yonnondio remained unfinished, but the struggle
to write fiction at once political and nonpolemical was an essential
apprenticeship for the writer who in her maturity produced Tell Me a
Riddle.
The concerns I have called, for lack of better terms, more ''subjective" and
"domestic," grew to a great extent out of Olsen's experience as a woman
and a mother. Thus, my second and third contradictions overlap, for as we
shall see there was little in Left literary criticism that would have validated
the centrality of these concerns, except insofar as they touched on class
rather than gender. The rest of this paper, then, will be concerned with the
third contradiction: between the fact that the world of the Left, like the
larger society it both challenged and partook of, was essentially
androcentric and masculinist, yet that it also demonstrated, more than any
other sector of American society, a consistent concern for women's issues.
The painful and sometimes wry anecdotes of women writers like Josephine
Herbst, Meridel Le Sueur, and others amply testify to the sexual politics of
life in the literary Left. For example, Herbst writes to Katherine Anne
Porter about the "gentle stay-in-your-place, which may or may not be the
home," she received from her husband, John Herrmann, when she wished to
join him at a "talk fest" with Mike Gold, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm
Cowley, and others: "I told Mister Herrmann that as long as the gents had
bourgeois reactions to women they would probably never rise very high in
their revolutionary conversations, but said remarks rolled off like
water."29Olsen herself remembers that at the American Writers Congress,
James Farrell informed her that she and another attractive young woman
present were "the two flowers there," compared with the other "old bags."
Because she was not really a part of the literary circles of the Left, their
sexual politics had less impact on Olsen than
 
 Page 162

on writers who were more involved, like Herbst and Le Sueur. If for Herbst
it was her gender that prevented her from moving freely in the heady circles
of the literary Left, for Olsen it was more the depth of her own class
loyalties to the rank and file. The sexism she experienced in her daily life
mostly reflected the structure of gender-role assignments in society as a
whole, although she does recall some incidents peculiar to life on the Left,
such as the pressure on YCL women to make themselves available at
parties as dancing partners especially to black and Mexican-American men,
whether the women wanted to dance or not. As a writer, though, Olsen was
keenly aware of the male dominance of Left literature and criticism and the
relative absence of women's subjects and concerns.
If one examines the composition of the editorial boards of Left magazines
of culture and criticism, one finds that the mastheads are largely male; in
1935, one woman wrote to the New Masses complaining at the
underrepresentation of women writers,30 although a few women writers,
like Herbst and Le Sueur, were regular contributors. The numerical
dominance of men in the literary Left paralleled the omnipresence of a
worker-figure in literature and criticism who almost by definition was male;
proletarian prose and criticism tended to flex their muscles with a
particularly masculinist pride. Here, for example, is a passage from Gold's
famous New Masses editorial, ''Go Left, Young Writers," written in 1929:
A new writer has been appearing; a wild youth of about twenty-two, the son of working-class
parents, who himself works in the lumber camps, coal mines, and steel mills, harvest fields
and mountain camps of America. . . . He writes in jets of exasperated feeling and has not
time to polish his work. . . . He lacks self-confidence but writes because he mustand because
he has a real talent.31

An even more pronounced masculinism prevails in Gold's "America Needs

a Critic," published in New Masses in 1926:
Send us a critic. Send a giant who can shame our writers back to their task of civilizing
America. Send a soldier who has studied history. Send a strong poet who loves the masses,
 
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and their future.... Send one who is not a pompous liberal, but a man of the street. ... Send us
a man fit to stand up to skyscrapers.... Send no saint. Send an artist. Send a scientist. Send a
Bolshevik. Send a man.32

Gold's worst insult to a writer was that he was a pansy, his art,
effeminate.33Gold, of course, was an extreme example of working-class
male chauvinism, but he was not atypical. Even as late as 1969, when
Joseph North edited an anthology of New Masses pieces, masculinity
predominates. North's Prologue praises the New Masses for capturing the
essence of American life in its portrayals of the industrial proletariat, in its
emphasis on the ''day of a workingman," that of a miner, a locomotive
engineer, a weaver. "Its men," he said, "its writers and artists understood
this kind of a life existed."34In spite of his once-favorable notice of Tillie
Lerner's work, he does not mention its women.
When women writers on the Left did write about explicitly female subjects
from a woman's perspective, they were sometimes criticized outright,
sometimes ignored. Le Sueur has remembered that she was criticized for
writing in a lyrical, emotive style about sexuality and the reproductive
process.35 I have already noted Chambers's attack on her for writing about
the conditions of women on the breadlines without building in a
revolutionary dialectic. Elinor Langer, having worked for several years on a
biography of Herbst, believes that one of the reasons Herbst's impressive
trilogy of novels failed to win her the recognition she deserved was that she
was a woman and the central experience in two of the three novels is that of
female characters.36Not that the scorn or neglect of male Left critics was
reserved exclusively for women writers. The more dogmatic of them
viewed any literature concerned primarily with domestic and psychological
subjects as suspect. One novel focusing on the experience and perceptions
of a child of the working classes, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1935), which
Olsen read and admired during the later stages of her work on Yonnondio,
was one of the more intricate, imaginative works in the proletarian genre.
Yet the New Masses dismissed it in a paragraph, concluding, "It is a pity
that so many young writers drawn from the proletariat can make no better
use of their
 
 Page 164

working class experience than as material for introspective and febrile

novels.''37
In writing Yonnondio, Olsen was consciously writing class literature from a
woman's point of view, incorporating a dimension that she saw ignored and
neglected in the works of most contemporary male leftists. All of Olsen's
work, in fact, testifies to her concern for women, her vision of their double
oppression if they are poor or women of color, her affirmation of their
creative potential, her sense of the deepest, most intractable contradiction of
all: the unparalleled satisfaction and fulfillment combined with the
overwhelming all-consuming burden of motherhood. Indeed, her writings
about mothering, about the complex, painful, and redemptive interactions
between mother and child, have helped a new generation of women writers
to treat that subject with a fullness and honesty never before possible in
American literature.
In Yonnondio, Anna as mother wants for her children what she can no
longer dream for herself: the freedom to live fully what is best in them; to
the extent that the circumstances of their lives prevent this, her love is also
her despair. Anna has a special kinship with her oldest daughter, Mazie, in
whom her own intelligence and early hunger for knowledge are
reincarnated. Mirroring each other's dreams and capacities, the two mirror
also the anguish of women confronting daily the poverty of their class and
the assigned burdens of their sex. At times they protect one anotherAnna,
Mazie's access to books, to literature; Mazie, Anna's physical wellbeing,
she herself becoming temporarily mother when Anna lies unconscious after
a miscarriage. Mazie's painful sensitivitythe sensitivity of the potential
artistmakes her as a child deeply susceptible to both the beauty and ugliness
around her; overcome at times by the ugliness, it is to her mother that she
turns for renewal. For example, one of the gentlest, most healing of
Yonnondio's passages is the interlude of peace when Anna and Mazie pause
from gathering dandelion greens, and Anna is transported by the spring and
river wind to a forgetful peace, different from her usual "mother look," the
"mother alertness ... in her bounded body" (120). Absently, she sings
fragments of song and strokes Mazie's body:
 
 Page 165

The fingers stroked, spun a web, cocooned Mazie into happiness and intactness and selfness.
Soft wove the bliss round hurt and fear and want and shamethe old worn fragile bliss, a new
frail selfness bliss, healing, transforming. Up from the grasses, from the earth, from the broad
tree trunk at their back, latent life streamed and seeded. (119)

The transformation here is not the political conversion that was to have
taken place later, but one based on human love, on the capacity to respond
to beauty, and on the premise of a regenerative life cycle of which mother
and daughter are a part.
To be sure, Olsen wanted to weave this emphasis on ''selfness," and this
image of a regenerative life cycle that prefigures, but does not itself
constitute, social and economic regeneration into a larger structure that
would incorporate both personal and political transformation. Yet the hope
Yonnondio offers most persuasively, through its characterizations, its
images and events, and its present conclusion, is less a vision of political
and economic revolution than an assertion that the drive to love and achieve
and create will survive somehow in spite of the social forces arraigned
against it, because each new human being is born with it afresh.
It is with this "humanistic" rather than "Marxist" optimism that the novel
now ends. In the midst of a stifling heat wave, Baby Bess suddenly realizes
her own ability to have an effect on the world when she makes the
connection between her manipulations of the lid of a jam jar and the noise it
produces, so that her random motions become, for the first time, purposeful:
"Bang, slam, whack. Release, grab, slam, bang, bang. Centuries of human
drive work in her; human ecstasy of achievement; a satisfaction deep and
fundamental as sex: I can do, I use my power; I! I!" (153). And her mother
and sister and brothers laugh, in spite of the awesome heat, the rising dust
storms. Then for the first time the family listens to the radio on a borrowed
set, and Mazie is awed at the magic, "transparent meshes of sound, far
sound, human and stellar, pulsing, pulsing" (153). This moment of
empowerment and connection is linked to the revolutionary vision, and
Anna's final, "The air's changin', Jim. I see for it [the heat wave] to
 
 Page 166

end tomorrow, at least get tolerable'' (154), certainly hints at the possibility
for greater change. Still, there is a great gulf between socialist revolution
and the temporary individualized relief of this final passage. Yet the end
seems right; indeed, today, the novel hardly seems unfinished, because it
offers in its conclusion the affirmation most fully embedded in the texture
of the novel as a whole: an affirmation of human will, familial love, and, at
least in the child not yet deadened and brutalized by the struggle for sheer
survival and the corrupt influence of social institutions, the drive toward
achievement and creation.
To say this is not to diminish the power of Yonnondio as an indictment of
society; Olsen makes it clear that the Holbrooks do not merely sufferthey
are oppressed, in quite specific ways, as a working-class family in a
capitalist system. The whole fabric of the book deals with how poverty,
exploitation, and what today we would call sexism combine to extinguish
gradually the very qualities Olsen values most. The loss of creative capacity
is not, as Wordsworth would have it, the inevitable price of growing up, but
rather the price of growing up in a society like this one.
In according that creative capacity especially to women and children, as in
detailing the impact of social circumstance on the dailiness of family life,
Olsen added a significant dimension to the largely masculine and public
world of the proletarian novel. Women's work in preserving and nurturing
that creative capacity in the young is shown in Yonnondio to be an essential
precondition to social change.
Although in this regard, Olsen's work was deliberately oppositional to the
androcentrism of the Left literary milieu, and although the tenets of
proletarian criticism would not have validated this feminist and humanist
dimension without the projected Marxian resolution, Olsen's affiliation with
the Left undoubtedly encouraged and informed her writings about women
in at least two ways.
First, there was the fact that in spite of the sexism of the Left milieu, the
existence of serious analysis of women's status and roles meant that, in
Olsen's circles at least, women's capacities were recognized and supported,
however inconsis-
 
 Page 167

tently, and women's grievances were recognized as real. It is certainly true,

as Olsen recalls today, that on ''those things that come particularly to the
fore through consciousnessraising, having to do with sexuality, with rape,
and most of all with what I call maintenance of life, the bearing and rearing
of the young," the circles of the Left were little better than those of society
as a wholein spite of a body of theory on housework and the frequent
bandying about of Lenin's observations on its degrading nature. And Olsen
is in accord with Peggy Dennis, married for years to party leader Eugene
Dennis, on the "explicit, deliberate and reprehensible sexism" of the party's
leadership.38Yet Olsen also knew party women who brought their own
husbands up for trial on charges of male chauvinism, one of them herself a
party activist whose husband refused to help with childcare; he was
removed from his leadership position when her charges were upheld. She
remembers seeing women in the party, women like herself, grow in their
capacities and rise to positions of leadership; she herself helped set up, after
much debate about the pros and cons of autonomous women's formations, a
separate Women's Division of the Warehouse Union to which Jack Olsen
belonged, establishing thereby a whole secondary leadership of women.
This process of women's coming to strength and voice was to have been
central to Yonnondio, and if, paradoxically, her own activism in the Left
helped prevent her from finishing the novel, her experience in that milieu
nevertheless gave her, too, a sense of confidence and worth essential to both
her political work and her writing.
She wanted, moreover, to pay tribute to, to memorialize, the women she
knew on the Left: women like her YCL comrades and especially immigrant
women like her own motherstrong women, political women, but sometimes
also women defeated by their long existence in a patriarchal world.
Sometime in 1938 she wrote in her journal:
To write the history of that whole generation of exiled revolutionaries, the kurelians and
croations, the bundists and the poles; and the women, the foreign women, the mothers of six
and seven ... the housewives whose Zetkin and Curie and
 
 Page 168

Bronte hearts went into kitchen and laundries and the patching of old socks; and those who
did not speak the language of their children, who had no bridge . . . to make themselves
understood.

Tell Me a Riddle is dedicated to two such women, and its central character,
Eva, is a vividly drawn composite of several; Eva, a passionate socialist
organizer and orator in her youth, who is silenced by years of poverty and
tending to others' needs, only to find her voice and vision again when she is
dying. The publications of the Left in the thirties are full of tributes to
women like Mother Bloor, Clara Zetkin, Krupskaya; in a way, Yonnondio
and Tell Me a Riddle are both extensions and demystifications of such
portrayals, renderings of the essentially heroic lives which circumstances
did not allow to blossom into public deeds, art, and fame.
Second, the theoretical analysis of crucial aspects of women's experience
was encouraged by articles, lectures, party publications devoted solely to
women's issues, and study groups on the Woman Question. Olsen herself
taught a class on the Woman Question at YCL headquarters on San
Francisco's Haight Street. A self-styled feminist even then, she had read not
only Marxist theory, but also works from the suffragist movement like the
History of Woman Suffrage and the Woman's Bible, and she invited
suffragists to her class to talk about their own experiences in the nineteenth-
century woman's movement, establishing a sense of the history and
continuity of women's struggles.
Theory about the Woman Question undoubtedly helped to shape her own
thinking about women's issues. Communist Party theory on women, like its
practice, certainly had weaknesses. Most arose from the fact that gender
was not identified as a fundamental social category like class. Thus,
working-class women could be viewed as suffering essentially the same
oppressions as their husbands, directly if they were workers, by extension if
they were wives. Consequently, they would presumably benefit from the
same measures. Analysis tended to focus on women in the paid labor force;
and although housework did receive a substantial amount of critical
attention, few analysts, except perhaps in special women's columns
 
 Page 169

or special women's publications like the Woman Worker, suggested

seriously that men should share equal responsibility for it, although many
arguednot strongly enough, according to Olsenfor its collectivization.39
The socialist writers of the earlier years of the century tended to be fuller in
their analyses of sexuality and ''life styles" than the Communist party in the
thirties, which generally avoided such discussions, failing to link political
revolution and sexual freedom as Agnes Smedley had at the close of the
twenties. Yonnondio is far more reticent than Daughter of Earth on this
subject. Although it includes the painfully explicit rape of wife by husband,
and although it is better than a history book at raising issues of women's
health, Yonnondio is largely silent about women's sexuality per seeven
though this is a topic which Olsen speaks of freely in her early poems and
sometimes in her journals. That silence may well have something to do with
the rather puritanical and conservative attitudes of the Communist party on
sexuality throughout the 1930s.40
Still, in no other segment of American society at that time were there such
extensive discussions about the sources of women's oppression and the
means for alleviating it. A recent article by Robert Shaffer, "Women and the
Communist Party, USA, 1930-1940," provides a useful summary of the
nature of women's status and roles in the Communist party, its theory about
the oppression of women, its publications and organizations designed to
counteract such oppression, its involvement in mass work among women
and around women's issues, and its views on the family and sexuality. He
concludes that "despite its important weaknesses, the CP's work among
women in the 1930s was sufficiently extensive, consistent, and theoretically
valuable to be considered an important part of the struggle for women's
liberation in the United States."41
Shaffer discusses two books by communist women published in the 1930s
that were important contributions to the analysis of women's issues. The
first, by Grace Hutchins, focused on Women Who Workthat is, women in the
paid work force; according to Shaffer, it underplays male chauvinism and
sometimes blames women for their own oppression, but it also scrupulously
documents the conditions of working
 
 Page 170

women and formulates important demands to better them. The second book,
written in 1939 by Mary Inman, takes a position reflecting the less sectarian
consciousness of the Popular Front Years. Inman argues that all women are
oppressed, not just working-class women, and that one of the symptoms of
this oppression is their isolation in their homes; that working-class men
sometimes oppress their wives; and that housework must be viewed as
productive laborpositions rejected by the party's East Coast leadership, but
supported in the West, where People's World was published and read. She
also discusses how girls are conditioned to a ''manufactured femininity" by
childrearing practices and the mass media.42Inman eventually left the party
over the controversy her book engendered, but clearly the ideas it expressed
had some currency and support in Left Circles at least on the West Coast.
In many ways, Yonnondio anticipates in fiction Inman's theoretical
formulations. The conditioning of children to accept limiting sex roles is an
important theme in Yonnondio. One thinks, for example, of the children's
games that so cruelly inhibit the preadolescent Mazie, or of the favorite
text"the Movies, selected"of twelve-year-old Jinella, who with Mazie as
partner plays a vamp from Sheik of Araby, Broken Blossoms, Slave of Love,
She Stopped at Nothing, The Fast Life, and The Easiest Way (127-28), her
imaginative capacity absurdly channeled by her exposure to these films, her
only escape from her real life as Gertrude Skolnick. Even Anna, full of her
own repressed longings, imparts the lessons of sex roles to her children.
"Boys get to do that," she tells Benjy wistfully, talking of travel by trains
and boats, "not girls" (113). And when Mazie asks her, "Why is it always
me that has to help? How come Will gets to play?" Anna can only answer,
"Willie's a boy" (142). Olsen, then, suggests throughout Yonnondio that
both women and men are circumstanced to certain social roles, and that
these roles, while placing impossible burdens of responsibility on working-
class men, constrict the lives of women in particularly damaging ways.
Olsen understands and portrays the double oppression of working-class
women in other ways as well. Anna's spirit is almost broken by her physical
illness-"woman troubles"connected with pregnancy and childbirth and
compounded by
 
 Page 171

inadequate medical care. Her apparent apathy and incompetence make her a
target of her husband's rage; he strikes out at and violates her because he
has no other accessible target for his frustrations and fears, until her
miscarriage forces him to a pained awareness and reawakened love. Few
other American novels, perhaps none outside the radical tradition of which
Yonnondio is a part, reveal so starkly the destructive interactions of class
and sex under patriarchal capitalism.
In Yonnondio, as in Olsen's other work, the family itself has a contradictory
function, at once a source of strength and love, and a battleground between
women and men in a system exploiting both. This, of course, is a
profoundly Marxian vision; it was Marx and Engels who wrote in the
Communist Manifesto: ''The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and
education, about the hallowed relation of parent and child, becomes all the
more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties
among the proletarians are torn asunder."43The vision of the family in
Yonnondio is formed both by Olsen's own experience and by her familiarity
from childhood on with socialist ideas.
Another aspect of that vision is Olsen's treatment of the relationship
between housework and paid labor in Yonnondio. One of the novel's crucial
structural principles is the juxtaposition of men's (and women's) work in the
paid labor force and women's work in the homeespecially in the final
chapter, which shifts back and forth between Anna's canning at home, as
she tends to the demands of her older children and juggles Baby Bess on
her hip, and the hellish speedup of the packing plant where Jim works. The
overwhelming heat, prelude to the great droughts and dust storms of the
thirties, becomes a common bond of suffering. There is nothing redeeming
about the brutal and exploitative labor at the plant; Anna at least is engaged
in production of goods the family will use and in caring for children whom
she loves through her exhaustion. Olsen makes it clear that both forms of
work are essential, and that the degrading conditions of both have the same
systemic causes. If she is finally unable in Yonnondio to suggest a systemic
solution, her instincts were perhaps more historically accurate than those of
other Marxists writing in the same period.
 
 Page 172

Yonnondio, of course, is far more than ideology translated into fiction.

Olsen wrote from what she had lived, what she had seen, at last
incorporating ''the common hysteria" of factory work, the bodily nausea and
weariness, along with the incessant demands of work in the home. But her
understanding of those events, the nature of her protest, although in many
ways going beyond Communist party theory and practice of the early
thirties, could only have been deepened by the very presence in her milieu
of theory and controversy on the Woman Question.44
On the whole, in spite of the Left's demands on her time and energies, the
prescriptiveness of its more dogmatic criticism, and the androcentrism or
outright sexism of many of its spokesmen, there is no doubt but that Olsen's
Marxian perspective and experience ultimately enriched her literature. In a
talk in 1974 at Emerson College, in Boston, explaining some of the reasons
why she is a "slow" writer, she discussed without using the terminology of
the Left the differences between her own concerns and what a Marxist
would identify as bourgeois ideology:
My vision is very different from that of most writers. . . . I don't think
in terms of quests for identity to explain human motivation and
behavior. I feel that in a world where class, race, and sex are so
determining, that that has little reality. What matters to me is the kind
of soil out of which people have to grow, and the kind of climate
around them; circumstances are the primary key and not the personal
quest for identity.... I want to write what will help change that which is
harmful for human beings in our time."45
In the fifties, partly out of a spirit of opposition to the McCarthy era, and
blessed with increased time as the children grew up and there were
temporary respites from financial need, Olsen began to do the work that
gave us the serenely beautiful but still politically impassioned stories of the
Tell Me a Riddle volume. Olsen's enduring insistence that literature must
confront the material realities of people's lives as shaping circumstances,
that the very categories of class and race and sex constitute the fabric of
reality as we live it, and that litera-
 
 Page 173

ture has an obligation to deepen consciousness and facilitate social change

are part of her-and our-inheritance from the radical tradition.

Notes
1. To my knowledge, the connections between the contemporary women's
movement and the Old Left have never been sufficiently explored, although
its roots in the civil rights movement and the New Left are well
documented, as in Sara Evans's Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's
Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York:
Random House, 1979). It would be interesting, for example, to look at the
number of feminist leaders and spokeswomen with family or other personal
ties to the Old Left.
2. The earlier version of this article was delivered at a session on Women
Writers of the Left at the National Women's Studies Association convention
in Bloomington, Indiana, June 1980. Olsen's comments on that version
were made mostly during an eight-hour tape-recorded conversation in Fall
1980. I have quoted extensively from that discussion as well as from earlier
interviews, without attempting to distinguish between them.
3. ''Tillie Olsen," "A Note About This Book," Yonnondio: From the Thirties
(New York: Dell, 1975), p. 158. All references are to this edition, and page
numbers will be supplied in parentheses in the text.
4. Selma Burkom and Margaret Williams, "De-Riddling Tillie Olsen's
Writings," San Jose Studies 2 (1976): 65-83. In spite of some inaccuracies,
this important study is the best source of biographical and bibliographic
information on Olsen outside of her own writings.
5. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976); and Elaine
Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë
to Lessing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).
6. Walter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1956), p. 3; and Daniel Aaron, Writers on the
Left (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961).
7. Aaron, Writers on the Left, pp. 336-37.
 
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8. From an unmailed letter to Harriet Monroe, apparently intended as a

cover letter for poems Olsen was planning to submit for publication in
Monroe's influential Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.
9. From Elinor Langer's transcription of her introduction to a talk given by
Olsen at a Reed College symposium in Portland, Oregon, in Fall, 1978.
10. In ''Divided Against Herself: The Life Lived and the Life Suppressed,"
Moving On (April-May 1980): 15-20, 23, 1 explored the theme of the
"buried life" in women's literature, as it appears in the work of leftist
feminist writers like Olsen and Agnes Smedley. In "Tell Me a Riddle," the
buried life is Eva's engaged, articulate, political self, whereas in Smedley's
Daughter of Earth, it is the maternal, domestic self. Both works testify to
the pain of denying part of one's being, and both condemn the society that
does not allow women to be whole.
11. Burkom and Williams reprint these poems in their article "De-Riddling
Tillie Olsen"; "I Want You Women up North to Know," pp. 67-69, and
"There Is a Lesson," p. 70.
12. Tillie Lerner, "The Iron Throat," Partisan Review 1 (April-May 1934):
3-9.
13. Tillie Lerner, "Thousand-Dollar Vagrant," New Republic 80 (29 August
1934): 67-69; and "The Strike," Partisan Review 1 (September-October
1934): 3-9, reprinted in Years of Protest: A Collection of American Writings
of the 1930s, ed. Jack Salzman (New York: Pegasus, 1967), pp. 138-44.
14. Salzman, ed., Years of Protest, p. 138.
15. Ibid., p. 144.
16. One of the best accounts of the importance of these clubs for young
writers, in spite of his ultimate disillusionment with the Communist party, is
Richard Wright's 1944 essay printed in The God That Failed, ed. Richard
H. Crossman (New York: Harper, 1950).
17. This is Olsen's recollection: I did not locate the actual source.
18. Cited in Burkom and Williams, "De-Riddling Tillie Olsen," p. 71.
19. Among those who signed the call to the conference and/ or attended
were Nelson Algren, Kenneth Burke, Theodore Dreiser, Waldo Frank,
Joseph Freeman, Granville Hicks, Langston Hughes, Edwin Seaver, and
Nathaniel West.
 
 Page 175

20. Langer mentions this drawing in her talk at Reed College cited above.
Olsen has a copy of the cartoon in her files, and Salzman includes it with
twenty others in Years of Protest, p. 307.
21. The selections in Salzman's chapter on ''The Social Muse," in Years of
Protest, pp. 231-307, are well chosen to represent various positions in this
debate.
22. Rideout's discussion of the efforts of the Left to define the "proletarian
novel" is particularly helpful and more detailed than I can be here; see
Radical Novel in the United States, especially pp. 165-70.
23. Printed in Feminist Studies, 7, no. 3 (Fall 1981).
24. Burkom and Williams, "De-Riddling Tillie Olsen," p. 69.
25. Rideout, Radical Novel in the United States, pp. 171-98. In only three of
the many novels Rideout discusses do female characters play a major role:
those by Josephine Herbst.
26. From an unpublished paper by Elaine Hedges, "Meridel Le Sueur in the
Thirties," first presented at the Modern Language Association Convention
in San Francisco, December 1978.
27. Mike Gold, "Proletarian Realism," reprinted in Mike Gold: A Literary
Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International Publishers, 1972),
p. 207.
28. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in an editorial comment on this paper.
29. Elinor Langer, "'The Ruins of Memory': Josephine Herbst in the 1930s,"
unpublished; also in Langer, "If In Fact I Have Found a Heroine . .. ,"
Mother Jones 6 (May 1981), 43. Meridel Le Sueur has mentioned similar
episodes in talks at a conference on women writers at the Women's Building
in Los Angeles in 1972 and at the National Women's Studies Association
Conference in Lawrence, Kansas, 1979.
30. Robert Shaffer, "Women and Communist Party, USA, 1930-1940,"
Socialist Review 45 (May-June 1979): 93, note. I am indebted to Shaffer's
article throughout the final section of this paper.
31. Folsom, ed., Mike Gold, p. 188.
32. Ibid., p. 139.
33. See, for example, Gold's "Wilder: Prophet of the Genteel Christ," in
Salzman's Years of Protest, pp. 233-38.
34. Joseph North, New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties (New
York: International Publishers, 1969), p. 24.
 
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35. Meridel Le Sueur, in talks cited above and personal conversations with
her on those occasions; also see Hedges, ''Meridel Le Sueur in the Thirties,"
p. 7.
36. Langer, "The Ruins of Memory," p. 16.
37. In Rideout, Radical Novel in the United States, p. 189.
38. Peggy Dennis, The Autobiography of an American Communist: A
Personal View of a Political Life, 1925-1975 (Berkeley, Calif.: Creative
Arts Books, 1977), p. 294.
39. Shaffer, "Women and the Communist Party," pp. 94-96.
40. Ibid., especially pp. 104-107.
41. Ibid., p. 10.
42. Ibid., pp. 83-87. I am also grateful to historian Sherna Gluck for
discussing Inman's work and the controversy surrounding it with me.
43. This version is from Barbara Sinclair Deckard's The Women's
Movement: Political, Socioeconomic, and Psychological Issues, 2d ed.
(New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 234.
44. Olsen's concern with the Woman Question continued into the forties.
She authored for a few months in 1946 a women's column in People's
World, writing articles like "Wartime Gains of Women in Industry," and
"Politically Active Mothers-One View," which argued like Inman that
motherhood should be considered political work. Also in the forties she
participated actively in some of the organizations targeted by the
Communist party for mass work on what the party considered to be
women's issues-health and education-work related also, of course, to her
own deepest concerns.
45. From a tape transcription in Olsen's files.
 
 Page 177

ELAINE NEIL ORR

A Feminist
Spiritual Vision
I am serious about the images I make.
MIRIAM SCHAPIRO,
''Notes from a Conversation
on Art, Feminism, and Work"

The last step in this process is to leave God. I take this to

mean, in religious terms, that we have to leave the Lord
in order to find God in our brothers and sisters. We have
to give up obedience to find solidarity. We have to give
up relationships of domination, even if our role in them is
the servant's role. We have to overcome the master-
servant relationship and become one with our brothers
and sisters....
That would be a major step in the direction we have to
travel. I think what we need in order to take that step is a
new language, and feminists (both male and female) are
working hard today to develop a language that says
more clearly what it amounts to and means to leave God
for God's sake.
And so ... I ask God to make me quit of God for God's
sake. And with that I would like to close.
DOROTHEE SOELLE,
The Strength of the Weak

If spiritual Being begins in life experience, we are in the process of

disclosing the truth, the light, and the way. Human beings are then
responsible for all that is in us to be. We leave the God of dominion, power,
and priority, for divinity that is on the journey, among the people. Dorothee
Soelle, German
From Tillie Olsen and a Feminist Spiritual Vision (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of
Mississippi, 1987), 167-183.
 
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feminist theologian, says we can no longer use sentences like ''Christ is the
Son of God" as a departure for theology. She suggests that sentences
derived from human experience, like "Mrs. Schmidt has been waiting for
seventeen months for an 8-by-12 foot room in a nursing home," are more
promising beginnings for religious understandings. Such a sentence, she
says, "can lead us somewhere" in contemplating the nature of God.1
Tillie Olsen's narrative and poetic texts "can lead us somewhere" in our
search for truth, light, and way. Moments within the texts (words, images,
metaphors) and the span of the stories themselves confront us with news of
a world in which people struggle for identity and purpose. Emerging
language patterns (like life/miracle/flower) are the writer's means of
evoking in readers a comprehension like her own. The otherness we
confront in Olsen is the depth of her longing and faith arising from abused
and despised life. For readers instilled with a theological sense of our
helplessness and God's supreme power, the notion that human care and
community may be the locus for the world's and divine's recreation is alien
indeed.
Reading Olsen with a religious interest, we come to ask why it is that for so
long we have needed God to be separate from us. Why have we needed to
deny change and to fear a humane world? Why do we prefer destruction,
and why do we use God as a reason for it? In a vision of life that supposes
the expansion of Being in human becoming, we begin to wonder why it has
been assumed that divinity is diminished in human contexts. In other words,
reading a woman writer like Tillie Olsen religiously accomplishes a major
task in the present work of feminist theologians. It allows us to make "the
mysterious turn" to an entirely different way of thinking about holiness and
redemption, about beauty and salvation. Olsen's body of work is a source of
new thinking about what matters in the intertwined realms of physical and
spiritual life, about what efforts are lasting.

A Metaphorical Rendering
From the perspective of Olsen's latest period, we can fruitfully reflect upon
a metaphorical pattern that has developed
 
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through her writing, communicating a vision of human transformation.2It is

telling that the metaphors are mixed, drawn from nature and human
manufacture. Using the journey or quest motif, Olsen pictures the human
search for a viable place to be, an environment or home in which one may
grow and blossom. Inheriting an abused and broken world, people search
the past and their environment to discover what inheritances may nurture
life. The yields of the search, like the members of the community, are
threads of a whole to be woven or pieced together in a pattern of humane
coexistence. Thus, full human being, like a quilt or a mosaic, is envisioned
as a coherent and patterned search for truths faithful to human needs and
visions and leading to actions that elicit mutual well-being and wholeness.
Like Nelle Morton, who writes in a different mode, Tillie Olsen shows that
''the journey is home."3Not ends but beginnings and makings are the goal.
The way is the negotiated, not pure way of being faithful in relationship.
Movements toward human unfolding and being cast light on the journey,
disclosing what is essential and true "for human beings in our
time."4Faithfulness to one's own time and circumstance, not allegiance to
distant worlds, is the calling echoed in Olsen's literature.
JOURNEYING
To journey at one's will is an expression of freedom. At the same time,
journeying may be a quest for freedom. The literary use of journeying as a
leitmotif for human dreams and visions is standard. As reflected in a
contemporary anthology such as Myths and Motifs in Literature, the
journey or quest motif in Western literature has largely been concerned with
the individual (almost always male) and "his hopes to find the Self" through
"a slow process forward to a final goal (heaven) along a linear movement of
time."5
Recently, feminist scholars have begun to identify trends and patterns in the
female quest, as reflected in literature by women. One such study is Carol
Christ's Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual
Quest.6Christ suggests the often communal nature of women's quests and
the grounding of women's struggle in the historical reality of their
traditional voicelessness. The pattern she discovers in
 
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women's texts, however, is by and large a radical break with the past and a
mystical, futuristic naming of a new reality.
Houston A. Baker's The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and
Criticism may offer a better parallel for understanding Olsen's use of the
metaphor: ''The black writer, having attempted the journey, preserves details
of his voyage in that most manifest and coherent of all cultural
systemslanguage. Through his [sic] work we are allowed to witness, if not
the trip itself, at least a representation of the voyage that provides some
view of our emergence."7For Baker, the writer makes an "effort at return,"
which then leads to emergence. Journeys in a literature like Olsen's are the
re-presentation of historical quests, which in turn spark new worlds and
imaginative voyages. Out of people's past comes the way of journeying in
the present. Language, then, is a kind of map, a rendering of valleys and
highways, of crossroads and destinations.
A book like Nelle Morton's The Journey Is Home is a language map for
feminist scholars. It records the way women have come in recent years (to
self and other understanding and truth) and charts paths for their continued
journeying. In the process of Morton's own use of the image in relation to
women's lives, new or different meanings emerge. While we journey
politically, historically, and geographically, we also journey spiritually. In a
note at the end of her book, she writes, "Maybe 'journey' is not so much a
journey ahead, or a journey into space, but a journey into presence. The
farthest place on earth is a journey into the presence of the nearest person to
you."8These sentences are evocative for literary criticism. The reading
journey is one into presence, into the presence of characters and of their
world, where we learn as much about ourselves as about the peopled text.
Olsen's reconstructionist vision shares a basic impulse expressed by Carol
Christ in the conclusion to her book, the impulse toward integration. Olsen's
use of journeying expands the possibilities for understanding the human
quest by an integration of past and future, self and other, male and female.
Depicting in her first fiction the quest for a better life, in later stories Olsen
uses the journey to illuminate her characters' communal struggles for
understanding and for a sense of meaningful participation in life.
 
 Page 181

A journey bridges the first two settings of Yonnondio. Though there are
other brief episodes of happiness in the novel, this scene (Chapter 3) is
uniquely joyful, marked by singing and bodies in relationship: ''Willie
slumbered against Mazie's shoulder. Ben drowsily had his head in her lap,
staring into the depthless transparent green above. . . . . 'Roses love
nightwinds, violets love dew, angels in heaven, know I love you.' Their
voices were slow curving rhythms, slow curving sounds. Voices, rising and
twining, beauty curving on rainbows of quiet sound" (38). Throughout the
chapter, the emphasis is less on the passage from place to place than on the
community created by the travel. The family's bodily support of one another
is imagized in the twining voices. The passage suggests an understanding of
human bondedness and the possibility of human cooperation.
Mazie is infused with feelings of expansion: "[She] stood up, her hands on
the wagon seat, screaming with delight. The wind came over her body with
a great rush of freedom" (35). A range of nature imagessnow, wind,
rainbow, sunshinepoints to the characters' anticipation and wonder as they
travel. The girl, in particular, senses the flow of life's energies and intuits
her connection with the vast possibilities of the new geography.
Joyous, exhilarating, the journey is portrayed from Mazie's perspective as a
wondrous moment, for Anna it is a hallmark of the future: "with bright eyes
[she] folded and unfolded memories of past yearsplans for the years to
come" (38). The family's search is for work, home, schooling, for identity
and connection. In their moving, the Holbrooks express their dearest hopes:
"A new life . . . in the spring" (38). Thus the journey is metaphoric of the
desire for opportunity and renewal. They hope not merely for survival, but
for beginning and building: "lovely things to keep, brass lamps, bright
tablecloths, vines over the doors, and roses twining" (38). Things of
material beauty suggest a sense of permanence and belonging, where
children can ponder questions and invite their souls to wander, where
relationships that offer sustenance for life can be fostered.
In the Holbrooks' journeying, two human quests are metaphorically
intertwined: one, the necessary quest for sus-
 
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taining work, a living wage, and the other, the desire to begin anew, to find
a life of meaning characterized by mutual caring and abundant yields. As
the journey for work is described, certain characteristics of the human quest
for meaning are suggested. Mazie experiences release, boundlessness, and
contentment as they travel. Furthermore, the journey is characterized by
solidarity, by human community and interdependence. Mazie helps her
father when the wheels are stuck, and Anna shelters the children bodily
when it snows.
In the story of Whitey, the journeying metaphor reflects the hopes of the
past. The sailor once felt connected to others in his work because they
shared ''the brotherhood." What was good for one was good for all. Now
that the camaraderie has disintegrated, he struggles to sustain meaning in
his life. He is like a wrecked vessel, no longer able to make himself "feel
good" because the adventure and community his travels once embodied are
no longer intact. Without the community he once knew, the journeying of
his present is empty.
The steerage ship of Eva's story connects her past journey for political
freedom with her present quest for selfidentity. A former embarkment,
made in desperation, now signifies the way Eva must travel to gain a sense
of herself and of the belief that has given her life meaning. What she
discovers is an unshakable faith in human beings. Though her present
journey is singular, it gains its meaning from the movement of thousands
toward freedom and dignity. We might understand the journey's conclusion
to signify Olsen's own faith. Searching for meaning, Eva finds that the
quester (herself) finds meaning by sharing with others the same struggle for
freedom. She (and Olsen) embody the truth that the "purpose" of freedom is
to create it for others."9Thus, Eva's spiritual search suggests that to
understand the journey of one's life is to see it in the context of movements
larger than oneself.
As readers, we journey into Eva's world. Reading fosters journeying into
another's presence. In "Tell Me a Riddle," we are invited into Eva's human
heart, to learn of her understandings, pains, and hopes. The result is an
expansion of our own journeying. Meeting another on her way, we have
made
 
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a detour on our own. Thus we might say that reading fictive worlds teaches
sympathy born out of interruption. Practicing a willed suspension of our
own world, we enter the otherness of a new world, thinking and feeling as
another. Journeys are thus intertwined, and we carry in our minds the
crossed paths of self and other.
While Eva's personal hope is symbolized by the socialist dream, Stevie's
journey begins at the personal level and expands toward a vision of
universal quest through imagistic association with animal and plant worlds
and the significant relations of this life. The longer light of spring,
accompanying the boy's quest for a place and for the knowledge that he is
connected with others by love, points to the metaphysical depth of the story.
Through the settings of junkyard and cemetery, journeying becomes a
metaphor not only for the living but for the hopes of the dead, whose
memory sparks the present search for meaning and for a feeling of
continuity.
The journeys of Olsen's characters are marked by struggle and community.
Employing the quest as a leitmotif of American literature, the writer
revitalizes its metaphoric potential by offering an unlikely set of vehicles:
the poor, minorities, women, and children. The incoherent chantings of an
old Jewish immigrant woman, the vision of an eightyear-old girl or a
fourteen-year-old boy, the desires of a povertystricken woman, balancing a
baby on her hip, a union sailor, reeling drunk, whose quest he no longer
understands: these are the people whose journeying Olsen depicts as the
essential human quest for freedom, place, and meaning. She makes us feel
the desire ''for mattering" from their perspectives and shows the springs of
hope flowing, almost miraculously, from their lives. These questers come in
groups, struggling together as family: mother/daughter, husband/wife,
friend/ friend. The black church in "O Yes" is emblematic of communal
journeying, where everyone is brought along: the old, the sick, the infant.
In her notes, Olsen has written, "In the human being is an irrepressible
desire for freedom that breaks out century after century." 10 In her fiction
she shows that desire to be not merely for freedom from want, hunger, and
fear, but freedom
 
 Page 184

for fulfillment, expression, and community. Using women's, children's, and

working-class perspectives, Olsen transforms the vision of human longing
from solitary to community questing. Through the lens of domestic needs,
limitations, and promises, Olsen suggests that the movement toward
freedom is most genuine and realistically promising as an inclusive journey
that begins where people are the weakest and least fortunate.
In Silences, Olsen writes of ''the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to
come into being, but cannot" (6), suggesting that the human quest is the
journey into Being, into authentic and expressive selfhood. When she writes
of the desire for "spaciousness that puts no limit to vision" (102), she
evokes for us an image of creativity in geographical terms. Imaginative
work needs room without a roof. The journeys inward and outward reflect
similar truths. Movement, change, and possibility are core human needs that
are also liberations. In the modern world, many take for granted the sense of
expansiveness gained in travel. But in sympathy with people who are
denied journeying, as today black South Africans (and others) are and as
Olsen's people are, we may remember the power of the journey to express
the human movement into holiness.
BLOSSOMING
The flowerwitness Emerson's rhodorais a symbol of beauty and fulfillment
as well as vulnerability, the time of blossoming the apex of the plant's
development and the glory of its existence. To speak of human blossoming
is to suggest the natural beauty of our selves, even more, abundance and
future fruition. Olsen's use of the image is prophetic, suggesting the
condition of life as it should be, not as it is. In the world of her characters,
the hope of blossoming is slim; parents witness the atrophy of children's
talents because the world garden denies them the nourishment that might
help them grow and flourish. For now, "the time is drought or blight or
infestation." 11 But if the "subterranean forces" are fed, if the "rootlets of
reconnaissance" are showered, "the mysterious turn" may occur, and a time
of blossoming be ushered in.12 Like other organic images literarily
employed, blossoming suggests
 
 Page 185

cycles of growth, bounty, and return, pointing to the interrelationships of

seed, soil, and flower, of child, environment, and future yield. While the
metaphor has often been used, Olsen's employment of it in contexts of
depletion, exhaustion, and death offers new insights.
Alice Walker's use of organic imagery may be used as an interpretive grid
for Olsen. Writing about art and women, Walker uses the imagery of seed
and flower: ''And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than
not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they
themselves never hoped to see."13In the next paragraphs she offers her
mother's gardens as the source of the imagery:
Whatever she planted grew as if by magic, and her fame as a grower of flowers spread over
three counties. Because of her creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are
seen through a screen of blooms...

I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, . . .
involved in work her soul must have. 14

The connection Walker makes between her mother's work and her soul,
between art and deep human need, suggests an understanding of the
organic/spiritual connection as more than a literary device. The connection
is rooted in human being. The work of hands feeds the spirit, blending body
and soul in radiance.
The singular moment of repose experienced by Mazie and Anna in
Yonnondio follows their discovery of catalpa blossoms "scattered in the
green." The flowers' fragrance and beauty transport Anna back to her
childhood, making it possible for her to abandon the worried present and
feel for a moment with her daughter the wonder of the universe: "Up from
the grasses, from the earth, from the broad tree trunk at their back, latent
life streamed and seeded. The air and self shone boundless. Absently, her
mother stroked; stroked unfolding, wingedness, boundlessness" (119). The
description combines
 
 Page 186

images drawn from flower and butterfly. Petals and wing ''unfold," flowers
"seed," and the butterfly's compass is "boundless." The girl, like the budded
flower, contains within the capacity to come to fruition. Here and elsewhere
in Olsen's writing, blossoming signifies the potential for wholeness and
holiness in human beings.
At the close of the story "I Stand Here Ironing," the blossoming metaphor is
the mother's way of expressing her daughter's capacity. Reflecting her
hopes and fears, the protagonist pleads, "Let her be. So all that is in her will
not bloombut in how many does it?" (20-21). Earlier she thought of the
girl's gift for pantomime as too often "clogged and clotted," not "used and
growing" (19). In this story, the association of flower and girl yields
ambivalent meanings. She may not grow at all, she may grow but never
come to fulfillment, or she may blossom fully, like Anna's catalpa.
The mother's fear and her negative expression of the Metaphor"so all that is
in her will not bloom"is reflected in Olsen's essay about her mother's death.
Describing her mother's life, Olsen writes of "that common everyday
nightmare of hardship, limitation, longing; of baffling struggle to raise six
children in a world hostile to human unfolding."15The allusion to the
metaphor is slight but recognizable: human unfolding is an image drawn
from nature. It is the normal condition in favorable circumstances where,
like flowers, children may grow and blossom. But because our world
unnaturally limits potential in children by preferring war and destruction to
creativity, the blossoms of humanity wither prematurely or never come to
flower at all. Some may be skeptical of the seemingly romantic view that
most children are born with vast creative potential. From Olsen's
perspective, what is unbelievable is the bomb, mass indifference, wholesale
destruction. In a deep hearing of her literary voice, we perceive how twisted
is the "truth" of greed, competition, and slaughter that directs so much
human behavior.
Reading a passage from the last pages of Yonnondio, cognizant of Olsen's
continued use of the metaphor in later work, we are able to see blossoming
and its denial as a metaphorical lens for human potential and what threatens
it:
 
 Page 187

Bang!

Bess who has been fingering a fruit-jar lidabsently, heedlessly drops itaimlessly groping
across the table, reclaims it again. Lightning in her brain. She releases, grabs, releases, grabs.
I can do. Bang! I did that. I can do. I! . . . That noise! In triumphant, astounded joy she
clashes the lid down. Bang, slam, whack. . . . . human ecstasy of achievement; . . . I can do. I
use my powers. I! I! Wilder, madder, happier the bangs [153].

Against the family's poverty and the story's preoccupation with losses and
limitations, the brief episode of unfolding human potential is a reminder of
the latent powers in human life. Like the unfolding of one petal, the first
lesson is only the beginning of the blossom. But in her environment, will
Bess continue to flower? Coming back to the story from Olsen's later fiction
and the probing question of the unnamed mother in ''I Stand Here Ironing,"
the reader is undoubtedly led to ask the question.
When in later addresses or talks, Olsen refers to "fullness of life,"
"thwarting of the human," or "the sense of one's unused powers," the
blossoming metaphor from her first fiction is evoked. 16 Expression,
creativity, and purposeful action are the human values to which Olsen gives
imagistic expression in terms of the flower's full maturation and glory. In
"Tell Me a Riddle," Eva's speech evokes the metaphor when she, dying,
pleads with David: "So strong for what? To rot not grow?"
Olsen gives interpretation to her metaphors in many of her unpublished
texts. In personal notes, she writes of "[t]he irrepressible little ones in whom
all the art qualities are ... germinal." But experience has taught her that
often family circumstances, more than potential, determine what one will
become. In children, she sees "the passion for language, for imitation,
make-believe acting, deft use of the body, love of rhythm, music."17 As a
seed whose germination and growth depend almost entirely on favorable
conditions, the child whose potential is miraculously given at birth, depends
on a
 
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world of encouragement and means if he or she is to grow in health. The

''word" of the human infant spoken into the world is an act of divine faith.
Our faithfulness or unfaithfulness lies in our human response to that word.
In language reflective of Eva's, Olsen uses the organic image for cosmic
questioning: "Has it always been this: this world of winter, only breaking on
the new life toward the longer light, the warmth, the blossoming"? 18 If the
world is a great seed, the light is the morality of valuing each human being,
and warmth, the sustenance of human caring.
The miraculous rebirth of dead objects in "Requa" makes it possible to
believe in the resurrection of human potentials. Even dirt has a life wish,
and junk desires the holiness of being made useful. Through Stevie's eyes,
we see beauty in rust patterns and the mystery of decay. All about are living
clues to the cycles of death and rebirth that turn the universe. Seeing his
own worth reflected in his uncle's face, Steve learns a central lesson of life:
others need caring for, too. Reciprocating Wes's attention reflects Stevie's
most difficult journey into another's presence; his blossoming is intimated
by his unfolding from isolation and reaching out to others. Thus his story
expands our sense of the religious dimension of human flowering, since the
moral principles of shared responsibility and mutual enhancement are the
truths that elicit Stevie's own resurrection.
In portraits of human struggle, Olsen shows some, like Eva and Whitey,
who know the feelings of waste and untapped potential. Others, like Emily,
Carol, Jeannie, and Steve, seem to span our lives and pose a question that
waits for the reader's reply. How might those whose lives are still before
them bring their gifts to bear on the world and find their paths of
righteousness?
PIECING
Repairing, patching, and sewing, work that women have traditionally
performed in the home, are all piecing activities. Piece goods are materials
purchased by the yard to be patterned, cut, and sewn, especially into
garments. But any creativity that combines parts into a whole may be
understood metaphorically as piecing. Olsen's use of the image brings a
 
 Page 189

historically female sphere of work to consciousness as a perspective for

viewing human activity and values. The metaphor implies reconstruction,
since in Olsen's world, the characters seldom piece new goods but rather
sort through discards and make something new from something old.
The quilt is a most salient work of piecing. Colorful and patterned, it
symbolizes not only the human ingenuity that creates something of use out
of something old, but as a finished product, it suggests an eye for the beauty
and harmonious design that characterize human creativity. While all of
these meanings are suggested in Olsen's employment of the metaphor, more
dramatically, she suggests a morality of reappropriation: choosing from the
past usable patterns for life in the modern present.
Miriam Schapiro, a contemporary artist, expresses a similar morality and
evokes the imagery of piecing in describing her own movement to feminist
consciousness in her work: ''The new work was different from anything I
had done before. I worked on canvas, using fabric. I wanted to explore and
express a part of my life which I had always dismissedmy homemaking, my
nesting. I wanted to validate the traditional activities of women, to connect
myself with the unknown women artists who made quilts, who had done the
invisible 'women's work' of civilization."19 Schapiro's collage style is drawn
from the historical work of foremothers (including their quilting) and seeks
to integrate the values of their traditional lives with her current feminist
perspectives. Using more than one medium and fabrics and objects out of
women's traditional contexts, Schapiro's "piecing" on canvas is like Olsen's
in word.
Olsen warns against the danger of glorifying one aspect of women's work
(homemaking) or overemphasizing one creative expression of women (like
needlework), while not encouraging women in different ways of making
art. Schapiro's use of a piecing style seems important, however, in that it
gives her a female tradition and allows her to claim a part of herself that she
had not expressed before (the caring angel). Olsen's use of the metaphor in
word and image appears, as it does with Schapiro, to grow out of her
experience in female contexts, though she expands it in her universal vision.
 
 Page 190

In the second chapter of Yonnondio, as the family works desperately to gain

the necessary money for moving, we are given this narrative depiction of
Anna's participation: ''Somehow to skimp off of everything that had long
ago been skimped on, somehow to find more necessities the body can do
easiest without. The old quilt will make coats for Mazie and Ben, Will can
wear Mazie's old one. This poverty's arithmetic for Anna" (26). The gift
Anna brings to a limited situation is her ability to create something of use
out of what she has, to divide and multiply fragments. The quilt, already
something made of fragments and leftovers, can be remade as two coats, a
girl's coat can be converted into a boy's.
Children, like their parents, learn the art of making something out of scraps
and leftovers:
On the dump there is Jinella's tent, Jinella's mansion, Jinella's roadhouse, Jinella's pagan
island, Jinella's palace, whatever Jinella wills it to be that day. Flattened tin cans, the labels
torn off to show the flashing silver, are strung between beads and buttons to make the
shimmering, showy entrance curtains. Here sometimes, . . . Mazie is admittedif she brings
something for the gunny sack. The gunny sack . . . stuffed with "properties": blond wood-
shaving curls, moldering hats, raggy teddies, torn lace curtains (for trains and wedding
dresses), fringes, tassels, stubs of lipstick, wrecks of high-heeled shoes and boots, lavish
jewelry. (127)

Like an artist or a "bricoleur," Jinella determines the name of what she

creates, as she strings tin cans, beads, and buttons to form a chain curtain,
brings together the worn old toy and lady's lipstick stub to form her
treasure, or turns a bit of lace into a bride's veil.20She is a namer of her
worldmansion, palace, roadhouseand by naming creates her reality.
Through Jinella's cunning, if desperate, imagining, Olsen points to the
unique human ability to make and create. Furthermore, the writer uses the
girl's piecing to reflect the value of cast-off junk, still recognizable to the
discerning eye.
The piecing imagery of the Yonnondio passages is evoked in "O Yes" by a
description of voices raised together in
 
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song. The passage reminds us of the Holbrooks' intertwined voices as they

journeyed to the farm. In ''O Yes," the young protagonist ponders: "If it
were a record she would play it over and over,. . . to untwine the
intertwined voices, to search how the many rhythms rock apart and yet are
one glad rhythm" (50). Twining is an action of lapping and turning, yet it
brings separate, even disparate, pieces together and suggests the intention of
combining. The pieces intertwined may be characteristically the same, as a
rope or chain, or they may, as voices, be different. What is pieced together
in "O Yes," through song, sermon, and scripture, is a message, a plea by the
black community for ultimate justice on earth as well as in heaven.
The "spinning" preacher's voice elicits in Carol's mind a tapestry of
childhood games: "Tag. Thump of the volleyball. Ecstasy of the jump rope"
(52). In Carol's thought, words and images are combined that will in the end
remind her of her allegiances and responsibilities. The twining voices,
singing of justice and humanity, metaphorize Carol's moral situation: she
must choose from the past what will direct her future. Similarly, Alva's
dream is drawn from pieces or fragments of experience: her own pregnancy,
loneliness and poverty; the diminutive guide who leads her to paradise with
parade stick and motorcycle; the convey line and the damned souls.
Furthermore, in an interview Olsen has remarked that her writing of the
passage came about as a combination of stories she had heard from black
women.21 Thus, the writer's method reflects her characters', and vice versa:
choosing images and thoughts from the past and weaving them into a
coherent, if also paradoxical, narrative for understanding life.
In "Tell Me a Riddle," we are told of Eva's "one social duty . . . the boxes of
old clothes left with her, as with the lifepracticed eye for finding what is
still wearable within the worn . . . she scans and sortsthis for rag or
rummage, that for mending and cleaning, and this for sending away." Eva's
sorting is reminiscent of Anna's piecing, looking for what can be remade or
used again. Looking through the old clothes, Eva's sorting reflects not only
the artistry of Anna's novel use of an older object, but also a sense of human
interconnectedness. When she looks through the clothes for what can still
be
 
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used, she reflects the human moral choice to bring need into alignment with
resource. From this perspective, we conclude politically and religiously that
an imbalance or nonalignment of goods and people is evil, and that in
regaining the original holiness/wholeness and promise of the universe, we
are responsible to right such imbalance.
Stevie's rebirth is elicited by sustained use of piecing imagery. Acts leading
to wholenessbringing parts together, teaching a skill, meeting human
needsare the seeds of holiness. Because individual human wholeness cannot
be fully and timelessly achieved, the human community must impart
wholeness, offering the individual a place in the pattern of life. Moving
from the domestic sphere to the contexts of industry and technological
waste, Olsen universalizes the metaphor, making clear her vision of
redemption as the historical and material reconstruction of beauty and
health out of waste and brokenness.
The metaphor of piecing contributes to the moral vision Olsen describes in
her interviews and talks. Her first sentence is structurally parallel with
Anna's thought (what can be saved, what cannot) in these remarks: ''Our
situation . . . is: what do we keep, what do we discard. What is going
backward, what narrows us, limits us, makes us too liable to hatreds,
bigotries, closing off, not recognizing what the central enemy is, where our
allies lie, where our common humanity lies."22
Olsen's view of intergenerational responsibility may also be interpreted in
terms of"piecing." She understands that the dreams and struggles of
revolutionaries form the basis, indeed are the beginnings, of our present
struggle, knowledge, and hope.23Like Will's coat converted from Mazie's,
such an attitude suggests that we inherit possibilities and hopes from the
previous generation. Our task is to sort, discard, and piece, to find what is
fitting for a life of commitment to human unfolding, and out of our
inheritance, to weave a garment for today.
Women have long been needleworkers. They have designed their art for
beauty and warmth. Piecing images, Olsen is a word worker, a designer of
life in fiction, poetry, and report. Like earlier women workers, she starts
with what is
 
 Page 193

needed. Her vision of truth and beauty begins with the essentials: voice,
place, affirmation, warmth, light, way.
A MOSAIC OF MEANINGS
Journeying, blossoming, and piecing together suggest the vision evoked by
Olsen's writing. Each elicits a matrix of meanings that can be used
effectively as an interpretive grid for reading Olsen's stories. Viewed
together, their meanings offer a way of understanding three central and
interwoven concepts in Olsen's writing, and ''lead us somewhere" in
religious ponderings: journeying suggests the struggle for place, identity,
and community engaging all humanity, while blossoming reflects the hope
for each individualand for the whole earthto attain fulfillment and to
become whole. The piecing metaphor points to a new spirituality wherein
individual and community gain grace and freedom through patterns of life
that are mutually enhancing. Faithfully sorting from the past what is usable
for a new earth, a new humanity, and a new sense of divinity, we gain the
transcendence of Spirit as the miraculous power that makes things new.
Together, the metaphors evoke a set of meanings. All point to human
desires for coherence, pattern, continuity, fullness, and connection. All
suggest a sense of intergenerational responsibility. The roots of future
generations are planted today, and the direction and resources of the present
generation were yielded from the past. Human responsibility flows both
waystoward root and blossompast and future. The dead are not lost as long
as we struggle in their name, and bondage to time is overcome in faithful
telling of the dreams that inspirit us.
The metaphors imply moving, direction, and purpose. They are historical
images connecting resource and yield, nature and creativity. Earth and
human, ancestor and grandchild, material and intellect, male and female are
bound in imagistic visions. And in each, the desire for "more" compels
human action. Olsen's metaphors reflect her own representative hope for
her characters and suggest the ultimate vision inspiring her fiction: a
universe in which we act as though human quests are the very matter of
truth and where no person, no hope, is ultimately lost.
 
 Page 194

Wholeness is holiness, the words describe an existence in which no part is

broken, impaired, injured, or useless. Rather, every element, resource,
action, decision, person is remembered and integrated.
The vision offered by the metaphors sustains the actual and often despairing
struggles of the characters and thus is a lens for a liberation theology, which
begins where people today struggle for bread, civil rights, and freedom of
expression. To integrate the seeming conflict between vision and historical
reality, Olsen draws her images as a paradox: beauty is created from
seeming ugliness, the hope for a new life is born out of degradation and
despair, the ''pieces" that may mold a better world come from fragmented
lives of hurt and disease, even from the graves of our ancestors.

Conclusion
The miraculous is not, for Olsen, the extraordinary, but the ordinary: birth,
small acts of kindness forged in darkness and loss, learning, art, songs of
faith, moments of meditation, creativity in all of its forms. Everyday life is
the miracle she limns and celebrates.
The morality her writing elicits transcends all human-made divisions and
depends upon the possibility that people can become essentially caring.
Olsen's stories and prose offer an understanding of what is right as what
enhances human growth and potential. Thus, her vision points to experience
and need as the legislators of morality. In our reading, we have called the
powers of life and sustenance (in traditional language, God) the
encouraging presence of love evolving with humanity in the quest for
fulfillment and beauty. Human responsibility, then, is for nothing less than
the co-creation of the world. In such a vision of possibility, all actions have
ultimate potential because they make us who we are; they give us identity
and purpose.
It is only a step from Olsen's moral understanding to her prophetic vision.
Mutual love and care will not only make possible more abundant living
individually but will redeem the struggles of generations before who have
striven for a more humane and beneficent universe, transforming all human
 
 Page 195

losses into an expansive pattern of living, which we continue with our own
lives. Thus are we participants in the ongoing struggle of humanity and of
God to be free and committed, independent and yet bound in relation to
those things that concern Being most deeply.
Critical to the religious awareness Olsen's writing offers are the characters,
settings, dilemmas, themes, and metaphors drawn from and reflecting
historical female experience in domestic spheres. For example, while
socialist Jewish men often broke radically with traditional religious practice
and the sacred spaces and texts of orthodox religious understanding, Jewish
women were never full participants in that religious life. Like most
American women of the same period, turn-ofthe-century Jewish women
attracted to new ideologies still largely maintained their life activities in the
spheres of action and with the values they had traditionally inhabited and
sustained. The sacred space of Olsen's foremothers, like the stories they
wrote with their lives, were primarily, though never exclusively, domestic.
Bringing to light the essential values and ethics of women's caretaking as
well as the hindrances, encumbrances, and silences of mothering, Olsen's
fictioninsofar as we interpret its implications for understanding the depth
dimension of human lifegives critical voice to a religious consciousness
arising out of women's historical experience. Its criticism of religion is a
criticism of traditional, male-dominated religions, and its prophetic vision
of blossoming life reveals a spiritual understanding that has long
undergirded and empowered women: the belief that making life possible is
a holy activity. The feminist bent of Olsen's world attitude simply extends
that belief to women's own lives. It is also holy to nurture oneself and to ask
for encouragement from others that one may experience one's own
fulfillment.
We may, as Olsen's writing imagines, hear the voices of truth, like Mazie, in
the wind, or, as Alva does, receive a divine message from a child. Some still
need another to speak for them because they cannot yet speak for
themselves. But Tillie Olsen's vision is for a world in which we
ourselvesmen and womenare born in our own voices, as we search for
truths that may redeem us in our own stories of faith.
 
 Page 196

Olsen is one writer who has told her truth. Other women writersvoices out
of Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and elsewhereare telling their
stories. We have much to learn from them of truth, journey, spirit, and way.
In the past we have feared this plenitude, preferring instead one text, one
truth, one way (all male authored in our Western Jewish and Christian
traditions). It is time to read new stories and old stories newly told. It is
time for the truth in women's lives to find hearing and voice. Why do we
fear expansiveness, Tillie Olsen's literature asks. What small God binds our
hands and mouths, fearing human talents? Mysteries remain; O1sen's world
offers no new idols. Instead her vision frees us to imagine our lives as if our
living mattered, as if our care leads to care and our hope to hope. Every life
is a potential text for understanding the depths of human longing and
possibility, and human actions undertaken in the Spirit of Holiness are the
hope of our salvation.

Notes
1. Dorothee Soelle, The Strength of the Weak: Toward a Christian Feminist
Identity, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Press,
1984), p. 91.
2. Page references to Olsen's books given in the remainder of the chapter
are to the editions noted in the bibliography. The Olsen entries in this
casebook's bibliography correspond to the editions Orr uses.
3. The phrase is the title of Morton's recent book.
4. Olsen's phrase.
5. Myths and Motifs in Literature, ed. David J. Burrows, Frederick R.
Lapides, and John T. Showcross (New York: The Free Press, 1973), p. 135.
6. Christ does not suggest a monolithic understanding of women's questing
but carefully asserts that she is describing ''a common pattern" in women's
literature. Christ, Diving Deep and Surfacing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980).
7. Houston A. Baker, The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and
Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 1.
 
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8. Nelle Morton, The Journey Is Home (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), p.

227.
9. Bernard Malamud, The Fixer, quoted in James Cone, God of the
Oppressed (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), p. 147.
10. From Olsen's personal files, written in the seventies or early eighties.
11. Olsen, Silences, p. 6.
12. Olsen's phrases, used in the first chapter of Silences, where she speaks
of her own experience.
13. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (San Diego: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1983), p. 240.
14. Ibid., p. 241.
15. Olsen, ''Dream-Vision," p. 261.
16. These phrases come from notes or transcriptions of talks in Olsen's
personal files.
17. From Olsen's personal files.
18. From Olsen's personal files.
19. Miriam Schapiro, "Notes from a Conversation on Art, Feminism, and
Work," in Working It Out, ed. Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1977), p. 296.
20. In French, a "bricoleur" is a Jack of all trades, a professional do-it-
yourself person. Claude Levi-Strauss uses the concept of "bricolage" to
describe the human process of creativity and coming to knowledge that is
practiced by one who, with limited resources, puts things together in novel
ways. See "The Science of the Concrete" in The Savage Mind (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 16-33.
21. Tillie Olsen, telephone interview with the author, July 1984.
22. Tillie Olsen. Quoted by Naomi Rubin, "A Riddle of History for the
Future," Sojourner (July 1983): 4.
23. Rubin makes this point in her summary introduction of Olsen in "Riddle
of History."
 
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JOANNE TRAUTMANN BANKS

Death Labors
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. ELIOT,
''Little Gidding" *

They look so different on the page, these two seemingly similar stories. 1
Tolstoy's paragraphs are long, his sentences complete and declarative, his
words richly abundant. His page is filled in. In contrast, Olsen works with
empty space as if it were as important an element as language. Many of her
sentences are fragments, italicized, parenthetical. These are not only styles
of writing for Tolstoy and Olsen; they are also, as I hope to show, styles of
living for their main characters. It is the deepest irony that in order to die
well, the characters must reconstituteeven repudiatethe very styles that the
authors have used so brilliantly.
It is all, finally, a matter of identity. Can these two people, Olsen's old
woman2and Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych (or can any of us, for that matter), die as
they (or we) have lived? Can they carry into the last scene of their lives'
dramas the same roles, the same selves, that they have built with such
energy in the preceding acts? Tolstoy and Olsen say "no." The people who
go to meet death in these stories are not the people who
From Literature and Medicine 9 (1990): 162-171.

* Excerpt from "Little Gidding" in Four Quartets, copyright © 1943 by T. S. Eliot and
renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
Inc.
 
 Page 200

existed before their illnesses intervened. Cancer has challenged every

dimension of their lives.
Before her cancer, the old woman in ''Riddle" had largely based her identity
on her service to others, rather than on her own primary needs. The field
theory psychologists, who believe that one's personhood can be explained
as the focus of one's relationships, would probably find her a clear instance
of their concepts.3As Olsen develops her, however, the elements of her
identity are loosely connected. There are significant spaces between them.
There is a literal one, for instance, in her geographical identity. The early
part of her life was spent in revolutionary Russia; all the rest, in America.
Metaphorically, the experience in America is separated by a vast space from
her intellectual, political life in Russia. Even apparently intimate spaces are
wide. To her daughter's statement that the mother lived all her life for
people, she replies, "'Not with'" (italics mine). The spaces are not precisely
voids, any more than the spaces between Olsen's paragraphs mark major
hiatuses. Some sort of meaning inheres in them. But, like Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's play of that name about Hamlet, the old
woman has perhaps not been the main character in her own drama. She has
had to work out her identity in the parentheses, as it were, between other
people's utterances. She has found her self in life's interstices.
The same phenomenon can be described in terms of space's correlative,
time. There was never time in the old woman's life to finish a project in the
way she would have preferred, seldom time even to finish reading a story
by her favorite, Chekhov, let alone live a life of the mind. She believes that
all her life she has been "forced to move to the rhythms of others,"4and thus
there are major discontinuities in her experience of her self.
"Discontinuity"that's Olsen's term. In her study of the barriers to creativity,
she suggests that discontinuity is a pattern imposed on women's lives.5In
context, it's clear that she means women whose lives are defined for many
of their adult years by maternal exigencies and the Sisyphean tasks of daily
housekeeping. She cites the old woman in "Riddle" as an instance. In her
case, the discontinuities and spaces are the inevitable consequences of
having so many children to raise
 
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in a condition of constant poverty, and with a passionate husband (she

grants that his desires are the ''most beguiling" interruption of them all). She
is an "outsider" not only because of her gender and her class, but also
because of her Jewishness.6Even within that tradition, she is an outsider, an
atheist who spits on religion's conventions as oppressive. Outsiders prowl
the circle of society, taking on such identities as they have in opposition and
at great cost to creativity.
Then comes the cancer. When the disease is doing its initial damage, the old
woman does not, of course, know about itat least in the usual sense of
"knowing." She knows in terms of D. H. Lawrence's fleshly knowing.7Her
body has a consciousness of sorts, and it immediately begins to
communicate with her mind: in concert they prepare to die. For instance,
there is good reason to blame the agitation she feels on outside causes,
namely, her husband's insistence that they sell the house where she feels
comfortable and move to a retirement community. But she wonders "if the
tumult was outside, or in her." She "knows" she has cancer. It "knocks" on
"the great ear pressed inside." Because of its insistence, she begins to
explore her life and to rebuild the identity she will need in the near and
urgent future.
But "explore" implies cognitive acuity, and the old woman's disease
eventually attacks that function. Early on, as is common in age, her recent
memories fade in favor of those from long ago, and finally she expresses
herself only in isolated snippets. It would seem that in a grotesque extension
of her lifelong habits, her identity in the final days lies scattered around her,
as ifin a phrase of Yeats from another context entirely"the centre cannot
hold" ("The Second Coming"). And yet she is exploring. "'No pills, let me
feel what I feel."' Even in neurological disarray, the old woman has the
power she needs.
Significantly, her given name is not revealed until now, when the story is
nearly over. She has always been "Ma" or one of a series of insulting
epithets hurled by her husband in their mutual game of bitterness"Mrs.
Unpleasant," "Mrs. Excited Over Nothing," "Mrs. Word Miser." Her name
is Eva.
Eva's job, her last one, is to recollect herself. She accepts this position
without question. It is what she must do
 
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before she can die meaningfully. Her method will be to undo, to reverse in
some ways, and to balance the style by which she has lived thus far. That is,
she will fill in some of the gaps in space and time that have prevented her
from having a solid self. She will attempt to connect the prose of her life as
a beleaguered mother and wife with the poetry that somehow still fuels her.8
At her core there is solitude. But it is not, she discovers, the same thing as
emptiness. In fact, at this stage of her life, she relishes it, refusing to give it
up by moving to a communal life, even creating it artificially, if necessary,
by turning off her hearing aid. She senses that from the silence will come
the identity she needs: ''in the reconciled solitude, to journey to herself."
Eva moves, instinctively Olsen seems to suggest, to the ocean's edge, there
to look "toward the shore that nurtured life as it first crawled toward
consciousness the millions of years ago." Eva is herself engaged in seeking
her beginnings.
Soon the necessary data come. Though they come in scraps, they also come
in torrents-words from beloved books and speeches, music from her
idealistic youth. Her husband is shocked; she has not spoken of these things
for decades. Hiding in the body of this frail, embittered, and normally silent
woman is the young girl with noble dreams for humankind. She has
survived all this time in the memory cells. At this point, Olsen introduces a
poetic image for a scientific truth: it seems to Eva's husband that "for
seventy years she had hidden a tape recorder, infinitely microscopic, within
her, that it had coiled infinite mile on mile, trapping every song, every
melody, every word read, heard, and spoken." The memories are so intense
that they are almost real presences for Eva in her deteriorating but (or
therefore?) receptive state. She is reunited in this sense with her girlhood
friend and mentor, the aristocratic rebel Lisa, for whom, because she is a
follower of Tolstoy, knowledge is holy and to be shared among all classes.
If times and spaces have thereby been reconnected for Eva, the achievement
has been bought at a terrible price. This woman, whose hands were always
busy with a child, now can scarcely bear to touch one. In Sylvia Plath's
memorable image from "Three Women," a baby's cries are "hooks that
catch and grate like cats." Eva's grandchildren are vessels of vitality,
 
 Page 203

from which she knows she must detach herself. The full context of a phrase
already quoted is: ''Somewhere coherence, transport, meaning. If they
would but leave her in the air now stilled of clamor, in the reconciled
solitude, to journey to herself." One grandchild entreats her to tell him a
riddle, but she is not playful. She has not time for life's inherent
ambiguities. Her task requires that she leave even her husband. As he
listens to the "tape recorder" of her past, he hears nothing of their
springtime love or their joyful hours as a family. For him, it is the moment
of bitterest grief. By her last day, Eva has left present time entirely. She is
now ready to enter the final turnstile, as she must, alone.
It would be wrong to conclude that Ivan Ilych has the simpler task just
because for most of his life he has a more secure sense of self. I am inclined
to think, as a matter of fact, that constructing an identity from scraps is
easier than dismantling a rigid one. But the latter is precisely what Ivan
Ilych must do if he is to die in peace.
His problem has its origins, as Eva's did, in the literary choices made by the
author. It is almost as if a certain style of dying is irrevocably linked with
certain aesthetic conventions. Olsen's organization and rhythms are
basically lyrical;9her point of view, essentially a post-Jamesian center of
consciousness, wherein the world is only as real as an individual's
perception of it. The poetic subjectivity extends to her title, which begs for
multiple interpretations. Tolstoy works within a very different mode. He has
the advantages, and the limitations, of a linear, realistic style. From the
bluntly explicit title on, he and his readers assume some truthful
correspondence between what he describes and the world as we agree to see
it. His voice is the one long known in narrative theory as omniscient.
Because Tolstoy's talent and insight persuade readers that he deserves to
declare such a perspective on human events, the narrator speaks with great
authority. This powerful presence has philosophical consequences for Ivan
Ilych. Consider, for instance, the finality that sounds in this famous
sentence: "Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and
therefore most terrible." Like realists before and after him, Tolstoy takes the
nature of society as his arena. He also practices satire as an extension of
both his social interests
 
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and his omniscient stance. That is, the satire results from his looking closely
at institutions such as the family, law, and medicine, and judging them
wittily on the basis of firmly held values. A story that will end as
powerfully as any in literature begins hilariously as a satirical look at the
behavior of self-centered ''mourners," who see Ivan Ilych's death solely in
terms of its interruption of their own affairs.
Ivan Ilych's life style partakes of Tolstoy's literary stances, and, with one
necessary exception,10 might even be seen as a parody of them. True, Ivan
Ilych is not a purveyor of satire among his friends (at least so far as we
know), but he has the satirist's smug certainty that his or her values are the
proper ones from which others depart at their peril. He thus tells himself the
story of his own life omnisciently without ever questioning his assumptions.
Furthermore, he is firmly anchored in society's abundant details, and this
too is a parallel with Tolstoy's style. If Eva is an outsider, Ivan Ilych is
clearly an insider, living in the public world of power. "Think: If Tolstoy
had been born a woman," muses Olsen in Silences.11Socially created
realities are for Ivan Ilych the only realities. He derives his identity from the
opinions of others of his rank and time.
Ivan Ilych has not so much lived his life as built a résumé. His professional
credentials are impeccable. He has accepted the ladder as a metaphor for
success, and he has moved up it at regular intervals, ending pleasantly
above the midpoint of the judicial bureaucracy. He is, in Willy Loman's
pitiful phrase from Death of a Salesman, not only liked, but well liked,
chiefly because he conducts his relationships with propriety and decorum
(two terms that are very important to him). When he furnishes a house, he
chooses those items that will make him appear to be rich; it has nothing
whatever of the personal about it. But neither has his personal life. In his
youth, his sexual relationships were conducted "with clean hands, in clean
linen, with French phrases." When it is time to marry, he chooses a woman
whose background will look good, as it were, on his résumé under the
biographical details section. That the marriage turns hostile distresses him
chiefly because of his wife's "coarse" demands for attention. He has had a
few setbacks, but in his opinion everything has gone on
 
 Page 205

the whole very satisfactorily indeed, and the evidence indicates that the
second half of his life should be even better.
He has allowed no space for major contingencies. His illness nearly breaks
him in two, so rigid has he become. In contrast, Eva bends like a bamboo
tree in the wind. She accepts her coming death far more easily and sets to
work on what must be done. For Ivan Ilych, disease is a gross impropriety
against which he rages ineffectually for much of the story.
At the same time, his anger serves as a powerful corrosive that begins little
by little to weaken the false girders of his life. I need not repeat the phases
of his torment and terror. They have in fact been given a kind of renewed
fame among medical educators by virtue of their being a nearly perfect
example of Kübler-Ross's stages of dying. 12 But it is important to my
argument to note that the process involves the tearing down of almost all his
previously held tenets. That moving up and on, for instance, is the only
criterion for success. Is he now a failure, and his life meaningless, because
he is horizontal? That cleanliness in bodily functions somehow
mysteriously insures the social order. Now that he must be helped with his
excretions, has all turned to shameful chaos? That professional people
ought always to affect indifference to their clients. Since the doctors he
consults do not listen to him, what does that say about his years in the law?
That a certain aloofness in human relationships, even in marriage, maintains
decorum. Why will not his friends and his family comfort him? That a
gentleman does not ask too many questions about life. Do gentlemen, then,
live in basic and mutually supportive deceit, especially as regards the
absolute fact of one's death? Perhaps most insidious of all: that he is a man,
when inside he is a little boy crying out to be pitied. Ivan Ilych has ''to live
thus all alone on the brink of an abyss."
Of course, there is the pain. The pain is ghastly and ought not to be
paraphrased, even if that were possible. But just as Ivan Ilych prefigured
Kübler-Ross, so does the story demonstrate what many clinically
experienced philosophers and theologians have said about the distinction
between physical agony (pain) and mental agony (suffering). Suffering is
the worse torture. If suffering can be reduced, pain can be
 
 Page 206

endured. If life has been meaningful, death can be likewise.

As part of his attempt to understand, Ivan Ilych takes a journey that is at
one point similar to Eva's. Both return to their youth for substanceEva to
connect with what she already feels to be good and true, Ivan Ilych to
understand his child self for the first time. To be sure, his early venture into
childhood memories elicits one of the most poignant passages in the story.
Thinking of the well-known syllogism that ends ''therefore Caius is mortal,"
Ivan Ilych refuses to accept that he is mortal. Caius is abstract logic. But he,
Ivan Ilych, had once been a little boy called Vanya with a mamma and a
papa and a beloved striped ball. Little Vanya cannot die!
Near the end, he returns more often to his childhood, savoring what we
would now call Proustian sensations. Life, he concludes, was better and
more vital then. In fact, the closer he comes to his beginnings, and the
farther he gets from death, the more real he feels. That may be fear
speaking, but it leads to another conclusion that carries more conviction: his
entire life has been lived in false rectitude except for those "scarcely
perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the
most highly placed people." They alone had been real. This awareness is
hardly freeing. In fact, with this insight, he has reached the bottom of his
despair. Immediately, his pain multiplies tenfold. Ivan Ilych had come as far
as he can alone.
But why is he so isolated? Where, in particular, are the doctors and the
nurses? Part of the answer is that in both Ivan Ilych and "Tell Me a Riddle"
doctors are portrayed as scarcely necessary to the dying people. Olsen is not
negative about them;13they simply do their jobs at the periphery of the
central drama. Tolstoy goes farther. His physicians make themselves
irrelevant by virtue of their self-importance. They deceive their patient and
themselves. After putting on an inappropriately cheerful, "there now" face
in the mornings, they cannot take it off. Ivan Ilych eventually consults
several doctors, each of whom disagrees pompously with the others. If their
characterizations were not set into the midst of an otherwise tragic tale,
their essential natureswhich are straight out of a Molière comedywould be
clearer.
The nurses are another matter altogether. The servant
 
 Page 207

Gerasim performs nursing functions for Ivan Ilych, and, in ''Riddle" Eva's
granddaughter Jeannie, who is in fact a professional nurse, does the nursing
alongside Eva's husband. Neither Gerasim nor Jeannie accomplishes very
much in terms of a conventional plot. Gerasim has very few sentences to
himself, and Jeannie does nothing overtly dramatic. Oddly, that is good
news for everyone who attends a dying person. It seems to demonstrate that
in these two situations, at least, a great deal can be accomplished with the
simple means available to most of us. On the plot level that I have been
developing, the nurses are really midwives who assist in the paradox of the
eleventh-hour birthing.14
Gerasim exemplifies Tolstoy's well-known view of the peasant as a kind
and simple type. Innocent of the supercilious posturing of Ivan Ilych's
family, friends, and doctors, Gerasim alone acknowledges directly that Ivan
Ilych is going to die: "Only Gerasim recognized it and pitied him." The
young servant finds caring for Ivan Ilych's body neither distasteful nor
burdensome, but a natural, democratic act that he hopes will one day be
done for him. He thereby helps Ivan Ilych in his central task of breaking
down his rigid ideas about propriety. With Gerasim, Ivan Ilych is able to
practice intimacy, never a valued part of his identity until now. Jeannie is
more sophisticated than Gerasim, but her reactions to dying are, like his,
direct, kind, and nonjudgmental. With perfect tact, she brings Eva a
Mexican cookie, the "Bread of the Dead," made by a mother in the likeness
of the little girl she has just lost. The cookie becomes the occasion for a
conversation about grief in which Eva participates comfortably. She says
that Jeannie is like the Russian Lisa, that mentor-midwife from long ago.
Eva is an atheist. I am not sure whether or not she is to be taken for a good
person. But there is something deeply spiritual about how, in the face of
physical agony, she yet makes a last-minute search for meaning among the
shards of humankind's attempts to connect. Jeannie senses this. She is
nearly incoherent in expressing itbut when has transcendent experience ever
been easy to verbalize? To explain her "radiant" face of love to her
grandfather, she replies "'my darling escape' . . .'my darling Granny."' Olsen
expands the
 
 Page 208

thought: ''(Shameful the joy, the pure overwhelming joy from being with
her grandmother; the peace, the serenity that breathed.)" Thus is the
midwife paid. 15
As for Eva herself, has she reached her goal by the time she dies? We have
only Jeannie's report: "On the last day, she said she would go back to when
she first heard music, a little girl on the road of the village where she was
born. She promised me. It is a wedding and they dance, while the flutes so
joyous and vibrant tremble in the air." Vibrant flutesthis is not the way Eva
remembered the scene earlier: "a bare-footed sore-covered little girl . . .
danced her ecstasy of grimace to flutes that scratched at a cross-roads
village wedding." Therefore, if Jeannie has repeated her grandmother's
words accurately, it may be that Eva has indeed seen through to the truth.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

We can follow Eva no farther towards her wished-for reunion.

Tolstoy lets us experience the fulfillment. When Ivan Ilych realizes that his
life has been false, his task is almost completed, though he does not yet
know it. He has not only broken down the past, he appears to have emptied
himself of any identity at all. He is like an empty vessel, waiting to be
filled. And he is filled, with light and with joy. His rebirth occurs just as his
pathetic little son comes into the room, takes up his hand, and, weeping,
kisses it.
People have offered theological, psychological, and something like
scientific interpretations of such a phenomenon. For Tolstoy, the
theological, as understood in the Western world, is paramount. Ivan Ilych is
rewarded with peace at that moment when he asks for forgiveness from
God. Suddenly, "there was no fear because there was no death." This cannot
mean that there is no dying, for Ivan Ilych goes on immediately to die, but
that because of faith, death has no sting, the grave no victory.16His pain too
is still real, but now just a given, and no longer a reminder of his absurdity:
"'Let the pain be."' Therefore, he is infused with light and joy.
Psychologically, Ivan Ilych changes at the moment when he sees oth-
 
 Page 209

ers as real. He feels his son's pain, and later his wife's, and he is relieved of
the burden of himself. The result is light and joy. Using the methods of the
social sciences, the authors of two recent books have concluded that,
whether for physiological reasons or others, many dying people do in fact
report seeing light, feeling joy, and going gladly. 17
Much mystery remains. Fortunately, I am obliged to pick up only one small
part of it. I have tried to establish that Olsen's and Tolstoy's literary styles
parallel the lifestyles of their main charactersloose, personal, and
fragmented in the first case; tight, social, and linear in the secondand that,
to die happily, the characters must at least partially revise the authors. If I
am right, why does this revolt of character against creator happen? It is
possible, though unlikely in these cases, that the authors intend it. So the
unconscious gapes. I cannot believe that the revolt is due to the authors'
unconscious selfhatred, wherein they are punished by their very own
creatures. In fact, something healthy may be going on. Here is how my
thinking runs: These authors are enormously successful. But success tends
to reinforce past methods, and the method that succeeds sooner or later
becomes the method that limits. Maybe the unconscious minds of these two
deeply creative writers have allowed their characters to break down old
forms, not in revolt but in exploration of new possibilities for Tolstoy and
Olsen. If so, the pattern is recognizable. It is that type of death labor we call
evolution.

Notes
1. I have used the Louise and Alymer Maude translation of Leo Tolstoy's
1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilych, in The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other
Stories (New York: New American Library/Signet, 1960), 95-156. Tillie
Olsen's story ''Tell Me a Riddle" was first collected in Tell Me a Riddle
(New York: Dell, 1961), 63-116. All subsequent quotations are from these
editions.
2. She is only sixty-nine, an age our society no longer considers old, but
that is how Olsen conceives of her. In Tillie Olsen's Silences (New York:
Dell, 1983), 58, she makes a reference to the character as "old mother,
grandmother."
 
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3. E.g., Harry Stack Sullivan and Kurt Lewin.

4. Like several others in the story, this phrase is italicized as if to
underscore meaning seized on the run.
5. Olsen, Silences, 58.
6. ''Outsider" is Virginia Woolf's term in Three Guineas (1938), a feminist
volume that Olsen frequently cites in public lectures and private
conversations.
7. D. H. Lawrence developed this concept throughout his work. See, e.g.,
his letter to Ernest Collings (17 January 1913) in The Portable D. H.
Lawrence (New York: Viking, 1947), 563: "My great religion is a belief in
the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect."
8. "Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted": a
phrase from E. M. Forster's novel, Howard's End (1910), and used, in part,
as its epigraph.
9. In the sense defined by Ralph Freedman in his influential study, The
Lyrical Novel: Studies in Hermann Hesse, André Gide, and Virginia Woolf
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963); that is, a fiction that
emphasizes personal experience as revealed through poetic methods more
than strictly narrative forms.
10. The clarity that derives from Tolstoy's fervent Christianity.
11. Olsen, Silences, 268.
12. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan,
1970).
13. Eva's first physician misses the diagnosis, but this serves an aesthetic
rather than moral goal in that it allows Olsen to observe what I have termed
Eva's "Laurentian" behavior while the cancer is still unknown to her
intellect.
14. It may be helpful to see their methods as Rogerian. Carl R. Rogers, who
believed that the good therapeutic relationship was paradigmatic of any
good interpersonal activity-and that the object of both was to help others
become persons-outlined three conditions for the helper. He or she was to
be "congruent" (i.e., genuine), to have "unconditional positive regard" for
the client, and to evince "accurate empathy." See "The Necessary and
Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change," Journal of
Consulting Psychology 21 (1957): 95-103.
15. Cf. Mary de Santis, the private duty nurse in Patrick White's novel, The
Eye of the Storm (New York: Viking, 1974), for
 
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whom the care of an elderly, disintegrating woman is a religious experience.

16. I Corinthians 15:55 (KJV).
17. Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson, At the Hour of Death, rev. ed.
(New York: Hastings House, 1986); and Raymond A. Moody, Jr., Life After
Life (New York: Bantam Books, 1976). Cancer, or any lingering terminal
illness, provides time for this kind of death labor, but Moody accumulates
evidence that the same process, much condensed, also occurs in some
traumatic near-death experiences.
 
 Page 213

MARA FAULKNER

Motherhood as Source and

Silencer of Creativity
From one of her earliest pieces of writing-''I Want You Women Up North to
Know" (1934)to one of her most recentMother to Daughter, Daughter to
Mother (1984)Tillie Olsen has been passionately interested in mothers as
writers and as subjects of literature. Motherhood as both source and silencer
of creativity is one of Olsen's main themes, and she has spent her life
rescuing mothers from silence, inarticulate awe, distortion, and
sentimentality.
In her afterword to Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother, Olsen says
that even in this book about mothers, "least present is work written by
mothers themselves. Whatever the differences now (including literacy,
small families), for too many of the old, old reasons, few mothers while in
the everyday welter of motherhood life, or after, are writing it. That
everyday welter, the sense of its troublous context, the voice of the mother
herself, are the largest absences in this book. And elsewhere" (275- 76).1
It does not take much imagination to discover what the "old, old reasons"
are. One reason mothers have not written their stories is that women have
been told, blatantly or subtly, that they must choose between motherhood
and other creative work, including writing. (Olsen lists in Silences the many
women writers who were childless, some by choice, many because they
were convinced they had no choice.) Another old
From Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen (Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1993), 35-63. Condensed with the permission of the author.
 
 Page 214

reason is the myth that motherhood is ineffable, that it is an experience so

immured in nature that no one can find the words to write about it.
According to this myth, mothering is something mothers intuitively know
how to do but cannot explain to anyone else. This notion sets them apart
from everyonetheir childless sisters, the fathers of their children, and a
sterile society. The underside of the myth of ineffability says that even
should a woman have the confidence and time to write about motherhood,
that experience is too ordinary, narrow, and dull to interest anyone except,
perhaps, mothers themselves. A third reason why mothers have not told
their stories is ''the patriarchal injunction" Olsen describes in Silences,
which tells women writers to avoid subjects belonging to the "woman's
sphere," not because they are ineffable but simply because they are female.
This injunction says to women, "If you are going to practice literaturea
man's domain, professiondivest yourself of what might identify you as a
woman" (250). Since mothering is an undeniably gendered mark of
identification, women writers who want to succeed should avoid this
subject at all costs.
Mothers have not fared much better as subjects. Their sons and daughters
have often settled for grim or glowing stereotypes, and those stereotypes
have passed for truth. As Adrienne Rich writes in Of Woman Born, it is
"easier by far" for daughters to "hate and reject a mother outright than to
see beyond her to the forces acting upon her."2Of course, some few writers
in every generation have challenged the stereotypes. Daughters of
immigrant mothers and daughters growing up in poverty have created
portraits of mothers that are both loving and unstintingly honest, and are
filled with grief, anger, and, sometimes, admiration. Edith Sumner Kelly's
Weeds comes to mind, as do Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth and the
novels of Anzia Yezierska. This is the tradition in which Olsen wrote her
stories about mothers and mothering. But because most of these works went
out of print soon after their publication and have only recently been
reprinted, the tradition has been invisible to most readers.3
A more contemporary reason for the silence by and about mothers is that
feminist writers and critics disagree about the value of this subject. While
many contemporary
 
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feminists share Olsen's interest, there is by no means a consensus. In a

review of May Sarton's 1985 novel, The Magnificent Spinster, Valerie
Miner reveals this uneasy split: ''For anyone dismayed by the current
feminist infatuation for motherhood, it is refreshing to read a novel in which
the women do stand on their own."4Olsen's interest in mothering can hardly
be termed infatuationit is neither fleeting nor romantic yet she is determined
to bring to light not only the oppression mothers have suffered but also "the
yields possible in circumstanced motherhood," as she says in Silences. She
is well aware that loving and admiring depictions of motherhood might be
read as reproaches by women who have chosen to remain childless. Several
years after her famous 1971 talk at the Modern Language Association
Forum on Women Writers in the Twentieth Century, Olsen reflected that she
barely touched the subject of the gifts mothers give, fearing that the many
childless professional women in the audience would hear her remarks as
one more version of the "traditional (mis)use" of the joys of motherhood "to
rebuke and belittle the hard-won achievement of their lives; more of the
societal coercion to conform; family as the only suitable way of life for a
female" (S 202).
A stanza from "Cellar Door," a recent poem by Sue Standing which Olsen
includes in Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother, expresses another
familiar dilemma Olsen shares with other women writing about their
mothers:
Her hands stained and nicked
from all the peeling, cutting, blanching-
beautiful how she touched things,
how quickly she could thread a needle.
I'm not supposed to love her for this-
smoothing our hair, sewing our clothes,
or on her knees waxing the floor.

Showing mothers' domestic work as beautiful and admirable might seem to

women readers like reinforcements of limiting roles or as calls to duplicate
the patterns of their mothers' lives.
Olsen's life and the content of her work stand in direct opposition to these
reasons, old and new, that have made
 
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motherhood ''the least understood, the most tormentingly complex

experience to wrest to truth" (S 254). Her life as a writer and working
mother of four daughters contradicts the idea that mothering and writing are
by their very nature mutually exclusive activities. Although she writes
eloquently in Silences of the domestic and economic structures that limited
her writing and almost prevented it altogether, she writes just as eloquently
of the ways in which her life as mother gave her the substance of her work.
In almost everything she has written, Olsen delineates the distorted shape
motherhood has taken in patriarchal society and critiques the cluster of
beliefs about it that have been passed on as truth from generation to
generation. It is part of her revolutionary work of helping to change "what
will not let life be" for women. But Olsen's repudiation of patriarchal
motherhood, that "last refuge of sexism," as she calls it,5is not in any sense
a rejection of mothers or mothering. On the contrary, Olsen considers
mothering one of the great untold stories of women's lives and one of the
great unmined sources of literary marvels. (Unlike Rich, who uses the word
mothering to mean the experience and motherhood to denote the institution,
Olsen uses these words interchangeably. Only the context makes her
meaning clear. I will follow Rich's usage throughout this chapter, however.)
Olsen insists in Silences that the losses to literature and to many other fields
of knowledge and endeavor have been incalculable "because
comprehensions possible out of motherhood (including, among so much
invaluable else, the very nature, needs, illimitable potentiality of the human
beingand the everyday means by which these are distorted, discouraged,
limited, extinguished) . . have had . . . to remain inchoate, fragmentary,
unformulated (and alas, unvalidated)" (202). The task she has set for herself
is to bring those comprehensions to "powerful, undeniable, useful
expression" (202). . . .
She writes in Silences that "conscience and world sensibility are as natural
to women as to men; men have been freer to develop and exercise them,
that is all" (42). This conviction seems to have come to her. . . from her own
life experiences and from knowing committed socialist women like her
mother and the Bundists Seevya and Genya Gorelick, the
 
 Page 217

women to whom she dedicates ''Tell Me a Riddle." This is the story in

which a mother's "world sensibility" is most evident, and it seems to be
more than coincidence that Olsen began writing it in 1955-56, the year in
which all three women died.6Olsen found in them and in her own life the
combination of experiences that do lead mothers to political consciousness
and a commitment to change that reaches far beyond their own families.
That combination includes early political involvement, wide reading, and a
knowledge of history. In several of her characters, most notably Eva in "Tell
Me a Riddle," Olsen brings to "useful expression" a mother's world
consciousness.
Finally, Olsen understands well the chasms that exist between mothers and
their daughters, and between women who are mothers and those who are
not. Yet her work reveals her belief that only full and honest remembering,
neither distorted by bitterness nor softened by nostalgia, can bridge those
chasms. One of the ways in which Olsen accomplishes this many-faceted
task is by embodying in three complex sets of images a blight-fruit-
possibility paradigm. Specifically, she uses three constellations of images,
centering on hunger, stone, and flood, to describe the blighted
circumstances of mothers' lives, to express wonder at the fruit of endurance
and beauty their lives have borne, and to sketch the joyful possibilities that
mothering could hold for women and for the world. But Olsen transforms
these three sets of images into one another with the logic of poetry or
dream, setting up echoes and oppositions both within and between works.
In the discussion that follows, I will try to show what these image patterns
mean and, at the same time, follow their intertwined, shifting course
through Olsen's work.
The first of these image patterns revolves around hunger and food. In
everything Olsen has writtenher poetry, fiction, essaysshe uses the language
of eating, of feast and famine, of nurturing and starvation, of fat bellies and
skeleton children to show a blighted world. In several worksmost notably
Yonnondiohunger is a literal fact of life, the obvious result of chronic,
institutionalized poverty; but in every work, spiritual, emotional, and
intellectual hungers gnaw even at those characters who are well fed.
 
 Page 218

The images of food and eating also suggest that life is meant to be a
banquet in a plentiful, generous world. In a world of possibility, feeding is
an expression of gracious and generous nurturance in an interlocking
human and natural ecology; and hungers for food, justice, knowledge, and
beauty are all part of the healthy reaching out to life. Even the dead become
nourishment for the living. But, at least on the surface, that is not the world
of Olsen's stories. She shows us instead a world where to survive one must
take food from others. Hunger, of necessity, becomes savagery; food
snatched from others and hastily devoured is tasteless; and nourishment
given binds people to each other through unending need.
Although Olsen is concerned with all hungry people, the hungers of
mothers and children preoccupy her most. Even one of her earliest poems,
''I Want You Women Up North to Know," is filled with the familiar images
of starving mothers and their children. There is Catalina Rodriguez, age
twentyfour, her "body shrivelled to a child's at twelve, / and her cough, gay,
quick, staccato, / like a skeleton's bones clattering"; and Catalina Torres,
who "to keep the starved body starving, embroiders from dawn to / night,"
spurred on by "the pinched faces of four huddled / children / the naked
bodies of four bony children, / the chant of their chorale of hunger."7
Yonnondio picks up these images of physical deprivation, showing
impoverished mothers and their families living in a world that feeds on
them instead of providing nourishment. Through Olsen's multiple vision we
see both men and women caught in poverty; this same vision, however,
shows us the further devastation suffered by poor women, as the additional
overlay of sexism leads husbands to feed off their wives and forces mothers
and children to devour each other's substance . . .
In "Tell Me a Riddle," Olsen shows even more clearly than in Yonnondio
the grotesque shape of motherhood in the patriarchy and the immense cost
of the institution to mother and children. Again, she totals up the cost by
filling this story with the language of starvation, feeding, and eating. Eva,
the central character, is a grandmother, with her years of pregnancy and
child rearing far behind her. Yet in describing her, Olsen uses images that
suggest both pregnancy and starva-
 
 Page 219

tion. Eva is a little gnome, ''all bones and swollen belly," with clawlike
hands and a "yellow skull face"the portrait of starvation that stares at us
daily from posters and television screens. Those closest to her see her as
something edible. David, her husband, and Nancy, her daughter-in-law, try
to persuade her to move from her familiar home to the Haven, a
"cooperative for the aged" run by David's lodge. When she refuses, they
leave her to "stew a while," as Nancy puts it. But perhaps more important,
the language of food both expresses and shapes Eva's perception of herself
and of the people and events surrounding her. When David complains to the
children about her harsh tongue, she thinks, "(Vinegar he poured on me all
his life; I am well marinated; how can I be honey now?)" Her quarrel with
David over selling the house becomes a "bellyful of bitterness," her
sickness she feels as a "ravening inside," and her children are "morsels"
with "lovely mouths" that "devour."
Linda Yoder describes well one purpose of this "overwhelming
concentration of [food] imagery." It underlines, she says, Eva's
overidentification with her role as mother "against which Eva will wisely,
though painfully, struggle."8 In other words, Eva's life has been so
completely absorbed by nurturing others that these activities have taken
over her ways of thinking and feeling and even her language. To borrow
Olsen's imagery, they have eaten her up.
It was a brilliant stroke on Olsen's part to make Eva a grandmother living in
the relatively affluent fifties rather than in the hungry twenties of
Yonnondio. For Eva, the tasks of mothering that used up Anna's life are only
memories, or have dwindled into unimportance. Instead of skimpy meals
stretched to feed nine, now "a herring out of a jar is enough." While David
worries about money, Eva shrugs, "In America, who starves?" The ironic
answer to this question is that mothers starve even in America and even
long after they have stopped being responsible for their children and no
longer have to contend with physical hunger.
Against her family's urging, Eva refuses to nurture her grandchildren in the
traditional mothers'/grandmothers' waysholding, comforting,
feedingbecause she knows she dare not let herself be drawn again into the
"long drunken-
 
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ness'' of needing and being needed, of devouring and being devoured by

trusting children. Yet it is significant that she never abandons the language
of food and hunger, and at the end of her life talks deliriously about "bread,
day-old" and "one pound soup meat." Furthermore, Olsen's omniscient
narrator continues to use this language to describe Eva, suggesting that
motherhood as defined and structured in patriarchal society starves mothers
by absorbing them body and spirit. Eva is hungry for all the nourishment
that her life has refused her or that she has resolutely given away to be true
to herself and her beliefs. She is hungry for both solitude and community,
silence and language. (Eva even tastes and chews words and ideas.)
Unaware that he is accurately describing her spirit as well as her body,
David reminds Eva that she is "all bones and a swollen belly." All David
sees are the symptoms of her illness; but here, as in Yonnondio, Olsen wants
her readers to see mocking visual echoes of starvation and pregnancy
which, mirroring each other and her illness, together form the shape of
Eva's life.
In her fine essay "The Hungry Jewish Mother," Erika Duncan sets "Tell Me
a Riddle" in the context of JewishAmerican literature by women. In this
literature, writes Duncan, "mothers are the 'bread givers' who try to make
feeding into a replenishing, ecstatic act. But the mothers are themselves
starved in every way, sucked dry and withered from being asked almost
from birth to give a nurturance they never receive. They are starved not
only for the actual food they are forced to turn over to others, but for the
stuff of self and soul, for love and song."9That is the blighted life mothers
lead in patriarchal society. As Olsen would say, that is the life of most
women, past and present, as they carry the full weight of gender, class, and
sometimes racial bias. We also see clearly the ways in which the mothers'
hungers are visited upon their children, especially their daughters, who, like
Anna's Mazie and Eva's Clara and Hannah, are reduced to "hands to help."
But to stop with grief and anger is to stop far short of Olsen's destination.
The second element of her structuring paradigm, the fruit borne by the
blighted tree, is nowhere more evident than in her portraits of mothers. For
Olsen's fic-
 
 Page 221

tional mothers possess intelligence, courage, and a gritty determination to

survive, no matter how insurmountable the obstacles they face. What is
more, in every story, mothers reach beyond survival to make their children's
lives richer and wider than theirs have been. Sometimes they succeed; more
often they fail. But even in failure, Olsen says, the most nourishing bread
they give future generations is the coarse grain of their courageous effort.
An important part of the task Olsen has set for herself is to acknowledge
this nurturance. She does so by setting remembered moments of beauty and
exaltation in mothers' lives in their context of pain and struggle.
This combination of beauty and struggle is evident in a remarkable passage
from Yonnondio, in which the rhythms of Olsen's prose transform work that
might be seen only as absolute drudgery into grace. It is no accident, of
course, that the work Olsen describes is that of preserving food. The scene
occurs on an unbearably hot day in a long line of such days, and Anna is in
her kitchen canning fruit, making jelly, and tending her children all at the
same time. Here is a portion of that scene. Read aloud, its rhythms work
their way into the body:
In the humid kitchen, Anna works on alone. ... The last batch of jelly is on the stove.
Between stirring and skimming, and changing the wet packs on Ben, Anna peels and cuts the
canning peachestwo more lugs to go. If only all will sleep awhile. She begins to sing softlyI
saw a ship a-sailing, a-sailing on the seaitclears her head. The drone of fruit flies and Ben's
rusty breathing are very loud in the unmoving, heavy air. Bess begins to fuss again. There,
there, Bessie, there, there, stopping to sponge down the oozing sores on the tiny body. There.
Skim, stir; sprinkle Bess; pit, peel, and cut; sponge; skim, stir. Any second the jelly will be
right and must not wait. Shall she wake up Jimmie and ask him to blow a feather to keep
Buss quiet? No, he'll wake cranky, he's just a baby hisself, let him sleep. Skim, stir; sprinkle;
change the wet packs on Ben; pit, peel and cut; sponge. This time it does not sootheBess
stiffens her body, flails her fists, begins to scream in misery, just as the jelly begins to boil.
There is nothing for it but to take Bess up, jounce her on a hip (there,
 
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there) and with her free hand frantically skim and ladle. There, there. The batch is poured and
capped and sealed, all one-handed, jiggling-hipped. There, there, it is done. (148-49)

In a recent talk, Olsen said that only when she read this scene aloud to an
audience did she realize that Anna's movements had the economy and
disciplined grace of dance. ''We gladly applaud for dancers on the stage,"
she said, "but do not recognize the similar grace and miracle of
synchronization" of a mother, her baby on one hip, canning and tending her
other children. Olsen added that she likes to imagine Anna's granddaughters
as dancers, whose freer lives Anna had made possible with her hard work
and loving determination. 10
There is danger in this kind of writing. Turning relentless work into a dance
could lead to the kind of sentimentality that perpetuates the work by casting
the softening glow of nostalgia over it and that encourages daughters to
repeat the surface patterns of their mothers' lives. That Olsen is alert to this
danger is clear from the scenes following this domestic dance, in which the
same event is seen as a mother's daily deadly toil; her skilled and useful
labor to feed her family; and a moment of beauty that is as necessary and
nourishing as canned peaches and amber jelly.
The multiple tasks push Anna to trembling, and her tenderness with the
children is mixed "with a compulsion of exhaustion to have done, to put
Bess outside in the yard where she can scream and scream outside of
hearing and Anna can be free to splash herself with running water, forget
the canning and the kids and sink into a chair, lay her forehead on the table
and do nothing" (149-50). But Anna does not stop; she keeps working
through the afternoon, surrounded by her heat-sickened children. Late in the
day, as Anna still works, the sunshining through a prism salvaged from the
dump sheds rainbows on the room. Mazie watches as the rainbow falls on
Anna: "Not knowing an every-hued radiance floats on her hair, her mother
stands at the sink; her knife seems flying. Fruit flies rise and settle and rise."
Mazie, with her quick appreciation for beauty of any kind, says lovingly,
"Momma" (152).
 
 Page 223

Light and shadow chase each other across these few pages, as Olsen's style
turns drudgery into dance and back into drudgery, and then, for a fleeting
moment casts ''the stammering light" of beauty and promise over the whole
scene. The cycles of poverty and sexism that rule Yonnondio will end this
moment and perhaps steal it from Mazie's memory. (In "Tell Me a Riddle,"
Eva's delirious, deathbed singing reminds her oldest daughter, Clara, of a
sound she has not heard or remembered since childhood. Clara cries in
silent anguish, "Where did we lose each other, first mother, singing
mother?" Even knowing well that moments like this one are often lost to
daughters, Olsen has chosen to preserve it as precious and nourishing
without in any way exalting the toil or urging future generations of
daughters to repeat it.
To return to Duncan's phrase, Olsen's fictional mothers are "bread givers"
dedicated to feeding their children's bodies, minds, and hearts. But Olsen
shows another, equally important yield of "circumstanced motherhood."
Because the experience of mothering, coupled with the other crucial
experiences I described earlier, gives them what Olsen calls "a profound
feeling about the preciousness of life on earth," 11 the other fruit their lives
sometimes bear is an awareness of justice and injustice that reaches beyond
the walls of home and family. Olsen dramatizes this sense of justice most
powerfully in Eva, who like the Seevya and Genya of Olsen's dedication,
had been a revolutionary during her girlhood in Russia, has memorized her
few books, and knows both past history and the United States of the 1950s.
To understand what Olsen is saying about Eva's wide-ranging
consciousness we need to return to the image of bread, this time
superimposed on the recurring image of stone.
Bread and stone run parallel to each other through most of "Tell Me a
Riddle." In the scene just before Eva's death, they leave their parallel tracks,
meet, and undergo that transmutation of shape and meaning that Olsen uses
so powerfully. In Eva's last delirious words, these two images reveal that
her embattled love for her family and her desire to create a more just world
for everyone are somehow the same passion, felt with the same intensity
and fed by the same springs. David keeps watch by her deathbed and listens
as she repeats
 
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bits from her memorized books, the facts of destruction in human history,
snatches of songs, and speeches from their revolutionary past. They are
litanies of courage, hope, and terror for the human race:
Slaveships deathtrains clubs eeenough
The bell summon what enables
78,000 in one minute (whisper of a scream)
78,000 human beings we'll destroy ourselves?

and:
Lift high banner of reason (tatter of an orator's voice)
justice freedom light
Humankind life worthy capacities
Seeks (blur of shudder) belong human being

As David listens, it seems to him that Eva is ''maliciously . . . playing back

only what said nothing of him, of the children, of their intimate life
together." He says to her, knowing she cannot hear him, "A lifetime you
tended and loved, and now not a word of us, for us." Finally Eva's words
work their way into his consciousness, and he too remembers the idealism
of their youth, the ways he has conspired with society to betray those ideals,
"and the monstrous shapes of what had actually happened in the century."
To ease himself, he thinks of their grandchildren, "whose childhoods were
childish, who had never hungered, who lived unravaged by disease in warm
houses of many rooms, had all the school for which they cared, could walk
on any street, stood a head taller than their grandparents, towered
abovebeautiful skins, straight backs, clear straightforward eyes. . . . And
was this not the dream then, come true in ways undreamed?"
The answer to David's question is yes, but only if one is thinking in
individualistic terms. For Eva, family and children have meanings that
extend far beyond tight biological definitions. Thoughts of the well-being of
her own family have never allowed Eva to escape into complacency, and
now, having fallen under her spell, David cannot escape either. He answers
his own question "as if in her harsh voice":
 
 Page 225

And are there no other children in the world? . . .

And the flame offreedom, the light of knowledge?
And the drop, to spill no drop of blood?

Eva's sense of responsibility for all the children of the world also deepens
her sense of helplessness and grief. One of her hungers is surely the hunger
and thirst for justice, and her starving body, that ''swollen thinness," imitates
as if by sympathetic magic the bodies of children not so well-fed as her
own. Now, under Eva's influence, David begins to feel her lifelong
starvation. He piles a tray with food, eats it, but "still was there thirst or
hunger ravening in him."
As David realizes how much of his own idealism has been lost, he is filled
with wonder that Eva has not lost or betrayed her dreams. But when David
asks her to affirm their wide-ranging vision, Eva answers with memories of
their private life together, and bitter memories at that:
Still she believed? "Eva!" he whispered. "Still you believed?
You lived by it? These Things Shall Be?"

"One pound soup meat," she answered distinctly, "one

soup bone."

"My ears heard you. Ellen Mays was witness: 'Human-

kind ... one has to believe."' Imploringly: "Eva!"

"Bread, day-old." She was mumbling. "Please, in a

wooden box . . . for kindling. The thread, hah, the thread
breaks. Cheap thread"and a gurgling, enormously loud, be-
gan in her throat.

"I ask for stone; she gives me breadday-old." He pulled

his hand away, shouted: "Who wanted questions? Everything
you have to wake?"...

Words jumbled, cleared. In a voice of crowded terror:

"Paul, Sammy, don't fight.

"Hannah, have I ten hands?

"How can I give it, Clara, how can I give it if I don't have?"

"You lie," he said sturdily, "there was joy too." Bitterly:

"Ah how cheap you speak of us at the last."
This short scene is, among other things, a small masterpiece of ironic
humor; even this close to death, David and Eva talk
 
 Page 226

in parallel monologues, their memories as unsynchronized as their lives in

America have been.
What interests me most, though, is David's remark, ''I ask for stone; she
gives me breadday-old." This is a witty reversal of the New Testament
passage in which Jesus describes the mercy of God with this homely
comparison: "Is there a man among you who would hand his son a stone
when he asked for bread?" (Matt. 7:9).12 The reversals move in every
direction. David asks not God or his father for sustenance, but rather his
dying wife. He also reverses the usual connotations of bread and stone. The
nourishment David asks for to feed his ravenous hunger is the stone of
unshakeable faith in life rather than bread, which at best is perishable; day-
old, it is a mark of poverty and defeat. Of course, David attributes Eva's
refusal to give him the nourishment he needs to her contrariness. The fact is
that she is not answering his questions at all, but following the associative
drift of her own memories. What Olsen gives us is a picture of Eva's
thoughts and a hint of her influence, finally, on David. Although Eva can
articulate the link only in fragments, in her mind, the personal and the
political are knitted together. In the early part of this scene, Eva will not let
David rejoice in his own family's health and lose sight of the world's hungry
children; here she will not let him take refuge in dreams of political change
that do not encompass the often dreary realities of family life, where
mothers must struggle alone to make ends meet.
That familiar split between the personal and political has no place in Olsen's
writing. As Catharine Stimpson writes: "Given her sense of American
politics, Olsen cannot show the achievement of the good dream, only its
transformation into terror or its dissolution. When the dream is dissipated,
as it is for the American-born children of Russian revolutionaries in 'Tell
Me a Riddle,' its political contents, its sense of 'the flame of freedom, the
light of knowledge,' are lost. Only its personal contents are gratified.
Without the political, the personal is merely materialistic."13 I would add,
however, that in Olsen's feminist vision, the reverse is also true: in
patriarchal America, without the personal, and especially without a
consideration of the lives of women and children, the political is
 
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empty theory, espousing equality on street corners or in labor halls while

ignoring the deep ills of family life.
Just as the personal and the political, reality and idealism are fused in this
scene, so are the images of bread and stone. If we read the rest of the story
with this fusion in mind, earlier references to stone take on unexpected
meanings. Two such references give insights into the marvels Eva's life can
yield to the alert reader and the ways in which her life breaks out of the
isolation of motherhood.
Early in the story, as part of his campaign to get Eva to move to the Haven,
David shouts at her, ''You sit, you sitthere too you could sit like a stone."
Critic Mary DeShazer says that this description, along with David's epithet,
Mrs. Word Miser, turns Eva into a "silent, Sphinx-like hoarder of words"
who, in struggling with the Sphinx's question, "What is Man?" finds both
the question and the answer inadequate to human experience, and more
specifically, to women's experience. As DeShazer writes, "Man has been
too long the seeker of and answer to the riddle . . . ; woman too must
identify the quest. Traditionally woman has been unable to riddle, for she
has lacked the power to name her own experience." 14While David glibly
matches his grandchildren riddle for riddle, the silent, searching Eva says
she knows no riddles. It would be more accurate to say that she knows no
answers to the riddles that torment her and certainly none that she could tell
a child.
While this image of Eva as Sphinx is provocative, I think Olsen expects or,
more realistically, hopes that her readers will also see in this woman sitting
"like a stone" Rebecca Harding Davis's korl woman from Life in the Iron
Mills, the book Olsen rescued from oblivion. The korl woman is rock hard,
"crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some wild gesture of
warning." She is hungry, her maker Hugh Wolfe says, not for meat but for
"summat to make her live." Far from being inscrutable like the Sphinx, she
has a "wild, eager face like that of a starving wolf's." She is the product not
of an ancient civilization, but of American industrial society, carved from
the waste material from the iron mill. Her maker is an illiterate miller who,
with no hope of ever becoming any-
 
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thing better, is cursed or blessed with an artist's eye and hands and heart.
The korl woman's form is ''muscular, grown coarse with labor"; one of the
visitors to the mill, looking at the "bony wrist" and "the strained sinews of
the instep," describes her as a "working woman,the very type of her class."
The visitors see in her gesturing arms both "the peculiar action of a man
dying of thirst" and "the mad, half-despairing gesture of drowning." Finally,
the sympathetic narrator of the story, who keeps the carving after Hugh
Wolfe's suicide, says that the korl woman has "a wan, woeful face, through
which the spirit of the dead korl-cutter looks out, with its thwarted life, its
mighty hunger, its unfinished work. Its pale, vague lips seem to tremble
with a terrible question. 'Is this the End?' they say,'nothing beyond?no
more?" 15
These are Eva's questions. She asks them not only about her own life and
the life of her son, Davy, who was killed in World War II, but also about all
those lives wasted by war and by many kinds of starvation. In her delirium,
she says: "Tell Sammy's boy, he who flies, tell him to go to Stuttgart and
see where Davy has no grave. And what? . . . And what? where millions
have no gravessave air." Her most tormenting questions are "when will it
end?" and "Man ... we'll destroy ourselves?"
Whether as Sphinx or korl woman or both, after a lifetime of being bread,
Eva has conspired with the circumstances of her life to change herself into
stone. This becomes clear if we look at another important passage, shortly
after she has refused to hold her newest grandson. She spends the
afternoons shut in the closet in her daughter's home, trying to protect herself
from her family and their needs. As her mind travels impressionistically
from subject to subject, she repeats to herself her grandson Richard's lesson
on rocks: "Of stones . . . there are three kinds: earth's fire jetting; rock of
layered centuries; crucibled new out of old (igneous, sedimentary,
metamorphic). But there was that otherfrozen to black glass, never to
transform or hold the fossil memory . . . (let not my seed fall on stone). . . .
(stone will perish, but the word remain). And you, David, who with a stone
slew, screaming: Lord, take my heart of stone and give me flesh." Shortly
before this, Richard had given her two specimens to start her own
 
 Page 229

rock collection, the first a trilobite fossil, the second a piece of obsidian,
shiny and impervious as glass. It is as if Eva is pondering which kind she is,
seeing the risks of being stone rather than bread. In her pondering, the
meanings of stone shift, reach back into myth and history, and take on a
dizzying ambiguity. Eva wants to become, and somehow leave for the
world, something that will last, outliving her body and keeping her beliefs
alive, green and burning in its heart. She knows that bread spoils or is
devoured, leaving children always hungry for more. She wants instead to be
the kind of rock that is shaped by history or the kind that holds ''the fossil
memory," to be cherished by a future generation of children collecting the
wisdom of the past.
The line, "And you, David, who with a stone slew, screaming: Lord, take
my heart of stone and give me flesh," is puzzling at first. David is of course
the biblical David who killed Goliath with a stone from his slingshot, but
from there on, the scriptural reference will lead us astray if we follow it too
closely. (The David story is from the first Book of Samuel [17:36-58],
while the second half of the quotation comes from the Book of Ezekiel,
where it is reported as the word of God spoken to the people of Israel
through the prophet [36: 26-27].) By this time Olsen has made it clear that
Eva is not an observant Jew, having rejected her religion as a young girl.
What she knows of Scripture is probably meant to be a mixture of early
memories and gleanings that are simply a part of Judaeo-Christian culture.
Olsen frequently shifts the meanings of biblical passages, sometimes
slightly, sometimes radically, often with ironical results. Here David is not
the heroic savior of his people but a slayer in a world where death breeds
death. He might represent David her husband, whose imperviousness to her
needs has been in some way deadly to both of them; he might be her son
Davy, who killed and was killed in World War II; he might be her gentle
friend Lisa, who killed an informer with her teeth; he might be humankind,
all of us implicated in death even as we pray for the ability to love. David
might be Eva herself, hardening her heart, and in so doing betraying herself
and others. For Eva faces the danger that she will simply be "frozen to
black glass," closed to love or pity, a stone on which no seed can grow. (In
another kaleidoscopic
 
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shifting of images, seed comes to mean life itself, the grain made into
bread, children, and the word.) Eva continues her pondering, ''(stone will
perish, but the word remain.)" She is no doubt thinking of her beloved
authors and orators and, with despair, of all her own unspoken words,
which, if she could only say them, would outlive her.
In creating a character like Eva, a woman and a mother who has somehow
kept all these supposed opposites alive within her, Olsen shows that even in
the patriarchy mothering bears fruit. In the scene from the end of the story
that I described earlier, day-old bread and inedible stone are transformed
into a feast, as Eva and her granddaughter Jeannie teach each other the
intricate relationships between life and death and together teach David.
Jeannie gives Eva the easeful knowledge that at last someone has heard and
understood the lessons her life taught her.
I have said that in describing Eva's swollen body, Olsen superimposes the
images of fatal illness, starvation, and pregnancy in order to show the
terrible cost exacted by poverty and patriarchal motherhood. For Olsen,
even this nightmare image suggests possibilities that for me were
completely unexpected. In this scene David finally comes to understand the
breadth and fidelity of Eva's life. For the first time in years, perhaps for the
first time in their marriage, he sees her in her full humanity, "dear, personal,
fleshed," and instead of coining one more ironic epithet, he calls her by
name. He sees Jeannie's sketch of himself and Eva, their hands clasped,
"feeding each other"; obeying the images, he lies down, "holding the sketch
(as if it could shield against the monstrous shapes of loss, of betrayal, of
death) and with his free hand [takes] hers back into his." In this scene,
David and Eva feed each others' starvation (the "ravening" each feels) and
in some way give birth to each other, their hands umbilical cords, and
Jeannie the midwife. The tragedy here is that it is her life as mother, as
bread and bread giver, that made Eva's perceptions possible and at the same
time commanded her silence. For Eva the birth and the saving nourishment
come too late. But Olsen gives the wisdom of Eva's life to her readers
through the words of this story, this imperishable stone.
Although Olsen is convinced that even "circumstanced
 
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motherhood'' is the source of marvels in life and in literature, her writing

always urges her readers to look beyond the circumstances, beyond marvels
that can be enjoyed by future generations but never by mothers themselves
and rarely by their own children. Her radical subtextthe possibility beneath
her proseinsists that mothering in its literal meaning and in all the extended
meanings she gives it in her fiction and nonfiction is meant to be tender,
ecstatic, explosively creative, and revolutionary, not in some yet-to-be-
created utopia, but in this world. This may seem at first like a rash
misreading, since Olsen continues to argue as she has throughout her
writing career that the circumstances in which mothers and children live
make full human development impossible. Almost fifteen years ago, she
wrote in Silences:
Except for a privileged few who escape, who benefit from its effects, it remains a maiming
sex-class-race world for ourselves, for those we love. The changes that will enable us to live
together without harm ... are as yet only in the making (and we are not only beings seeking to
change; changing; we are also that which our past has made us). In such circumstances,
taking for one's best achievement means almost inevitably at the cost of others' needs. (And
where there are children. . . . And where there are children . . . .) (258)

One might expect her view to have changed to match the changes that have
occurred in women's lives in the intervening years. But while Olsen
acknowledges gratefully that at least in some places technology and the
women's movement have combined to broaden mothers' horizons and
lessen the drudgery of their lives, she insists rightly that mothers still bear
"the major responsibility for the maintenance of life, for seeing the food
gets there, the clothing, the shelter, the order, the cleanliness, the quality of
life, the binding up of wounds, the attention to what is happening, roof after
roof." She also asserts that societal structures in the United States still make
it impossible for mothers to raise their children except "at the cost of [their]
. . . best, other work." 16 Finally, she continues to point out to anyone who
will listen that for many mothers, in
 
 Page 232

the United States and throughout the world, even the meager gains of the
past few decades are out of reach.
On the other hand, since the beginning of Olsen's writing career, she has
implied that things do not need to be the way they are for mothers. Silences,
for example, is filled with statements like these: ''No one's development
would any longer be at the cost of another" (222n); the silencing of mother-
writers is "(unnecessarily happening, for it need not, must not continue to
be)" (39); and of the mother-artist Käthe Kollwitz, she marvels at what
might be "ifneeded time and strength were available simultaneously with
'the blessing,' the 'living as a human being must live'. . . (as, with changes,
now could be)" (212). "Could be," "not yet," "so far"these persistently
hopeful phrases, scattered like seed in Silences and in her talks and
interviews, are the explicit counterparts of the hopeful subtext of her fiction.
I do not believe that Olsen's sketching of the creative possibilities of
mothering falls into the "current infatuation with motherhood" Valerie
Miner deplores. In her fiction, Olsen never suggests that mothering should
take the place that romantic love, or more recently, sexual experience, has
held in literature as the one and only route to maturity and selfhood
available to women. On the contrary, in suggesting the possible, Olsen
deflates many overblown features of the motherhood mystique. That
deflation is an important strategy in making the possible real. Once again,
the imagery of hunger, eating, and feeding shows us how she accomplishes
this multilayered task.
In Olsen's fiction, the language of hunger almost always holds two elements
of her basic paradigm folded within one image: starvation, greed, and
something close to cannibalism on the one hand, and a passionate give-and-
take that replenishes the body and spirit on the other. This imagery suggests
that when hunger of any kind is not distorted by inequality and injustice, it
is healthy, generous, curious, and eager for connections. It leads to equality
rather than domination. Even on the most literal level, hunger expresses a
desire to stay alive; and giving food both sustains life and expresses a faith
that life is worth sustaining. On the figurative level, her imagery
acknowledges that, consciously or unconsciously, each
 
 Page 233

generation feeds on the wisdom and work of ancestors and contemporaries

as well as on the promise of children. In the face of no matter what betrayal
or hypocrisy, meals in Olsen's work are communal, the flat-out denial of
individualism.
A few examples will serve to show that, for Olsen, being healthily hungry is
almost synonymous with being healthily human, not just for mothers and
children but for everyone. In a fine passage from Silences, she quotes
Whitman's belief that ''American bards . . . shall be Kosmos, without
monopoly or secrecy, glad to pass anything to anyonehungry for equals by
night and by day." Olsen adds her impassioned interpretation of what this
hunger for equality means:
O yes.

The truth under the spume and corrosion. Literature is a place for generosity and affection
and hunger for equalsnot a prizefight ring. We are increased, confirmed in our medium,
roused to do our best, by every good writer, every fine achievement. Would we want one
good writer or fine book less? . . .

Hungry for equals. The sustenance some writers are to each other personally, besides the help
of doing their best work.

Hungry for equals. The spirit of those writers who have worked longer years, solved more,
are more established; reaching out to the newer, the ones who must carry on the loved
medium. (174)

Given favorable conditions, creation and relation feed each other. Again
from Silences, "So long they fed each othermy life, the writing;the writing
or hope of it, my life" (20). Even the conscious and subconscious levels of
the human person feed each other: "Subterranean forces can make you wait,
but they are very finicky about the kind of waiting it has to be. Before they
will feed the creator back, they must be fed, passionately fed, what needs to
be worked on" (13). In Olsen's fiction, everything is meant to be tasted and
chewed. David urges Eva to taste the beauty of the California seacoast, and
in "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" Lennie and Whitey share the pleasure of
"chewing over . . . the happenings of the time or
 
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the queerness of people.'' For Olsen, literal and figurative images of hunger
express the healthy, essential needs of every part of the human psyche and
of the human community, becoming a wedding of body and spirit and a
powerful force drawing people out of isolation toward each other.
The logic of Olsen's imagistic connections between hunger and mothering
raises a further question: What would mothering look like if it were not
maimed by the "sex-classrace world" in which it now exists? I believe
Olsen's answer is exactly the same as the answer to the same question about
hunger: mothering could be, can be healthy, generous, curious, eager for
connections, even rapturous. Olsen's language again suggests possibilities
of both starvation and plenty. Eva calls her children morsels. Suggesting
something small, fragile, and tasty, this word holds both potential menace
and tenderness. David says to Eva, "You are the one who always used to
say: better mankind born without mouths and stomachs than always to
worry for money to buy, to shop, to fix, to cook, to wash, to clean." Eva's
answer"How cleverly you hid that you heard. I said it then because eighteen
hours a day I ran. And you never scraped a carrot or knew a dish towel
sops"reveals that she was not renouncing hungry people or the task of
feeding them but rather the unspoken rules of the patriarchal family.
David calls Eva "a woman of honey," meaning, of course, the opposite; Eva
concurs with his opinion of her, thinking during an argument, "(Vinegar he
poured on me all his life; I am well marinated; how can I be honey now?)."
This exchange would seem to reinforce the image of Eva as food, and bitter
food at that, but Olsen gives neither David nor Eva the last word. As she
often does, here she uses David's ironical epithet to tell some deeper truth
about Eva, . . . whose wisdom she wants her readers to taste, and find
nourishing and even delicious.
Another important passage linking mothering and hunger goes even further
in suggesting possible yields. It is the famous one in which Eva tries to
explain to herself why she cannot hold her grandson: "Immediacy to
embrace, and the breath of that past: warm flesh like this that had claims
and nuzzled away all else and with lovely mouths devoured; hot-
 
 Page 235

living like an animalintensely and now; the turning maze; the long
drunkenness; the drowning into needing and being needed.'' Eva uses
similar words to describe her daughter Vivi, caught in "the maze of the
long, the lovely drunkenness" of mothering. With some justification, critics
have described this passage on mother love as "violent" and the language
that of addiction or even cannibalism.17I propose a parallelor perhaps
subterraneaninterpretation, suggested by words like intensely, maze, lovely
drunkenness, and drowning, all of which say that mothering can be an
ecstatic experience having much in common with intense creative and
communal activity. Olsen creates here something far more interesting than a
new version of the cliché that turns mothering into a metaphor for the
creative process. Instead, she suggests that mothering is one of many
analogous human experiences that involve one wholly, dissolving tight
boundaries and sweeping one into "the seas of humankind." Because of
their power, such experiences are both dangerous challenges and
exhilarating adventures; they threaten annihilation and at the same time
promise fullness of life.
The images Olsen uses for all these experiencesthe flood, the high tide, the
powerful underground riverseem to have come to her early from the 1934
San Francisco longshoremen's strike. At any rate, they appear for the first
time in "The Strike," her account of that event. The longshoremen are a
river "streaming ceaselessly up and down, a river that sometimes raged into
a flood, surging over the wavering shoreline of police, battering into the
piers and sucking under the scabs in its angry tides. HELL CAN'T STOP
US. . . . That was the meaning of the seamen and the oilers and the wipers
and the mastermates and the pilots and the scalers torrenting into the river,
widening into the sea."18 Flood images almost disappear in the landlocked
heat of Yonnondio; we hear them only briefly in Anna's songs"Oh
Shenandoah I love your daughter / I'll bring her safe through stormy water,"
and "I saw a ship a sailing / And on that ship was me." They reappear more
than twenty years later in the stories collected in Tell Me a Riddle and later
still in Silences. I suspect that the expanded meaning of this imagery in later
works reflects what twenty years as mother and writer taught Olsen about
the hidden
 
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emotional similarities among seemingly disparate experiences. Several

passages that use flood images to characterize such experiences will show
what those lessons were.
In ''O Yes," innumerable images of drowning and baptism mingle with each
other to describe Carol's experience of being drawn into black religious
experience and into caring for lives other than her own. The church choir
sings:
Wade,
Sea of trouble all mingled with fire
Come on my brethren it's time to go higher
Wade wade
(R 57)

Carol tries to separate herself from the explosive pain and joy of the black
congregation by focusing on "a little Jesus walk[ing] on wondrously blue
waters to where bearded disciples spread nets out of a fishing boat." But the
voices sweep over her "in great humming waves" and she feels herself
drowning into "the deep cool green": "And now the rhinestones in Parry's
hair glitter wicked; the white hands of the ushers, fanning, foam in the air;
the blue-painted waters of Jordan swell and thunder; Christ spirals on his
cross in the windowand she is drowned under the sluice of the slow singing
and the sway" (57-58).
A passage from "Tell Me a Riddle" picks up similar images of flood and
drowning to describe Eva's experience of mothering: "It was not that she
had not loved her babies, her children. The lovethe passion of tendinghad
risen with the need like a torrent; and like a torrent drowned and immolated
all else" (92). Olsen then describes Eva's early revolutionary spirit and the
new tasks she believes old age holds for her; the flood imagery declares the
commonalities between these three phases of Eva's life: "On that torrent she
had borne [her children] on their own lives, and the riverbed was desert
long years now. Not there would she dwell, a memoried wraith. Surely that
was not all, surely there was more. Still the springs, the springs were in her
seeking. Somewhere an older power that beat for life. Somewhere
coherence, transport, meaning" (92-93).
 
 Page 237

Finally, Olsen echoes both ''O Yes" and "Tell Me a Riddle" when she
describes in Silences the experience of writing and how it feels when
writing has to be deferred. For her and for the writers she quotes (James,
Woolf, Gide, Kafka), writing is "rapture; the saving comfort; the joyous
energies, pride, love, audacity, reverence wrestling with the angel, Art"
(173). She describes the many times in her life when she had to "leave work
at the flood to return to the Time-Master, to business-ese and legalese" (21).
In using this flood imagery to forge links between mothering and other
absorbing, creative work, Olsen obviously is not repeating the "moldy
theory" that all women must be biological mothers in order to claim their
womanhood (S 16); nor does she mean that mothering can or should absorb
a woman's whole life. Finally, she is not bitterly or ironically setting
mothering alongside political action, religious experience, or writing only to
reveal by contrast its dull passivity. On the contrary, her imagery suggests
that, far from being dull and repetitive, mothering could and should be high
adventure, calling forth compassion, courage, and wonder. It could and
should be like art, Olsen says in Silences, in "the toil and patience," but also
in the "calling upon total capacities; the reliving and new using of the past;
the comprehensions; the fascination, absorption, intensity" (18). In addition,
viewing mothering as art and as a source of art can help dismantle the walls
between women who are mothers and women engaged in other creative
work and, at the same time, help bring together the often fragmented selves
within individual women.
By demonstrating that her life as mother was one of the main sources of her
writing, and in taking the further step of making mothers' lives the center of
much of her fiction, Olsen counters one of the old notions about mothers I
described at the beginning of this chapter. This notion claims that mothering
is an experience so immured in nature there are no words to express it.
Olsen's imagery tells a homelier truth: that mothering is neither more nor
less expressible, neither more nor less sunk in silence than any other
experience that involves one's whole being. Just as it is difficult but possible
to write about making love, creating a poem, teaching well,
 
 Page 238

marching on a picket line, or nursing a dying grandmother, it is difficult but

possible to write about mothering.
Annie Gottlieb's 1976 book review entitled ''Feminists Look at
Motherhood" helps me to understand the weight of Olsen's influence in
bringing mothering out of the hazy, romantic half-light that has obscured it
for so long. Gottlieb writes about an honest and joyous dialogue between
her, a writer with no children, and her youngest sister, who had just given
birth to her first child. It is a dialogue, says Gottlieb, that would have been
impossible only a few years earlier:
The birth of my sister's baby would have divided us irrevocably from each otherand from
ourselves. She would have passed, for me, into a closed, dim world, inarticulate, seductive
and threatening, made up of equal parts of archetypal power and TV-commercial insipidity.
And for her, it would have been hopelessly beyond the reach of words she could not begin to
formulate and would in any case not have dared to utter, because they would have violated
all the accepted canons of motherhood.

She might have feared my educated contempt, for motherhood, while cloyingly idealized,
was in no way honored as either a source or an accomplishment of human intelligence. 19

Gottlieb attributes the newfound possibility of communication between

herself and her sister to the women whose books about motherhood she is
reviewing (Alta, Jane Lazarre, and Adrienne Rich). Their work was made
possible, she says, by the Women's Movement, "which in turn has drawn
inspiration from the work of a few pioneersforemost among them Tillie
Olsen." For Gottlieb, Olsen "feels like the first, both to extend 'universal'
human experience to females and to dignify uniquely female experience as
a source of human knowledge."20Although Olsen would hasten to name
many predecessors to whom she herself is indebted, I agree with Gottlieb
that Olsen is certainly the first whose works have been widely read, studied,
and discussed.
In the fifteen years since Gottlieb wrote that tribute, dozens of books about
mothers, mothering, and motherhood
 
 Page 239

have appeared, and it is true that what Valerie Miner terms ''this current
infatuation with motherhood" might be traced to Olsen. But Olsen never
sets mothers against women like May Sarton's magnificent spinster who
"stand on their own." In fact, she does the opposite. As Gottlieb says,
Olsen's writing has directly and indirectly helped to create connections
"between body and mind, between female experience and the realm of
thought, between a woman who at this moment is predominantly a mother
and one who at this moment is a writer."21While Olsen continues to show
clearly the differences among women, including those between women who
are mothers and those who are not, she steadfastly affirms that those
differences are not inherently divisive, ought not to be used as weapons of
reproach or sources of guilt, and do not lend themselves to ranking except
when one is obeying the dictates of patriarchal thought.
Gottlieb writes that "between the 'experience' of motherhood and the
patriarchal 'institution,' a system of man-made myths and 'false-namings'
exists that twists the experience itself into something far more anguished
and confining than it would naturally be. What it could be under vastly
different circumstances we cannot fully know."22Olsen's stories express
more powerfully than those of any other writer I know the needless anguish
and confinement, asking that her readers, sons and daughters all, "enter the
pain" of their mothers' lives.23 But Olsen never gives up on the possibility
that pregnancy, birth, and the essential arts of mothering could be one way
for a woman to give birth to herself; they could be replenishing acts for
mothers, their children, and a hungry society. In the imagery of Olsen's
fiction, they could be hearty bread, stone that preserves the valuable lessons
of the past, and a flood filled with life.

Notes
1. Citations of Olsen's major works appear in the text. I have used the
following editions and abbreviations: Mother to Daughter, Daughter to
Mother (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1984); Silences (New York:
Dell, 1980), designated as S; Tell Me a Riddle
 
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(New York: Laurel-Dell, 1981); and Yonnondio: From the Thirties (New
York: Laurel-Dell, 1981), designated as Y.
2. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and
Institution (New York: Bantam, 1976), 237.
3. For example, Edith Sumner Kelly's Weeds was published in 1923 and
was not reprinted until 1972, in the appropriately named Lost American
Fiction series of the Southern Illinois University Press. Agnes Smedley's
Daughter of Earth, published in 1929 and reprinted in a shortened version
in 1935, did not reappear until 1973, when The Feminist Press reprinted it.
4. Valerie Miner, ''The Light of the Muse," review of May Sarton, The
Magnificent Spinster, Women's Review of Books 3, No. 3 (December 1985),
7.
5. Lisa See, "PW Interviews: Tillie Olsen," Publisher's Weekly (23
November 1984), 79.
6. Olsen's Personal Statement, in First Drafts, Last Drafts: Forty Years of
the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, prepared by William
McPheron with the assistance of Amor Towles (Stanford: Stanford
University Libraries, 1989), 63.
7. Tillie Lerner, "I Want You Women Up North to Know," reprinted in
Selma Burkom and Margaret Williams, eds., "DeRiddling Tillie Olsen's
Writings," San Jose Studies 2, No. 1 (February 1976), 67-69.
8. Linda Kathryn Yoder, "Memory as Art: The Life Review in
Contemporary American Fiction," Ph.D. diss., West Virginia University,
1983.
9. Erica Duncan, "The Hungry Jewish Mother," in Cathy Davidson and E.
M. Broner, eds., The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature
(New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), 232.
10. Olsen, lecture/reading and correspondence, 8 March 1992.
11. Olsen, quoted in See, "PW Interviews," 79.
12. The Jerusalem Bible, 1966.
13. "Tillie Olsen: Witness as Servant," Polit: A Journal for Literature and
Politics 1 (Fall 1977), 5.
14. Mary K. DeShazer, "'In the Wind of the Singing': The Language of
Tillie Olsen's 'Tell Me a Riddle'," paper presented at the symposium, "Tillie
Olsen Week, The Writer and Society," 21-26 March 1983. Sponsored by
Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, et al.
 
 Page 241

15. Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills; or The Korl Woman (Old
Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1972), 31-33, 64.
16. Olsen, quoted in Linda Matchan, ''The Staggering Burden of
Motherhood," Boston Sunday Globe (11 May 1986), 98.
17. See Yoder, "Memory as Art," 100; and Judith Arcana, Our Mothers'
Daughters (Berkeley: Shameless Hussy Press, 1979), 188.
18. Tillie Lerner, "The Strike" reprinted in Jack Salzman, ed., Years of
Protest: A Collection of American Writings of the 1930's (New York:
Pegasus, 1967), 139.
19. Annie Gottlieb, "Feminists Look at Motherhood," Mother Jones
(November 1976), 51.
20. Ibid., 51, 52.
21. Ibid., 53.
22. Ibid., 52.
23. Duncan, "The Hungry Jewish Mother," 232.
 
 Page 243

RACHEL BLAU DuPLESSIS

To ''Bear My Mother's Name": Künstlerromane by Women Writers

No song or poem will bear my mother's name....
Perhaps she was herself a poetthough only her
daughter's name is signed to the poems that we know.
ALICE WALKER,
"In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" (1974)

The love plot and Bildungs plot are fused in a particular fictional strategy, a
figure emerging in a range of narratives from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
Aurora Leigh to Margaret Atwood's Surfacing.*And the central struggle
between designated role and meaningful vocation is negotiated by different
narrative tactics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts.1 The figure of a
female artist encodes the conflict between any empowered woman and the
barriers to her achievement.2Using the female artist as a literary motif
dramatizes and heightens the already-present contradiction in bourgeois
ideology between the ideals of striving, improvement, and visible public
From Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 35-63. Condensed with the permission of the
author.

* Ed. note. In an introductory chapter, DuPlessis argues that prior to the twentieth century,
gender ideologies are inscribed in two primary, sometimes overlapping, plots: the romance,
or love plot, and the quest, or Bildung, involving the character's growth and development.
Twentieth-century women's fiction writes multiple, complex plots displacing the
conventional endings for women protagonists in either marriage or death. "Künstlerromane"
means, literally, "artist-novels." These are novels in which the artist's development is central.
 
 Page 244

works, and the feminine version of that formula: passivity,

''accomplishments," and invisible private acts.
For bourgeois women, torn between their class values and the subset of
values historically affirmed for their gender caste, the figure of the female
artist expressed the doubled experience of a dominant ideology that was
supposed to be muted in them and that therefore became oppositional for
their gender. Making a female character be a "woman of genius" sets in
motion not only conventional notions of womanhood but also conventional
romantic notions of the genius, the person apart, who, because unique and
gifted, could be released from social ties and expectations.3Genius theory is
a particular exaggeration of bourgeois individualism, and its evocation
increases the tension between middle-class women as a special group and
the dominant assumptions of their class. Because it is precisely expression
and the desire to refuse silence that are at issue in artistic creation, the
contradiction between dominant and muted areas can also be played out in
the motif of the imbedded artwork, another narrative marker of these
Künstlerromane.
Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning is the mid-century text
of an emergent ideological formation, as Ruth Hall (1855), a sweet
American book, is that of dominant sentiments. Aurora Leigh is a
booklength narrative poem about the fusing of artist and woman, and the
testing of values surrounding class and spiritual vision.4In the final
moments of this work, the artist Aurora accepts her suitor in marriage,
having discovered that all her notable successes are compromised without
affection.5
Passioned to exalt
The artist's instinct in me at the cost
Of putting down the woman's, I forgot
No perfect artist is developed here
From any imperfect woman.
(380)

Aurora's expostulation of Love's primacy at the end of the work ("Art is

much, but Love is more. / O Art, my Art, thou'rt much, but Love is more!"
381) is well separated from
 
 Page 245

the even more powerful statements of her allegiance to art and her
meditations on craft, in Books II and V, which describe the upsurge of her
passionate inspiration as the ''lava-lymph" (195).
Never flinch,
But still, unscrupulously epic, catch
Upon the burning lava of a song
The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:
That, when the next shall come, the men of that
May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say
"Behold,behold the paps we all have sucked!"
(201-202)

Aurora Leigh is irrepressibly rich in imagery of volcanoes and breasts, of

maternal power to nourish; and by evoking the physical female, the poem
claims both biological and cultural authority to speak.6
Heterosexual love may have moral and ideological primacy in Aurora
Leigh, as articulated at the end, but vocation, itself bound with maternal
bliss and the power of love/hate relations among women, has textual
primacy.7Vocation, asserted early and often, is, moreover, stated in the
critical context of a beady-eyed analysis of female education for
domesticity, acquiescence, and superficiality. Aurora's choice of vocation is
made against the will of her closest relatives, including Romney. She asserts
female right to a profession not because of financial exigency or family
crisis, but out of sheer desire and for the sake of sheer power. Her ecstatic
commitment to the vocation of poet and her achievement tend to make valid
the ideology of striving and success that she embodies, joining that set of
values to female possibility.8
Between the beginning and the end, Romney and Aurora have exchanged
roles, in a chiastic move that tends to make their marriage somewhat
credible, despite the plot mechanism that has him involved with three
women, representing three social classes and three female types. Aurora has
seen the centrality of love, he the vitality of her art. While he had, in Book
II, been the fountainhead of smugly discouraging statements about women
as artists ("We get no Christ from
 
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you,and verily / We shall not get a poet, in my mind,'' 81), at the end he
comes to recognize that her achievement was more vital than his in
inducing the conversion experiences that are the real root of any social
change. This readjustment takes shape in a distinct and punitive shock to his
views. For Romney, like an escapee from Jane Eyre, is first rejected, like
St. John Rivers, and then, like Rochester, blinded. This wounding of male
heroes is, according to Elaine Showalter, a symbolic way of making them
experience the passivity, dependency, and powerlessness associated with
women's experiences of gender.9And, as in Brontë's Shirley, the rebellious
lower orders express, in unacceptable form, the rancor and hostility of all
the powerless, women included. For Romney's blindness is direct
punishment for his political theories. A mean-spirited, animalistic rebellion
causes the accident that blinds him. The poor have been so brutalized that
their souls are nasty, unawakened, unspiritual; their true awakening will be
brought about only by poetry and God, not by politics.
Because he can no longer continue these handicapped reformist activities,
the private sphere of love and the cosmic sphere of religion become the
world in which all his needs canmustbe satisfied. So the man is made to live
in the "separate sphere," in the feminine culture of love and God. The
creation of Romney's short-fall, his "castration" by the malicious verve of
the unwashed masses, creates a power vacuum where the upper-class or
upper-middle-class hero used to be. Aurora is then available to claim both
masculine and feminine rewardsthe hero's reward of success and the
heroine's reward of marriagein a rescripting of nineteenthcentury motifs
that joins romantic love to the public sphere of vocation.
Shine out for two, Aurora, and fulfil
My falling-short that must be! work for two,
As I, though thus restrained, for two, shall love!
(389)

Since Aurora had offered to sacrifice and to be used (381), what more
aggrandizing way to fulfill her desire for abasement than to demand that she
do twice as often and twice as in-
 
 Page 247

tensely what she has already proven she can do very well. Being an artist is,
at the end, reinterpreted as self-sacrifice for the woman, and thus is aligned
with feminine ideology. This work, then, created a powerful reference
point, but it did not change the nineteenth-century convention of
representation that saw the price of artistic ambition as the loss of
femininity.
Most of the nineteenth-century works with female artists as heroes observe
the pieties, putting their final emphasis on the woman, not the genius; the
narratives are lacerated with conflicts between femininity and ambition.
There are works in which the only reason for an artistic vocation is the
utterly desperate and melodramatic destitution of the main charactersay a
widow with young children, cast out from sanctimonious, petty family.
Such is the case with Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the
Present Time, published (in America) a year before Aurora Leigh. In this
work, when a child asks, ''When I get to be a woman shall I write books,
Momma?" the proper answer is clearly Ruth's "God forbid . . . no happy
woman ever writes. From Harry's grave sprang Floy [her pen name]."10
This statement may be taken as the mid-century base line of attitudes, in
which a woman's entry into public discourse elicits a shudder of self-disgust
and is allowable only if it is undertaken in mourning and domesticity.
Self-realization and ambition as a female crime, and the absolute separation
of love and vocation are also grimly coded into a moral tale by Rebecca
Harding Davis.11 An older woman, Hetty, vividly discontented with the
dullness and ordinary struggles of her life, is alienated from her new baby
and from her husband. The focus of her discontent is her ambition to
succeed in the public world with "fame and an accomplished deed in life"
(10). The climax of this conflict comes in a sequence that we later learn is a
hallucinatory dream of an artist's life. She is hissed on stage, sexually
exposed, homeless, mistaken for a prostitute, and responsible for her
husband's death from grief: surely an intense catalogue of punishments for
the crime of ambition. This transposition of desire for vocation to shame
and disgust is achieved by Davis's manipulation of the dual connotations of
the artist as soul and body. At first her ambition is boldly justified as "the
highest soul-
 
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utterance,'' a "mission," "a true action of the creative power," but the sordid
intervention of a "greasy" impresario refracts these spiritual claims and
collapses them. There is no third or mediating way out of the paradox that
the apparently romantic aspirations have a sordid reality, while humdrum
domestic life is, instead, the real sphere of divine mission. Here, as in
Aurora Leigh, class questions subtly shift the ground: the preindustrial farm
in which all participate, the family work in unity and interdependence, is
clearly better than the protocapitalist exploitation of artist/woman by
impresario/man, a relationship all too suggestive of prostitute to pimp.
Reunited with family, baby, and husband, Hetty thanks God that she was
purged of selfishness, willful dreams, and her delusive claims to talent. "A
woman has no better work in life than the one she has taken up: to make
herself a visible Providence to her husband and child" (19). God is usefully
recruited to bolster the solution. The public sphere is tempting but shallow;
the transcendent "Self" without ties is desolate; the private sphere, rather
than stultifying and "mawkish," is a cozy and ennobling realm of human
love (15, 8). The either/or ending of love versus vocation is created with a
newly honed edge in this tale. Although it does offer a pointed vocabulary
of critique, the narrative just as pointedly discredits it.
Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) summarizes these nineteenth-century
motifs, working them allusively, testing their limits, considering how they
might be broken.12The way the life of the artist can be mistaken for the life
of the demimondaine, the way "the children" come in and are narratively
presented, and an allusion to the sacredness of home ties by a woman
suffering in childbed are motifs shared with Rebecca Harding Davis. The
death of Edna Pontellier as an artist figure is a plain statement that the
character rejects the binary, either/or convention of love versus vocation.
However, the fact that her rejection of complicity takes the form of suicide
attacks the binary division between selves only by the monism of
obliteration. Chopin hints that there might be some socially plausible, if
marginalized, third way open to Edna, who is too attached to her privileges
of class (the dovecote, the smart set) and gender (her beauty) to pursue it. In
this narrative the binary choice still has force, but not finality; the
 
 Page 249

main character cannot experiment further and punishes herself for her
mixture of ambition to transcend feminine norms and complicity with them
by an act (swimming) that both celebrates and destroys that awakening. . . .
The Story of Avis (1877) by the prolific American writer Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps takes up the challenge of Aurora Leigh to examine the relation of a
woman to artistic vocation after the declaration of love and the marriage
that conclude Browning's poem. This deft book is formed like a quilt of
neatly fitted and boldly colored discoursessentimental, realistic, and, of
course, allegorical (the death of a bird [Latin: avis] given to her future
husband for safekeeping).
Avis is another of the large-spirited and gifted artist heroes torn between
human energy and feminine ideology. Phelps's version of a tragicomic
wedlock plot will show that marriage and vocation should not be combined
for women.
Successfor a womanmeans absolute surrender, in whatever direction. Whether she paints a
picture, or loves a man, there is no division of labor possible in her economy. To the
attainment of any end worth living for, a symmetrical sacrifice of her nature is compulsory
upon her. I do not say that this was meant to be so. I do not think we know what was meant
for women. It is enough that it is so. 13

Women are trained to a personality, formed by social constraints that

compel an undivided commitment to one path; allusions to the
psychological economy of romance makes change seem impossible. Avis
argues that even a woman of genius cannot break the imposed pattern of
sacrifice, of an either/or choice. Her future husband claims that a talented
and dynamic woman painter, once married, would be able to create and
housekeep in fair and equal balance. He is, not incidentally, feckless,
although persuasive. The book is built to test their opposing propositions;
Avis ''wins" the argument by losing her art, a plot mechanism that
recapitulates the double bind of femininity and vocation.
Shrewdly observed details of daily life in a household that does not
compromise its bourgeois solidity make the novel a study in frustration. 14
Not only the arrival of children but, in
 
 Page 250

sharply executed scenes, their behaviorseductive tantrums outside the studio

doordramatizes the conflicts that daily impede the practice of her talent. Her
paints grow dusty; domesticity encroaches constantly. Then the home itself
falters: one child dies, the husband is invalided by tuberculosis, the
marriage is an alienating stalemate. The author's attention shifts to the
prevention of the spiritual and emotional divorce she has so cunningly
suggested, as if Avis would be dishonored as a character if she could not
recapture love or respect for her husband. With this shift of attention, the
burden of the novel falls on the wedlock plot, and the Bildung of the female
artist is put aside. But even her husband's death does not set Avis free. In a
conservative scene of surrender, the character discovers that being married
had ''eaten into and eaten out the core of her life, left her a riddled, withered
thing, spent and rent" (447). She can no longer create, for her genius has
been used up in love; she is reduced to teaching art school. This mercantilist
view of the psychic economy of women suggests that a fixed amount of
energy exists in her life; what is spent is never replenished or recreated.
Hence the either/or choice persists and controls the character.
The book ends by the generational displacement of the mother's ambition
onto her daughter. 15 The mother reads her child the story of the Quest for
the Holy Grail, and we understand that while the first generation (Sir
Lancelot) failed, the second, purer generation of seekers will achieve the
quest. The thwarted mother bequeathes her ambition to the child, and that
emergent daughter becomes, as we shall see, the main character of the
twentiethcentury Künstlerroman.16
Avis's two major art works embody the conflict between vocation and love.
One is the catalyst for her marriage, a portrait of her future husband. The
other is the sphinx, a work of a thwarted artist, encoding both the powers
and failures of her genius.17In the sphinx is depicted the muted, riddling,
and inarticulate drive of woman artists in particular and of women in
general, suggesting vocation and its erosion, potential speech and actual
silencing, the whole "mutilated actuality" of her career (150).
In a number of works that center on female artists, characters from the
conventional heterosexual love plot . ..
 
 Page 251

make strong demands for conformity to exactingly interpreted feminine

roles. Both lover and maternal figures compel the processes of silencing
and thwart the preternatural articulateness of the female artists. In the
nineteenth-century works, the husband or suitor is the major problem for
the artistic career. The husband/suitor's concerted disapproval of the artist's
vocation (Aurora Leigh, until the end), his lack of sustained understanding
of the nature of her needs (The Story of Avis), his view of wife as bourgeois
possession (The Awakening) and his controlling of her artistic and
intellectual activity (as we shall see in ''The Yellow Wallpaper") are some of
the motifs.
The major modulation from the nineteenth- to the twentieth-century
Künstlerroman involves the position of heterosexual love and the couple
within the narrative. The romance plot, which often turns into a stalemate,
is displaced in twentieth-century narratives and replaced by a triangular plot
of nurturance offered to an emergent daughter by a parental couple.
Whenever the heterosexual bond remains central to the main character, she
is usually a "thwarted mother" type of artist. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's
"The Yellow Wallpaper" may be taken as a transitional work; the nurturing
that the potential artist receives is a form of social and emotional control,
repressive tolerance at its shrewdest. But Gilman's text is transitional
because, instead of submitting to the complicity or battered resignation we
see in works like The Story of Avis, Gilman's hero performs the act
signaling a shift in female narrative politics, the critique of narrative and
ideology by writing beyond the ending.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is an obdurate account of the conflict between an
artist's calling and external constraints, telling of the literal entrapment of a
potential writer in the room in which she is suffering from a breakdown. 18
Her journal of self-analysis (the work is constructed as a diary) is written
furtively, under her husband's ban. The external controls on the woman's
activity are very persistent, so her creative energy is baffled except for one
completed documentthe text we hold.
The room of her imprisonment epitomizes the doubled public and private
power characteristic of the social pressures brought to bear on women. As
the marital bedroom, it recalls
 
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love and trust; with its bars and fixed furniture, it mimics such impersonal
corrective institutions as jails and asylums. In the double character of the
husband/doctor, Gilman has expressed this nexus of patriarchal love, power,
and force; he combines the professional authority of the physician with the
legal and emotional authority of the husband.19The cause of the character's
worsening depression is writtenand with the proper eyes can be readin the
yellow wallpaper of the sickroom and in the diary secretly kept by the
woman.
The symptoms have a double impact, involving her fixation on the
wallpaper and her decoding of it. In the inability of the trained professional
to read her symptoms (but in his power to enforce his interpretation), in the
ability of the untrained patient to understand the semiology of her illness
(but her powerlessness to have her reading credited), Gilman has
constructed a dramatic statement illustrating the difficulty of the muted
group* to ''deny or reverse a universal assumption." 20When the ill woman
makes the climactic separation of the wallpaper's front pattern and its
hidden female figure, she makes the crucial analytic distinction between a
muted ("creeping") woman and the "central, effective and dominant system
of meanings" in her society.21By making the wallpaper pattern represent the
patterns of androcentric society, Gilman underscores the dailiness and
omnipresence of the universal assumption of male dominance, its apparent
banality and harmlessnessjust one modest feature of home decor. But like
any system of social and ideological dominance, it is pervasive, extensive,
and saturating.22All who live within this fixed pattern of institutions and
values are affected by it, no matter what their social benefits or sufferings or
how "careful" they are; Gilman reports that "the paper stained everything it
touched" (27).
At the ending, depending on one's interpretive paradigm, two contradictory
opinions about the main character can be held. The conflicting judgments
are simultaneously present, as the narrator, tearing the wallpaper, tries to
release
* Ed. note. In anthropological thought, as brought into feminist literary criticism by Elaine
Showalter, a "muted group" is a group silenced by its lack of access to social power.
 
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her double, the muted subtext with its unsaid meanings. ''Much Madness is
divinest Sense" here. But from the standpoint of "Much Sensethe starkest
Madness" that is, from the perspective of normalcy, her statement
demanding freedom for the muted meanings looks like irrationality and
delusion.23By an ending that calls attention to interpretive paradigms and
powers, Gilman highlights the politics of narrative.
The autobiographical sources of this short story have been well-
documented, from the breakdown itself to the infantalizing rest cure,
prescribed by an eminent Philadelphia doctor.24As Gilman was massaged
and fattened, she could "Have but two hours' intellectual life a day. And
never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live." "The Yellow
Wallpaper," dramatizing the mental cruelty of that dependent inactivity, was
written with an explicitly didactic purpose-"to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell,
and convince him of the error of his ways."25It is less noted that the
inspiration for this story parallels the provocation of The Story of Avis: a
compensatory defense of a thwarted mother and a highly critical eye cast at
the institution of heterosexual romance and marriagein Gilman's case both
the marriage of her parents and her own first marriage.26
The motif in which the maternal parent becomes the muse for the daughter
has more than fictional status; we can trace it through the biographies of
women authors from Virginia Woolf and H. D. to Alice Walker. In a
Woolfean essay, Walker "thinks back," tracing the sources of her art to the
parent whose artistry is vital.
Whatever she planted grew as if by magic, and her fame as a grower of flowers spread over
three counties. ... And I remember people coming to my mother's yard to be given cuttings
from her flowers; I hear again the praise showered on her because whatever rocky soil she
landed on, she turned into a garden. A garden so brilliant with colors, so original in its
design, so magnificent with life and creativity, that to this day people drive by our house in
Georgiaperfect strangers and imperfect strangersand ask to stand or walk among my mother's
art.27
 
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Judging from the evidence in Gilman, Phelps Ward, Woolf, and Walker,
there seems to be a specific biographical drama that has entered and shaped
Künstlerromane by women. Such a narrative is engaged with a maternal
figure and, on a biographical level, is often compensatory for her losses
(which may themselves be imaginatively heightened by being remembered
by her child). The daughter becomes an artist to extend, reveal, and
elaborate her mother's often thwarted talents. ''No song or poem will bear
my mother's name" (240). Still, "perhaps she was herself a poet,"
summarizes Walker, "though only her daughter's name is signed to the
poems that we know" (243).
The younger artist's future project as a creator lies in completing the
fragmentary and potential work of the mother; the mother is the daughter's
muse, but in more than a passive sense. For the mother is also an artist. She
has written, sung, made, or created, but her work, because in
unconventional media, is muted and unrecognized. The media in which she
works are often the materials of "everyday use" (to borrow a phrase from
Alice Walker), and her works are artisanal.28The traditional notion of a
muse is a figure who gives access to feeling or knowledge that she herself
cannot formulate. In contrast, this maternal muse struggles with her
condition to forge a work, usually one unique, unrepeatable workan event, a
gesture, an atmospherea work of synthesis and artistry that is consumed or
used.
By entering and expressing herself in some more dominant art form (poem,
not garden, painting, not cuisine, novel, not parlor piano playing) the
daughter can make prominent the work both have achieved. Mother and
daughter are thus collaborators, coauthors separated by a generation.
Because only the daughter's work is perceived as art within conventional
definitions, it will challenge these formulations of decorum, so the mother
or muted parent too can be seen as the artist s/he was.29This intellectual,
aesthetic, and ethical defense of the mother becomes involved with the
evocation of the preoedipal dyad, matrisexuality, or a bisexual oscillation
deep in the gendering process. In these works, the female artist is given a
way of looping back and reenacting childhood ties, to achieve not the
culturally approved ending in hetero-
 
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sexual romance, but rather the reparenting necessary to her second birth as
an artist.
In the nineteenth-century texts sampled here, heterosexual ties and the
marriage relation come under considerable critical scrutiny, but no change
in narrative modes occurs. In twentieth-century texts, the proportion of
successful artist figures increases, by virtue of a keen change in the terms of
the conflict between role and vocation. Instead of meaning marriage,
motherhood, and housewifery, ''role" comes to mean the filial completion of
a thwarted parent's task. The daughter artist and the blocked, usually
maternal, parent are, then, the central characters of twentieth-century
women's Künstlerromane. The maternal or parental muse and the
reparenting motifs are strategies that erode, transpose, and reject narratives
of heterosexual love and romantic thralldom.
Precisely this is at stake in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, which
concerns Lily Briscoe's long development, revealed through the interrupted
process of completing her painting over the ten years in which the novel is
set. The painting, a vivid formulation of the novel's themes in an imaginary
plastic structure, is "about" a mother and child, Mrs. Ramsay and James, or
even Lily herself, poised between strong opposing forces representing male
and femaleMr. and Mrs. Ramsay. The creation of that dynamic poise has
been the central aesthetic struggle for Lily.30
Because of her double and contradictory status, Mrs. Ramsay exists twice in
Lily's painting, first as one of the two conventional sides that must be
balanced, but then as the inspiration for the revelatory stroke in the middle.
For Mrs. Ramsay is central to the two systems: she is the stereotypical
feminine side of that dichotomy between male and female which will be
superseded, yet at the same time she is the final line at the center of the
painting: the dome of the mother-child dyad, the lighthouse of quest-love,
the wedge-shaped mark of life infused with the void of oceanic death . . . .
By the midpoint of the novel, both of the traditional endingsmarriage and
deathhave occurred, a sharp critical statement on Woolf's part that clears the
ground of any rival solutions to Lily's plot. The third part of To the
Lighthouse surpasses these classic resolutions, moving beyond the
 
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endings they propose, to brother-sister links, to male-female friendship,

and, even more, to a vision that overwhelms all the binary systems on
which the novel has been built. The final stroke, the placement of Lily's last
line, an abstraction of the mother-child dyad wedged into the divided
picture, makes her work emotionally complete and aesthetically unified.
The either/or division between masculine and feminine reaches a both/and
resolution in the art work of the female artist, who joins oedipal to
preoedipal materials and expresses the hive, dome, and secret hieroglyphs
of matrisexual passion.31This synthesis of polarities is even recorded in
Woolf's response to her text: on one hand she can characterize it as a ''hard
muscular book," yet she can also see it as "soft and pliable, and I think deep
. . . .32
In the first part of the novel, Lily opts for the pure quest plot of artistic
ambition. . . . Yet Lily cannot finish her painting, not because "women can't
paint, women can't write"Tansley's taunt and an external goadbut because
she has split her formalist vision from her emotional life (238). Woolf
further insists that Lily's painting can be completed only if she immerses
herself in vulnerability, need, exposure, and grief, only through empathya
set of feelings usually called womanlyand not through exclusive attention to
aesthetics in a vacuum. The point is illustrated in the later scene with Mr.
Ramsay, when "The sympathy she had not given him weighed her down. It
made it difficult for her to paint" (254). In short, the painting can be
achieved only through the fusion of love with quest.
The love here is not of the classic novelistic kind: Lily's helpful and
genuine admiration for Mr. Ramsay's boots, saving him from yet another
depressive attack, is hardly a prelude to their courtship. But love it is,
alluding to familial love, friendly love, comradely ties, some "of those
unclassified affections of which there are so many" (157). She helps him
without dissolving into romantic thralldom or powerful self-abnegation, an
important distinction from Mrs. Ramsay's way. Not only in offering
affection to him but in admitting vulnerability to love and loss in herself,
Lily is able to complete her painting. Thus love enables quest; quest is
given meaning because of love. The two arcing and interconnected actions
that complete the
 
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novelMr. Ramsay's sail across the bay with his children and Lily's
completion of the paintingare both journeys that had been becalmed until
love, grief, and need were admitted....33
On the last page of Surfacing (1972) by Margaret Atwood, the narrator
hovers between past and future, between her dead parents and her unborn
child, between meretricious commercial art and the art she promises to
make. Surfacing also shows an emergent daughter who focuses the heritage
of both parents in order to bring herself to maturity. The man in the book, a
woodsy impregnator, is set aside when his task is done. The art work is a
ritual performance piece that the protagonist constructs in order to gain
access to her parental, Canadian, mythic (especially matriarchal) roots.
Through this performance ritual, she sloughs off the victimization and
deadness of nationality and gender. Alone in the wilderness, the protagonist
choreographs visions of her parents, dreams, and symbolic acts, like eating
or not, into a unity both aesthetic and transformative. The ritual functions in
this character's life much as Lily's painting did, closing the past and
readying the self for the future. The liminal ending in which the narrator
crosses over into love (for her unborn child) and achievement (her unborn
art) mingles quest and love; the acceptance of female rolethe pregnancy was
deliberately soughtis, like the scenes of empathy in To the Lighthouse, the
enabling act.34
Despite any use of the words ''mother" and "daughter'" to characterize the
preoedipal implications of this reparenting, some of these figures are either
displaced by some generations or are not the biological daughters of the
mothers they seek. The generational displacement in the twentieth-century
works covertly announces that the mother might be less than inspiring.
Hence the mother may die in the story, as she does in Woolf and Tillie
Olsen. In Christina Stead's novel The Man Who Loved Children (1940), the
daughter artist Louie has even murdered Henny, her mother, with Henny's
complicit understanding. Louie then emerges from her family, having
broken the grip of the two embattled parents, escaping beyond the frame of
the book in a liminal ending: "I have gone for a walk round the
world."35The death or generational displacement of the mother in plots
involving a daughter artist may be
 
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the writer's way of solving one form of the conflict between role and
vocation, between the mutual costs, in Jane Flax's terms, of maternal
nurturance and filial autonomy. The nar- rative death is a cold-blooded if
necessary enabling act, which distinguishes the useful from the damaging in
the maternal heritage. The useful partempathy and symbiosisis placed in the
daughter's art work; the damaging partenvelopment and paralysislies buried
in the grave.36
The doubled story in Tillie Olsen's ''Tell Me a Riddle" is based on the
complementary characters of artists who are thwarted and emergent, mother
and daughter, dying and living. One major riddle"How was it that soft
reaching tendrils also became blows that knocked?"refers in general to the
ceaseless dialogue between possibility and betrayal that is carried on over a
woman's lifetime, and in specific to the conflict between motherhood and
Eva's political and artistic vocations.37The lifelong impoverishment of Eva's
complex spirit, a narrowing carried out in the private realm of family life as
well as in the public, historical realm, with its failure of revolutionary
hopes, has made her a rancorous old lady. Eva is deaf, deliberately, bitterly
silent, and filled with hostility and resentment: a paradigmatically muted
figure.
During the story, she and her husband leave their house, site of many
contentions and thematic issues about the meaning of home and family, and
visit three "daughters." The first returns to the past, with her ghettoized
emphasis on Jewish particularism; the second lives a life like her mother's,
with its ever-present claims and pressures of children "intensely and now."
The third figure, the grandchild Jeannie, completes the pattern, offering
future promise. Resembling the revolutionary woman who taught Eva to
read more than fifty years before, Jeannie expresses a continuity between
the battered ideals of the century's struggles and the unknown future in
which these revolutionary possibilities might be realized.
At the last stage of her journey, with her death from cancer imminent, Eva
becomes the point upon which past, present, and future converge. She
recovers her long-repressed identity as "First mother, singing mother,"
beginning her "incessant words," which resemble the Sprechstimme of
modernist musical style.38Her suffering and her memories crack her
 
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open; her voicing makes a broken, poetic song-speech with a pedal-point of

unanswerable riddles: ''So strong for what? To rot not grow": "Man . . .
we'll destroy ourselves?" Like the pageant music in Woolf's Between the
Acts, Eva's song is a communal one, and her individual person is like a
conduit through which a collectivity chants: "night and day, asleep or
awake... the songs and the phrases leaping." In Eva's cantata of voices,
memories, stories, bits of speeches and books, Olsen makes a manifesto of
long-muted voices, a political and aesthetic statement of power from the
apparently powerless, who sometimes can hear the music of human struggle
and destiny.
The granddaughter Jeannie, a Visiting Nurse, only gradually emerges as an
artist in the course of the story. For if Jeannie is a muse for Eva, the reverse
is also true: the grandmother's vision will reorient the younger woman. In
the sketch of her grandmother "coiled ... like an ear," Jeannie shows she has
understood Eva's essence: sensitivity to the music of struggling humanity.
Another of Jeannie's sketches, of her grandparents lying, hands "clasped,
feeding each other," makes the grandfather forgive Eva for her bitterness.
Jeannie "remarries" them at their last moments together. So, like Eva's, her
art is a moral and didactic act.
Human creativity in its boldest and broadest senses inspires Eva's cantata.
The collective strength and "zest" of voices at a community chorale break
through her defenses. The stories of Chekhov and Balzac are high cultural
sources; a Pan del Muertofolk-art cookie for a dead childcomes from
popular culture. "Like art," this decorated cookie recalls the songs of Anon
in Between the Acts, the moment "almost like a work of art" in To the
Lighthouse, and "my mother's art" of the garden for Alice Walker. Like
Woolf and Walker, Olsen obliterates the distinction between high culture
and folk art in the array of Eva's sources.39 Yet while immersion in the
human condition compels artistic expression, such an immersion also
prevents it. Olsen's own career is a negotiation with this contradiction. She
chooses to look for the unsaid, absent, or missing elements, constructing a
literary and political stance "dark with silences" of the unspoken. 40 Olsen
has testified to the thematic and moral center provided by her recognition,
like Woolf's in A Room of One's Own, of the social,
 
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material, and emotional circumstances that prevent, or give a certain twisted

cast to, fruition and achievement.
If, in these women writers, the function of the artist with the tools of
dominant culture is to embody muted experiences, then the figure of the
female artist counters the modernist tradition of exile, alienation, and
refusal of social rolesthe non serviam of the classic artist hero, Stephen
Dedalus. The woman writer creates the ethical role of the artist by making
her imaginatively depict and try to change the life in which she is also
immersed. This differentiates the figure in the female Künstlerromane from
the fantasies of social untouchability or superiority that are prevalent in
modernist depictions. These issues of change and stasis emerge in Doris
Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962).41 A published writer of a book that
she now regards with contempt, Anna Wulf can no longer ''write," but keeps
four notebooks, separated explanations for the political and sexual strains
that caused her professional stalemate. The major formal project of
Lessing's book is to explore and surpass meretricious, abandoned, or
incomplete stories, sometimes love plots, but also a whole novel called Free
Women, in order to arrive at some precious dialectical "golden" amalgam,
through which a more dynamic statement about history, politics, and
personal relations can be articulated. . . .
Anna had argued endlessly that it is impossible to create art, since the only
wholeness people exhibit occurs by virtue of pastiche and ersatz imitations
of order. She learns that it is not art that should be rejected but a limiting
conception of artistic order. Thus another kind of narrative must be
inventedthe multivocal, palimpsestic, personal, autobiographical,
documentary, analytic, essayistic diary-novel. This is not the encyclopedic
form of the authoritative summa but something that has switched the poles
of authorityan encyclopedia with its categories unformed, its indices
unmade, its alphabets unorganized, without fixed grids of judgment,
exclusion, concision, or categorization. Anna has found that to write fiction
as it was once written would constitute a premature resolution of conflict,
confining contradictions rather than releasing them the length and breadth
of the work. Narrative based on nostalgia, on manipulative transpositions,
on
 
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small-minded, riskless reaches into the expressive are obsessively set forth
and rejected. Thus the novel is an encyclopedia of the critique of narrative
and hegemonic orders . . .
The fictional art work, distinctively described in these works, has a poetics
of domestic values-nurturance, community building, inclusiveness,
empathetic care.42The poetics of the fictional art work begins with its
ethics, not its aesthetics; it has its source in human ties and its end in human
change. The work is described as having a clear ethical function and is not
severed from the personal or social needs that are its source-for example,
the mourning or rage expressed by the characters. This art work can only be
made with an immersion in personal vulnerability, a breakdown, or a
breakthrough, as in Gilman, Lessing, and Atwood, or as an articulation of
long-repressed grief or love, usually the experiences of a daughter in
relation to parents, as in Woolf and Olsen.43This saturation in buried, even
taboo emotions, first resisted, then sought, and finally claimed, is the
preferred process by which the fictional artist comes into her own. Since
this art work annuls aesthetic distance and is based on vulnerability and
need, it is very like ''life."44
But the work is not exclusively expressive in its poetics. While often begun
in situations of psychic desperation, these works are not satisfied simply to
confess this fact, or to transform the fictional artist through her knowledge.
In contradistinction to purely expressive theories of art, here sincerity is
valued because it clarifies the ethical and social bases of the experience.
Expression, in the fictional art works, is informed with critical purpose.
Anna Wulf's breakdown, the subject of her most dramatic and fructifying
notebook, is a decisive rupture with the paradigms of intellectual and
emotional order in which she once believed. Eva's cantata begins in hostile
anger and ends with a vision of social and revolutionary hope. The hero of
"The Yellow Wallpaper" resists the definitional grids that imprison her
double in the wallpaper.
The depicted art work is charged with the conditions of its own creation.
Maintaining self-reflexive emphasis on the process of creation, this art work
is not presented as an artifact free from the stresses and limits of the time in
which it was formed. Instead, it is both fabricated from and immersed in
 
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the temporal, social, and psychic conditions of muted female life that we
are compelled to understand in reading the work: interruptions, blockage,
long censorship, derision, self-hatred, internalized repression. Nor does the
art work seek the status of a masterpiece or great work, which will be
severed from its everyday connections, stored in a museum or gallery,
published or sold. The imaginary art work takes its cue from the artisanal
experience, in which the object is made for use and has its existence in the
realm of necessity, as an expression of ties or needs. Art defined in this
fashion is not a property dependent upon its market price and the level of
rarity or specialness that it has attained. The fictional art work, drawing on
the artisanal, not only expresses its connection with the parental or maternal
handicrafter but also registers a protest against art as a salable commodity.
The thing precious only because it is hoarded, saved, unconsumed is
rejected. Instead, craft (gardening, cooking, storytelling, singing, quilting)
and art (painting, sculpting, writing) are viewed as varient parts of one
spectrum of human production. This pointed fusion of craft and high art
makes a critical assessment of the value placed on activities elevated above
the material and conflictual realm.45
The division between high and decorative arts is a historical construct, not a
universal, and it can be linked to the view of the artist as a separated,
isolated genius. By inserting the artist in a social group, the familybut a
family reconceptualized so that parental and especially maternal ties are a
nurturing source, not an impedimentand by structuring an ethics of
emotional service, the idea of the artist as social outcast is contested.
So the fictional art works are carefully built to end what Theodor Adorno
calls ''the pure autonomy of mind" in the relation of art to culture.
Culturehigh bourgeois culture"originates in the radical separation of mental
and physical work. It is from this separation, the original sin, as it were, that
culture draws its strength."46William Morris also points to the historical
specificity of the moment when "the great and lesser arts" separate, the one
to become "ingenious toys" for the rich, the other to become trivial and
unintelligent.47It is clear that the fusion of the artisanal and high art has
been
 
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an analytic dream for radical thinkers. The ideological importance of this

fusion for solving the narrative dilemma of role and vocation is apparent
when one remembers the completely binary alternatives of the nineteenth-
century textseither domestic life or artistic life. The twentieth-century
female Künstlerromane solve that binary opposition between work and
domesticity by having the fictional art work function as a labor of love, a
continuation of the artisanal impulse of a thwarted parent, an emotional gift
for family, child, self, or others. This may or may not be realistic, but it is a
compelling narrative solution to a prime contradiction. In their artist novels,
women writers present a radical oppositional aesthetics criticizing
dominance.

Notes
1. There are two parallel discussions of the Künstlerroman. Grace Stewart
discusses mother-daughter ties as ''often central to the novel of the artist as
heroine," but focuses on their negative character. A New Mythos: The Novel
of the Artist as Heroine, 1877-1977 (St. Alban's, Vt.: Eden Press Women's
Publications, Inc., 1979), p. 41. In another consideration of this topic, Susan
Gubar argues that two scripts felt to have been absolute alternativesartistic
production and biological reproductionare joined in twentieth-century
women's Künstlerromane, allowing female images of creativity to dominate
the works. "The Birth of the Artist as Heroine: (Re)production, the
Künstlerroman Tradition, and the Fiction of Katherine Mansfield," in The
Representation of Women in Fiction, ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret
R. Higonnet (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1983): pp. 19-
59.
2. A note on terminology. "Female artist" will refer only to the fictional
figure; the person who invented the narrative is a woman writer. "Art work"
will mean the imaginary text, painting, or performance described, the
production of the female artist.
3. Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (London: Macmillan Press,
Ltd., 1981), p. 27.
4. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh and Other Poems, introduced
by Cora Kaplan (London: The Woman's Press, Ltd., 1978).
 
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5. Although, by its focus on closure, my interpretation emphasizes the

relations of romance, this work, like Jane Eyre, has a powerful subtext of
female love-hate relations among the women of all three social classes.
Especially the tie between Marian Earle (''a monumental Madonna") and
Aurora is discussed by Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of
a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 151.
6. Cora Kaplan is admirable on this point, as on many others in her
introduction.
7. In another reading, it is heterosexual romance that becomes a metaphor
for creative identity. For Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, Romney is first the
interior, self-hating critic and then a "dramatic projection of... blind faith" in
oneself." "Aurora Leigh: The Vocation of the Woman Poet," Victorian
Poetry 19, 1 (Spring 1981): 48.
8. But this was also a shocking affirmation, for it violated "the social and
public silence of women after puberty which was central to the construction
of femininity in the nineteenth century." The Marxist Feminist Literature
Collective, "Women's Writing: Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, Aurora Leigh,"
in 1848: The Sociology of Literature, ed. Francis Barker (Colchester:
University of Essex, 1978), p. 202.
9. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists
from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977),
p. 152.
10. Fanny Fern [Mrs. Sarah Payson (Willis) Parton], Ruth Hall: A Domestic
Tale of the Present Time (New York: Mason Brothers, 1855), p. 333.
11. Rebecca Harding Davis, "The Wife's Story," The Atlantic Monthly XIV,
81 (July 1864): 1-19.
12. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (New York: Capricorn Books, 1964).
13. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Story of Avis (Boston: James R. Osgood &
Co., 1877), p. 126.
14. Indeed, in a notable conduct book, a sister writer deplores Phelps's
sympathetic depiction of Avis's dilemma, insisting that even an
"emancipated schoolgirl" still needs practical knowledge of womanly,
domestic tasks. With sharply selective citation, she makes Avis's complaints
seem self-indulgent. Marion Harland, Eve's Daughters, or
 
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Common Sense for Maid, Wife and Mother (New York: J. R. Anderson and
H. S. Allen, 1982), p. 326.
15. The same kind of ending is visible in Rebecca Harding Davis, Earthen
Pitchers (1873-74), which offers similar motifs: the ruining of female
talent, the insensitive but ill husband (here he is blind), the heritage in the
child.
16. Phelps was presenting a compensatory analysis of her own family. Her
exacting and punctilious father had, in her view, stifled the ambitions and
spirit of her talented mother, a writer, whose name the eight-year-old
Elizabeth took in tribute after her mother's untimely death. The bond
between Avis and her daughter takes on an extra dimension in the
biographical context, in which the author, a daughter, did feel she was
completing her mother's thwarted work. For the biographical information,
see Christine Stansell, ''Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: A Study in Female
Rebellion," in Women: an Issue, ed. Lee Edwards, Mary Heath and Lisa
Baskin (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1972): pp. 239-56. About this,
Phelps wrote, "Her last book and her last baby came together, and killed
her. She lived one of those rich and piteous lives such as only gifted women
know; torn by the civil war of the dual nature which can be given to women
only." Cited from Phelps [Ward], Chapters from a Life, 1897, in the
Afterword by Mari Jo Buhle and Florence Howe to The Silent Partner
(1871) (Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 1983), p. 362.
17. Because Avis cites Aurora Leigh, it is likely that the subject of her
painting was inspired by these lines in Barrett Browning: "Or perhaps
again, / In order to discover the Musethe Sphinx, / the melancholy desert
must sweep round, / Behind you as before" (AL, 70).
18. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (1899) (New York:
The Feminist Press, 1973).
19. That powerful and loving doctor/lawgiver is a recurrent figure in
women's writing, as in their lives, for he sums up the fascinated
ambivalence of male culture toward the ambitious female as speaking
subject: Freud and "Dora"; S. Weir Mitchell and Gilman; Otto Rank and
Anais Nin; Freud and H. D. He recurs, transposed, in the Sir William
BradshawSeptimus Smith tie in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.
20. "That one sex should have monopolized all human activi-
 
 Page 266

ties, called them 'man's work,' and managed them as such, is what is meant
by the phrase 'Androcentric Culture.''' Referring to the difficulty of even
naming "our androcentric culture" in a convincing way, Gilman remarks, "It
is no easy matter to deny or reverse a universal assumption." The Man-
Made World, or, Our Androcentric Culture (New York: Charlton Company,
1911), pp. 25, 21.
21. Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural
Theory," New Left Review 82 (November-December 1973): 9.
22. A veiled citation from ibid.
23. The gloss is Emily Dickinson, 435. "Much Madness is divinest SenseTo
a discerning Eye / Much Sensethe starkest Madness / 'Tis the Majority / In
this, as All, prevail / Assent and you are same / Demuryou're straightway
dangerous / And handled with a Chain" The Complete Poems of Emily
Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
1960), p. 209.
24. As early motherhood and the strains of domesticity, added to a well-
meaning but awkward marriage, overtaxed the ambitious Gilman and
contributed to her breakdown, it was not more injunctions to domesticity
and femininity that she needed. But this is what S. Weir Mitchell offered his
female clients. Mitchell's treatment reflected nineteenth-century attitudes,
inducing conformity with the duties of womanhood rather than exploring
the conflict and anger within the individual. This point is made by Mary A.
Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860-
1896 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), p. 149. In S. Weir
Mitchell's home city there is, near 16th on Walnut Street, a plaque
commemorating his accomplishments as "physician, physiologist, poet,
man of letters" adding, "He taught us the use of rest for the nervous."
25. Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography
(1935) (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 96, 121.
26. After her own first marriage, she sank into a profound depression,
which lifted almost the instant she separated from that husband, but whose
effects lasted in what she perceived as a compromise of her abilities.
Earlier, Gilman has seen her parents' marriage as "a long-drawn, triple
tragedy," and said "mother's life was one of the most painfully thwarted I
have ever known" (Living, p. 8). Her mother was a pianist who sold the
instrument to pay her bills; again
 
 Page 267

the thwarted mother as artist motivates the achievements of the daughter.

Gilman felt that it was possible to combine marriage, motherhood, and
vocation, but in her specific case, ''it was not right." This may stem from the
self-denial and deprivation to which she subjected herself.
27. Alice Walker, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," in In Search of Our
Mothers' Gardens (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 241.
28. In Alice Walker's story "Everyday Use," the maternal heritage of quilts
belongs to the down-home daughter, who will use them and who has the
skills to replenish the stock, not to the urban chic daughter, who,
discovering her rural roots, wants to hang the quilts on the wall and alienate
them into quaintness. The story is a revisionary telling of the Jacob-Esau
story, in which the matriarch works to equalize the "portion" of both sisters,
when the more favored quick child has schemed to take part of that heritage
although she does not honor it.
29. Where the writer is also concerned to show the artist completing the
work of the thwarted father, the father will come from a historically
marginalized, nondominant group. For example, in Doris Lessing's The
Golden Notebook, the parental couple is transposed to Mother Sugar,
Anna's analyst, and Charlie Themba, a (correctly) paranoid African leader.
This use of parental figures often involves a distinct rewriting or an
idealization, for example, using characters who are surrogate parents or
grandparents, generationally displaced, or otherwise reassembled.
30. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World, Inc., 1955).
31. It is striking how, in Moments of Being, the maternal and the visionary
moments are both expressed in the image of a translucent dome of light: the
"globular, semi-transparent" early ecstatic sensations, the "arch of glass"
that domed Paddington Station, burning and glowing with light. Moments of
Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1976), pp. 66, 93. So Mrs. Ramsey at that preoedipal moment of yearning
(associated with both hieroglyphs and bees) ends as "the shape of a dome"
(80).
32. Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954), pp. 102, 105.
33. How to achieve this ending was the subject of Woolf's entry on 5
September 1926, which interestingly reveals that in the
 
 Page 268

original conception, Lily and her picture were secondary, and ''summing up
[Mr.] R's character" seemed to be primary. The shift from a patrifocal
narrative to one focused on balance between the generations and on the
daughter's vision of the mother serves as further evidence of the thesis of
this chapter (Writer's Diary, p. 98).
34. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (Ontario: Paperjacks, 1973).
35. Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children (New York: Avon
Books, 1966), p. 491. The book contains an imbedded art work-Louie's
play, in an invented language, which depicts to her father a distinct, bitter
message about the tie between Snake Man and his daughter: "You are
killing me" (378).
36. See Jane Flax, "The Conflict Between Nurturance and Autonomy in
Mother-Daughter Relationships and Within Feminism," and Judith Kegan
Gardiner, "A Wake for Mother: The Maternal Deathbed in Women's
Fiction," which discusses how "mothers in death embody the negative
aspects of female personality and role," both in Feminist Studies 4, 2 (June
1978): 171-89; 146-65.
37. Tillie Olsen, "Tell Me a Riddle," in Tell Me a Riddle (New York: Dell
Publishing Company, 1960), p. 86.
38. The term Sprechstimme (literally "speech voice") is a distinctive form of
writing for the voice in twentieth-century music. Grove's Dictionary of
Music and Musicians defines it as a "kind of vocal declamation which
partakes of the characteristics of both song and speech."
39. The same multiple populist inspiration, double artist figures, mother-
daughter and father-daughter ties, and proliferating works of art occur in
Margaret Laurence's The Diviners (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1974). By
stories, ballads, and novels, the politically outcast Canadian strains-Celtic,
French, and Indian-are synthesized and become oppositional to the
powerful British minority.
40. Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York: Delta, 1979).
41. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (New York: Ballantine Books,
1968).
42. In her analysis of artist novels, Gubar calls this "revisionary domestic
mythology" (The Representation of Women in Fiction, p. 39).
43. The particularly privileged mother-daughter connection for creative
women was verified in Bell Gale Chevigny's "Daughters Writing: Toward a
Theory of Women's Biography," Feminist Studies 9, 1 (Spring 1983): 79-
102.
 
 Page 269

44. Judith Kegan Gardiner corroborates this connection between art and
life, tracing it to fluid ego boundaries in women's psychological identity.
''On Female Identity and Writing by Women," Critical Inquiry 8, 2 (Winter
1981): 347-61. In considering stances plausible for a feminist poetics,
Lawrence Lipking discusses several issues that this study has also put forth:
the pressure on women of an injunction to silence, the personal, rather than
objective, stake women have in analyses made of them, and therefore the
lack of aesthetic distance and the attempt to build a poetics and a criticism
based on affiliation, not authority. "Aristotle's Sister: A Poetics of
Abandonment," Critical Inquiry 10, 1 (September 1983): 61-81.
45. Herbert Marcuse, "The Affirmative Character of Culture," Negations:
Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 95-96. One
might fruitfully compare the black aesthetic, as enunciated by Gwendolyn
Brooks in her introduction to Jump Bad, an anthology of black poetry from
Chicago. "These black writers do not care if you call their product Art or
Peanuts. Artistic survival, appointment to Glory, appointment to Glory
among the anointed elders, is neither their crevice [sic] nor creed. They
give to the ghetto gut. Ghetto gut receives. Ghetto giver's gone." Report
from Part One (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972), p. 195.
46. Theodor W. Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," Prisms (London:
Neville Spearman, 1967), p. 26.
47. William Morris, "The Lesser Arts" (also given under the title "The
Decorative Arts," 1877), in The Political Writings of William Morris, ed. A.
L. Morton (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1973), p. 32.
 
 Page 271

CONSTANCE COINER

''No One's Private Ground":

A Bakhtinian Reading of Tillie
Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle
"Commitment" is more than just a matter of presenting
correct political opinions in one's art; it reveals itself in
how far the artist reconstructs the artistic forms at his
[/her] disposal, turning authors, readers and spectators
into collaborators.
TERRY EAGLETON,
referring in his Marxism and Literary Criticism to Walter Benjamin's "The Author as Producer"

In the stories collected in Tell Me a Riddle Tillie Olsen examines the

marginalization and potential empowering of various groups of oppressed
people, particularly women, by experimenting with potentially
democratizing modes of discourse. Deborah Rosenfelt has rightly placed
Olsen in
. . . a line of women writers, associated with the American Left, who unite a class
consciousness and a feminist consciousness in their lives and creative work, who are
concerned with the material circumstances of people's lives, who articulate the experiences
and grievances of women and of other oppressed groupsworkers, national minorities, the
colonized and the exploitedand who speak out of a defining commitment to social change.
("Thirties" 374)

Reprinted (with revisions) from Feminist Studies 18, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 257-81.
 
 Page 272

Although Tell Me a Riddle shows a range of marginalized lives, Olsen is far

from content with merely portraying this multiplicity in American society.
As Rosenfelt observes, Olsen writes out of a ''commitment to social
change," and I will discuss some of Olsen's narrative/political strategies that
exemplify that commitment.
The modes of discourse with which Olsen experiments in developing her
narrative strategies are those she has derived and recreated from long and
careful listening to the voices of marginalized people. The cacophany of
their voices, Olsen recognizes, comprises a potentially democratizing force.
Noting some of Olsen's uses of empowering discursive forms in Silences,
Elizabeth A. Meese writes that "by means of a polyvocal chorus she [Olsen]
questions silence and allows others to participate in the same process. . . .
She then calls upon the reader to write the textno longer her text, but
occasioned by it and by the voices speaking through it" (110). The
experiments noted by Meese as well as several other experiments pervade
Tell Me a Riddle.
Some of Olsen's specific uses of discursive modes and the political/social
changes they work to bring about are prefigured in Mikhail Bakhtin's
general concept of "heteroglossia." For Bakhtin there are two competing
forces in language use: "Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject
serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought
to bear" (Dialogic 272). The "centripetal" or "monologic" force presses
toward unity, singularity of meaning; it attempts to assert its dominance by
silencing uses of language that deviate from it. On the other hand, the
"centrifugal" or "heteroglossic" force resists the dominance of monologism
by fragmenting and disrupting it. The myriad heteroglossic voices of the
marginalized comprise a social and political force against the tyranny of
dominant discursive modes in any language community. Those such as
Olsen who observe, record, and honor the multiple heteroglossic voices
engage in the democratizing enterprise of amplifying dominated and
marginalized voices.
Bakhtin's metaphor of "carnival" displays the nexus of heteroglossia and
political/social power. Carnival, with its various simultaneous activities, is a
site in which many of the
 
 Page 273

usual societal impositions of class and order are suspended while the
populace participates in multiple ways of parodying or mimicking the
dominant culture's behavior. Terry Eagleton has described Bakhtin's notion
of carnival in these terms: ''The 'gay relativity' of popular carnival, 'opposed
to all that [is] ready-made and completed, to all pretence at immutability,' is
the political materialization of Bakhtin's poetics, as the blasphemous,
'familiarizing' language of plebeian laughter destroys monologic
authoritarianism with its satirical estrangements" (Against 117). In Tell Me
a Riddle, in several instances of carnival-like atmosphere, heteroglossia is
unleashed to engage in a powerful, playful satirizing of the dominant
culture.
The nurturing and recording of heteroglossia has democratizing potential,
but heteroglossia itself and the recording of it also contain hazards both for
the multiplicity of speakers and for those who listen to their voices. The
collection of stories in Tell Me a Riddle presents a wide range of individual,
marginalized voices competing for our attention. Unless readers/listeners
make connections among a variety of voices, many of which are foreign to
their own, the potential for genuine democracy latent within the cacophony
of heteroglossia is lost. If they remain unconnected from each other, the
competing voices lapse into a white-noise excess of sound that becomes
unintelligible. Rejecting many traditional modes of authorial control, Olsen
refuses opportunities to make connections for us and presses us to make
connections among those voices ourselves. The social/political act of
connecting otherwise isolated and marginalized voices realizes the
democratizing potential of heteroglossia, and Olsen demands that we
participate in such action.
To participate properly, we must be permeable to multiple voices, and in
some characters in Tell Me a Riddle, Olsen shows us both the benefits and
risks of receptivity to heteroglossia. Multiple voices often compete within a
single character, displaying that character's complex web of ties to others
and to the past. Heteroglossia on this level often operates in Tell Me a
Riddle and other works by Olsen to undermine and offer alternatives to
bourgeois individualism. But Olsen does not idealize the individual
permeable to heteroglossia; she
 
 Page 274

shows us hazards that exist in individual manifestations of heteroglossia

(e.g., Whitey's isolation in ''Hey Sailor, What Ship?" and the multiple
voices that threaten to overwhelm the narrator of "I Stand Here Ironing").
Tell Me a Riddle asks us to be cognizant of the dangers we face as we
assume the role Olsen insists we assumethat of active readers alert to the
connections among a multiplicity of marginalized voices.
Throughout the stories in Tell Me a Riddle Olsen pits heteroglossic modes
of discourse she associates with the oppressed against oppressors'
monolingual/monological modes of discourse. In the title story, Jeannie's
sketch of Eva "coiled, convoluted like an ear" suggests Olsen's
narrative/political strategies. Olsen's writing, like an ear "intense in
listening," is permeable to the heteroglossic differences constitutive of a
complex social field. The stories collected in Tell Me a Riddle strain away
from the prevailing narrative and social order by "hearing" and
incorporating the suppressed voices of mothers, those of the working class,
and the dialects of immigrants and African-Americans; by deconstructing
the opposition between personal and political; and, in the title story, by
honoring the communal polyphony of a dying visionary.
A second and related narrative/political strategy is a reworking of
traditional relationships among writer, text, and reader. The stories collected
in Tell Me a Riddle subvert the concept of textual ownership, affirming the
reader not as an object but, reciprocally, as another subject. Many dominant
discursive practices still take for granted that the act of reading will be a
subjection to a fixed meaning, a passive receiving of what Bakhtin terms
"monologue." In Bakhtin's view of monological discourse, the writer
directly addresses the readers, attempting to anticipate their responses and
deflect their objections; meanings are seen as delivered, unchanged, from
source to recipient. In Bakhtin's terms, monologue is "deaf to the other's
response; it does not await it and does not grant it any decisive force" (cited
in Todorov 107).
Heteroglossic discourse, on the other hand, acknowledges "that there exists
outside of it another consciousness, with the same rights, and capable of
responding on an equal footing, another and equal 1" (107). Tell Me a
Riddle's heteroglossia acknowledges the other consciousnesses that exist
out-
 
 Page 275

side the text. As Meese indicates about similar strategies in Silences, Tell
Me a Riddle activates its reader-subjects while subverting authorial
domination; in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht's theater and Jean-Luc
Godard's cinematic montage, it turns writer and readers into collaborators.
The two categories of Olsen's narrative/political strategy I have identified-
her recording of heteroglossia and her reworking of relationships among
writer, text, and readerconstitute this essay's two major divisions.
In Tell Me a Riddle's first story, ''I Stand Here Ironing," Olsen begins her
recording of heteroglossia by exploring problems that fragment lives and
discourse and by experimenting with narrative forms that display that
fragmentation. Emily, the daughter of the unnamed narrator, had been born
into "the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression," and her father, no
longer able to "endure . . . sharing want" with the 19-yearold mother and
child, had left them when Emily was eight months old (10). The infant "was
a miracle to me," the narrator recalls, but when she had to work, she had no
choice but to leave Emily with "the woman downstairs to whom she was no
miracle at all" (10). This arrangement grieved both mother and child: "I
would start running as soon as I got off the streetcar, running up the stairs,"
the narrator remembers, and "when she saw me she would break into a
clogged weeping that could not be comforted, a weeping I can hear yet"
(10-11). Then came months of complete separation, while the child lived
with relatives. The price for reunion was Emily's spending days at "the
kinds of nurseries that [were] only parking places for children. . . . It was
the only place there was. It was the only way we could be together, the only
way I could hold a job" (11). Their situation improved with the presence of
"a new daddy" (12). Although the narrator still worked at wage-earning
jobs, she was more relaxed with her younger children than she had been
with Emily: "it was the face of joy, and not of care or tightness or worry I
turned to them." But, the narrator adds, by then it was "too late for Emily"
(12).
The narrative is laced with references to the pressure of circumstance, the
limits on choice: "when is there time?";
 
 Page 276

''what cannot be helped" (9); "it was the only way" (11); "We were poor and
could not afford for her the soil of easy growth" (20); "She is the child of
her age, of depression, of war, of fear" (20). Both mother and daughter have
been damaged: While Emily expresses fear and despair casually ("we'll all
be atom-dead"), her mother suffers because "all that is in her [Emily] will
not bloom" (20). All the narrator asks for Emily is "enough left to live by"
and the consciousness that "she is more than this dress on the ironing board,
helpless before the iron" (21).
The story includes two major discursive forms. The form that appears
through most of the story is indirect, circling, uncertain; it is heteroglossic.
The other form, which Olsen points out and discards in one paragraph near
the story's end, is direct, clipped, and assertive.1 It is a version of the
reductive dominant discourse contributing to the pressure of the
circumstances in which Emily and her mother struggle to survive. With
these two forms of discourse Olsen introduces issues that concern her in all
the stories in Tell Me a Riddle: language as power; dominant versus
subversive modes of discourse; heteroglossia.
The second major discursive form, the direct, is introduced by the narrator
of "I Stand Here Ironing" in this way: "I will never total it all. I will never
come in to say: She was a child seldom smiled at. Her father left me before
she was a year old. I had to work her first six years when there was work, or
I sent her home and to his relatives. There were years she had care she
hated" (20). What the narrator offers here is what she will not say and what
she will not do. She will not "total"sum upEmily's life in a direct, linear,
cause-and-effect way.
The other major discursive form-with its many modes of indirectness, false
starts, and uncertainties-is signalled in the form of address at the beginning
of the story. The narrator says, "I stand here ironing, and what you asked
me moves tormented back and forth with the iron" (9). This "you" (never
clearly identified, but likely one of Emily's high school teachers, a guidance
counselor, or a social worker) is the ostensible audience to whom the
narrator's discourse is directed. However, in this most indirect form of
address, the entire story takes place in the mind of the narrator, who is
speaking to
 
 Page 277

herself as though rehearsing her discourse for the ''you." We do not know
whether this discourse ever passes from the silence of the mother's mind to
the hearing of the audience (the teacher or counselor) for whom it is being
rehearsed.
The narrator's discourse is persistently marked by indirectness, false starts,
and uncertaintiesthe forms on which the narrator must rely as she looks
back over her life with Emily: "Why do I put that first? I do not even know
if it matters, or if it explains anything" (10); "In this and other ways she
leaves her seal, I say aloud. And startle at my saying it. What do I mean?
What did I start to gather together, to try and make coherent?" (18). These
fitful "digressions" typify the movement of the story's first major discursive
form. The user of that form, far from reducing her subjects to linear, cause-
and-effect patterns, displays in multifaceted discourse her own complicated
and ultimately irreducible forms of interdependence with her subjects. The
form is heteroglossic; it is a "voice" made of many voices: Caught in the
memory of conflicts between Emily and her sister, Susan, "each one human,
needing, demanding, hurting, taking," the mother says, "Susan telling jokes
and riddles to company for applause while Emily sat silent (to say to me
later; that was my riddle, Mother, I told it to Susan)" (16-17). As employed
in this and other stories in the collection, heteroglossia is not solely a matter
of multiple voices within or among cultures or subcultures; it is often the
multiple and conflicting voices that make up one person. Olsen's displays of
individual heteroglossia, the fragmenting of voices constituting a self and
that self's interdependence with others, become one means by which her
work offers alternatives to bourgeois individualism.
At the beginning of the story, the words of the unidentified teacher or
counselor and the mother's reaction to those words create a complex
intermingling of voices. The mother has been asked to assist in helping
Emily: "'I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me
about your daughter. I'm sure you can help me understand her. She's a
youngster who needs help and whom I'm deeply interested in helping."' The
next line of the story is "'Who needs help.' . . ." (9; ellipsis Olsen's). Who
indeed? This entangling of the helpers and the helped, including the
suggestion that the mother
 
 Page 278

is being asked for the very aid she herself may need in order to assist Emily,
is indicative of the ways in which the narrator's thinking and discourse
proceed. She cannot, in language, fully demarcate herself from Emily or
from those whose lives became entangled with Emily's in the past, such as
an unsympathetic nursery school teacher: ''And even without knowing, I
knew. I knew the teacher that was evil because all these years it has curdled
into my memory, the little boy hunched in the corner, her rasp, 'why aren't
you outside, because Alvin hits you? that's no reason, go out, scaredy"' (11).
Facing the incessant pressure of time and circumstances"And when is there
time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?"the narrator
recognizes that multiple voices and memories constantly threaten to engulf
her (9).
The nonlinear mode of discourse is so often replete with complexity of
meaning that it risks falling into meaninglessness and the equivalent of
silence. In this story that risk is most acute at moments when the mother
cannot find the language to respond to Emily. While looking back over her
life with Emily, the mother returns to times when she could respond to her
daughter with nothing more than silence.
There was a boy she loved painfully through two school semesters. Months later she told me
how she had taken pennies from my purse to buy him candy. "Licorice was his favorite and I
bought him some every day, but he still liked Jennifer better'n me. Why, Mommy?" The kind
of question for which there is no answer. (15-16)

On the night in which this story takes place the mother is remembering such
details of Emily's life and instances of failed communication between
mother and daughter. The cumulative details from the various stages of
Emily's life and the crowding of voices force the narrator to say near the
story's end: "because I have been dredging the past, and all that compounds
a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I cannot bear it tonight"
(20). A richness of meaning approximating meaninglessness and the
equivalent of silence weighs on the mother when she says of Emily, "This is
one of her communicative nights and she tells me everything and no-
 
 Page 279

thing as she fixes herself a plate of food'' (19). Yet for the narrator a reliance
on nonlinear discourse with its attendant hazards is not only a matter of
what her circumstances have forced upon her. It is also a matter of choice.
The narrator must use nonlinear heteroglossic modes if her goal in telling
Emily's story is, as she says it is, to "Let her [Emily] be." The complicated,
conflicting stuff of which human beings are made can be discussed only
nonreductively in nonlinear discourse, in a manner that has some chance of
"letting them be." To adopt the dominant, linear, reductive mode of
discourse is to usurp and control Emily, and it is to abandon the hope with
which the story ends: the narrator's hope that Emily will know "that she is
more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron" (20).
The two major discursive forms in "I Stand Here Ironing"the indirect,
uncertain, circling form, and the direct, clipped, assertive formappear again
in "Tell Me a Riddle," and, again, Olsen uses them to explore language as
power; dominant versus subversive modes of discourse; and heteroglossia.
The story begins with a battle between Eva and David, who have been
married for forty-seven years, most of them spent in poverty. In the dialect
of Russian-Jewish immigrants, they bitterly dispute whether to sell their
home and move to a retirement cooperative operated by David's union. He
craves company while Eva, after raising seven children, will not "exchange
her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms
of others." David and Eva use a notalways-direct, but relentlessly assertive,
and minimal form of discourse in their perpetual quarreling. We find that
mode of discourse in their opening fray:
"What do we need all this for?" he would ask loudly, for her hearing aid was turned down
and the vacuum was shrilling. "Five rooms" (pushing the sofa so she could get into the
corner) "furniture" (smoothing down the rug) "floors and surfaces to make work. Tell me
why do we need it?" And he was glad he could ask in a scream. "Because I'm use't."
"Because you're use't. This is a reason, Mrs. Word Miser? Used to can get unused !"
 
 Page 280

They poke at each other with as few words as possible, using words not as
instruments of communication but as weapons of combat and control.
Further, each uses any available means to suppress the other's minimal
discourse. She turns down her hearing aid and turns on the vacuum cleaner.
He turns on the television ''loud so he need not hear."
The text only gradually reveals Eva's long-ago status as a revolutionary
orator; only through fragments of dialogue and interior monologue do we
learn that this obdurate, rancorous woman, who now wields power only by
turning down her hearing aid, was once an orator in the 1905 Russian
revolution. Models for Eva's revolutionary commitment included that of
Olsen's own mother, Ida Lerner. Another was Seevya Dinkin, who shares
"Riddle"'s dedication with Genya Gorelick.2
"Tell Me a Riddle" illuminates, as no polemic could, the terrible cost of a
sexual division of labor. David, who has worked outside the home, has
sustained a vitality and sociability. But he has lost the "holiest dreams" he
and Eva shared in their radical youth, seems to accept American "progress,"
and would rather consume TV's version of "This Is Your Life" than reflect
on his own. Insulated at home, Eva has felt less pressure to assimilate, to
compromise her values, and has preserved those dreams. But the many
years of 18-hour days, of performing domestic tasks "with the desperate
ingenuity of poverty" (years in which David "never scraped a carrot") have
transformed her youthful capacity for engagement into a terrible need for
solitude (Rosenfelt, "Divided" 19).
As Eva is dying she slips into the indirect discursive mode. After years of
bitter silence, she begins to speak, sing, and recite incessantly. Fragments of
memories and voices, suppressed during her years of marriage and
motherhood, emerge as the old woman nears death. Eva, like the mother in
"I Stand Here Ironing," becomes an individual embodiment of
heteroglossia. Eva had announced her desire for solitude, but ironically she
returns in her reverie to the time when she was engaged with others in a
revolutionary movement. She sings revolutionary songs from her youth and
in a "gossamer" voice whispers fragments of speeches she had delivered in
"a girl's
 
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voice of eloquence'' half a century before. Her babble is a communal one;

she becomes a vehicle for many voices.
Eva's experiences while dying may have been partly modelled on those of
Ida Lerner. "In the winter of 1955," Olsen reports in Mother to Daughter,
Daughter to Mother, "in her last weeks of life, my motherso much of whose
waking life had been a nightmare, that common everyday nightmare of
hardship, limitation, longing; of baffling struggle to raise six children in a
world hostile to human unfoldingmy mother, dying of cancer, had beautiful
dream-visionsin color." She dreamed/envisioned three wise men,
"magnificent in jewelled robes" of crimson, gold, and royal blue. The wise
men ask to talk to her "of whys, of wisdom," but as they began to talk, "she
saw that they were not men, but women: That they were not dressed in
jewelled robes, but in the coarse everyday shifts and shawls of the old
country women of her childhood, their feet wrapped round and round with
rags for lack of boots. . . . And now it was many women, a babble" (261,
262). Together, the women sing a lullaby.
Like Ida Lerner, on her deathbed Eva becomes the human equivalent of a
heteroglossic carnival site.
One by one they [the thousand various faces of age] streamed by and imprinted on herand
though the savage zest of their singing came voicelessly soft and distant, the faces still
roaredthe faces densened the airchorded into

children-chants, mother-croons, singing of the chained love serenades, Beethoven storms,

mad Lucia's scream, drunken joy-songs, keens for the dead, working-singing....

Olsen blurs the distinction between high and popular culture in the diversity
of cultural forms that sustain Eva; her beloved Chekhov, Balzac, Victor
Hugo; Russian love songs; revolutionary songs; a "community sing" for
elderly immigrants; and Pan del Muerto, a folk-art cookie for a dead child.
The barrage of voices and references that constitute Eva at her death return
us to the danger I referred to in discussing "I Stand Here Ironing"that
multivocal, hetero-
 
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glossic discourse may result in the equivalent of silence. Despite the danger,
heteroglossia's cacophony is preferable to the dominant discourse's
reductive forms. As for Emily in ''I Stand Here Ironing," what will "let Eva
be" is heteroglossia. After years of living in silence and near silence, Eva
emerges in heteroglossia. Yet in both stories the richness of meaning
released in Emily's and Eva's heteroglossic utterances threaten to result in
the equivalent of silence.
In Tell Me a Riddle mimicry provides examples of subversive, indirect
modes of discourse jousting with dominant monolithic modes; however, in
mimicry Olsen finds the occasion to examine hazards in marginalized
discourse's competing with the dominant discourse. Like other forms of
parody, mimicry comprises a powerful form of heteroglossia. Aimed
against an official or monologic language, mimicry divides that system
against itself. However, mimicry's ability to oppress the oppressor may be a
snare for the mimic. To make her mother laugh, or out of the despair she
felt about her isolation in the world, Emily, in "I Stand Here Ironing,"
imitates people and incidents from her school day. Eventually her gift for
mimicry, pantomime, and comedy lead to first prize in her high school
amateur show and requests to perform at other schools, colleges, and city-
and state-wide competitions. However, her talent and achievement do not
remedy her isolation: "Now suddenly she was Somebody, and as
imprisoned in her difference as she had been in anonymity" (19). By
exercising her parodic talent, Emily unwittingly exchanges one form of
marginalization for another.
Like Emily, Whitey in "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" has a knack for mimicry,
which he exhibits, for example, when telling Lennie about the union official
who fined him: "(His [Whitey's] old fine talent for mimicry jutting through
the blurred-together words.)" (44). Whitey, a seaman being destroyed by
alcoholism, is no less isolated than Emily in "I Stand Here Ironing." Lennie
and Helen, who have been Whitey's friends and political comrades for years
(Whitey saved Lennie's life during the 1934 Maritime Strike), and their
three daughters are his only friendsindeed, the only people he can "be
around . . . without having to pay" (43).3
Mimicry deals Whitey a fate similar to Emily's. How-
 
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ever, an irony of ''Hey Sailor, What Ship?" is that it is mimicry of the

mimic, Whitey, that contributes to Whitey's fate. The family engages in an
affectionate mimicking of the salty language that sets Whitey apart from
their other acquaintances:
Watch the language, Whitey, there's a gentleman present,
says Helen. Finish your plate, Allie.

[Whitey:] Thass right. Know who the gen'lmum is? I'm

the gen'lmum. The world, says Marx, is divided into two
classes. . . . [ellipsis Olsen's]

Seafaring gen'lmum and shoreside bastards, choruses

Lennie with him.

Why, Daddy! says Jeannie.

You're a mean ole bassard father, says Allie.

Thass right, tell him off, urges Whitey. Hell with waitin'
for glasses. Down the ol' hatch.

My class is divided by marks, says Carol, giggling help-

lessly at her own joke, and anyway what about ladies? Where's
my drink? Down the hatch. (35)

Thus mimicry functions in "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" as one form that
entices Whitey out of isolation and into the family, while simultaneously
diminishing the importance of Whitey as "other." The behavior of the
family in relation to Whitey, despite what seems to be their shared political
beliefs and practice, becomes a microcosm for the dominant culture's
behavior in relation to much marginalized discourse. Charmed by difference
(the history of music in U.S. popular culture exemplifies the point), the
mainstream culture co-opts the marginalized discourse, stripping it of its
power as "difference," and diminishes its force in a process of
homogenization. O1sen's references to mimicry in these stories comprise
part of her running commentary on the power of dominant and subversive
modes of discourse and the complications of identity that marginalized
people and their discourses face.
In addition to mimicry, "Hey Sailor, What Ship?", like other stories
collected in Tell Me a Riddle, manifests heteroglossia by incorporating
genres that "further intensify its speech diversity in fresh ways" (Bakhtin,
Dialogic 321). Although this strategy is not uncommon among fiction writ-
 
 Page 284

ers, Olsen employs it more than many. In ''Hey Sailor, What Ship?" Olsen
has inserted a valediction (because the story is a farewell to Whitey, this
insertion becomes a valediction within a valediction). Whitey learned it as a
boy from his first shipmate, and one of the children asks him to recite it.
Originally delivered in 1896 by the Phillipine hero Jose Rizal before he was
executed, it concludes:
Little will matter, my country,
That thou shouldst forget me.
I shall be speech in thy ears, fragrance and color,
Light and shout and loved song....

Where I go are no tyrants....

(42)

Jose Rizal would have been an insurgent against both Spanish and
American domination of the Philippines, and the recitation implicitly
condemns American imperialism and the Cold War, at its height when
Olsen wrote "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" Whitey's recitation also eulogizes his
(and Olsen's) youthful hopes for a socialist America, which have been
snuffed out by Cold War strategists:
Land I adore, farewell....
Our forfeited garden of Eden. . . .

Vision I followed from afar,

Desire that spurred on and consumed me,
Beautiful it is to fall,
That the vision may rise to fulfillment.
(41)

Moreover, the valediction associates Whitey, who has been destroyed as

much by "the death of the brotherhood" as by alcoholism, with political
martyrdom. Whitey, who has attempted to keep thirties militancy alive in a
period of political reaction, feels estranged from the complacent younger
seamen. "These kids," he complains to Lennie, "don't realize how we got
what we got. Beginnin' to lose it, too." One "kid," who had overtime
coming to him, "didn't even wanta beef about it" (44). As the
 
 Page 285

ship's delegate, Whitey nevertheless took the grievance to the union, which
had become a conservative, alien bureaucracy, and was fined for ''not taking
it [the grievance] up through proper channels" (44). The younger seamen
also lack the sense of solidarity Whitey and Lennie experienced during the
thirties: "'Think anybody backed me up, Len?'. . . Once, once an injury to
one is an injury to all. Once, once they had to live for each other. And
whoever came off the ship fat shared, because that was the only way of
survival for all of them ... Now it was a dwindling few . . ." (45). And,
finally, because Whitey's efforts to stay sober have consistently failed and
his health is rapidly deteriorating, Jose Rizal's valediction also functions as
his own farewell address.
Yet there is a dimension to Whitey that cannot be explained in political or
economic terms. Even in his youth, when both he and the Left were robust,
Whitey was tormented by an emotional disorder that manifested itself in an
inability to have sexual relations except when "high with drink." Many
years later, at "the drunken end of his eightmonths-sober try," Lennie and
Helen hear a "torn-out-of-him confession" that the psychosexual problem
persists, and likely, it will remain a riddle (44, 46). The story ends with its
plaintive refrain"Hey Sailor, what ship?"which mourns the tragic waste of
Whitey's life as well as suggests the disorientation, diminished options, and
uncertainty of radicals in a period of right-wing ascendancy.
Both Whitey and Emily exemplify dangers in heteroglossic, subversive
modes of discourse. Emily's and Whitey's individual talent allows each of
them to joust with the dominant discourse. However, those individual
talents, unlinked to other heteroglossic voices also intent upon jabbing at
the dominant discourse, leave both Emily and Whitey without the
supporting network of similar subversive voices. Without that support, they
experience the dominant discourse's subsuming power and are returned to
marginalized positions and forms of silence.
Mimicry and the two major forms of discoursethe direct and the indirect,
and the risk that the cacophony of multivocal discourse may result in the
equivalent of silenceplay major roles in "O Yes." Helen, Lennie, and their
daughters
 
 Page 286

appear again in this story about the difficulty of sustaining a friendship

across racial lines. Lennie and Helen's 12-year-old, Carol, is white;
Parialee, her neighbor and closest friend from their earliest years, is
African-American. ''O Yes," which begins with Helen and Carol's attending
Parialee's baptismal service, is permeable to the speech of "others"songs by
three church choirs; parishioners' shouts; Parialee's newlylearned jivetalk;
and Alva's African-American dialect. Carol, who has never before
experienced the intense emotionalism that erupts during the service
(chanting, shrieking, fainting), is a stranger in the world of an all-African-
American congregation. Trapped in heteroglossia's cacophony, Carol falls
into the silence of a near faint, and once again, an abundance of meaning
approaches silence.
Yet, in the first of the story's two parts, a far more reductive and controlling
mode of discoursean assertion/affirmation form of "dialogue"presents itself
as a counter to heteroglossia. In the dialogue's highly structured
environment, the preacher takes the lead by making assertions that the
congregation affirms. The dialogue includes the preacher's words, such as
"And God is Powerful," and the congregation's response, "O Yes" and "I am
so glad" (52, 54). The reductive and controlling mode of discourse in which
the assertions are assigned to the figure of power, the preacher, and the
affirmations to his followers, the congregation, replicates the structure of
society outside the church. Exercising their role in the dialogue, the
parishioners seem to be playing out the subservient parts African-
Americans have so often been assigned within the society. Yet, within the
church, heteroglossia persistently strains against the constraining mode of
discourse. In "O Yes," as throughout Tell Me a Riddle, two major discursive
formsheteroglossia and, in this case, the countering assertion/affirmation
dialoguevie for power.
A complicated version of mimicry is prominent in "O Yes." What I
identified earlier as a conventional assertion/affirmation structure placed in
the midst of a swirling heteroglossia contains complex elements of a form
of mimicry in which the preacher and congregation wittingly or unwittingly
dramatize the roles of dominant and marginalized people, oppressor and
oppressed. As the drama of the dialogue in-
 
 Page 287

tensifies, it threatens to overpower heteroglossia by reducing it to the near

monological assertion/affirmation exchanges between a leader and
followers. Much of that drama takes place in the sermon delivered at
Parialee's baptismal service. The narrator tells us that the subject of the
sermon is ''the Nature of God. How God is long-suffering. Oh, how long he
has suffered" (51). The narrator has shown us a version of the classic
Christian mystery of incarnation: God as the maker of human beings who
suffer and God as the human victim of suffering. This dual role of
perpetrator and victim becomes central to the sermon-response's dialogic
structure. Early in the sermon the preacher chants, "And God is Powerful,"
to which the congregation responds "O Yes" (52). Here, again, we find an
assertion/affirmation structure in which the preacher assumes the lead in the
dialogue by making assertions that the congregation, in its role as follower,
responds to by affirming.
Other dimensions of the dialogue quickly emerge. The preacher, working
the theme of the great judgment day, blows an imaginary trumpet and
announces: "And the horn wakes up Adam, and Adam runs to wake up Eve,
and Eve moans; Just one more minute, let me sleep, and Adam yells, Great
Day, woman, don't you know it's the Great Day?" (53). The basic
assertion/affirmation structure is still operating, but within that structure the
preacher in godlike fashion now creates characters who in turn engage in
their own dialogues. The scene becomes increasingly heteroglossic.
Immediately after the created Adam's rousing call to a sleeping Eve ("Great
Day, woman, don't you know it's the Great Day?"), one of the choirs
responds, "Great Day, Great Day" (53). Is the choir responding to the voice
of the created Adam or to the preacher? The answer is of little consequence.
What is important here is that the structure of the assertion/affirmation
dialogue has dictated conditions that the congregation follows. Whichever
"leader," real or imaginary, they respond to in the course of the sermon,
they persistently replicate their role as affirmers of the leader's assertion.
Thus what emerges from this heteroglossic scene is a powerful counter to
heteroglossia, a discursive structure that imposes unity and control by
locking participants into predetermined traditional roles.
The force for unity within heteroglossia intensifies
 
 Page 288

as the imaginary dimension of the dialogue escalates. The preacher moves

from assertions about God and the creation of characters such as Adam and
Eve to assuming the role of God, and with that move the form of his
discourse shifts from assertion/affirmation to promise/affirmation. Having
just asserted the multiple roles of God in relation to human beings (friend,
father, way maker, door opener), the preacher proclaims: ''I will put my
Word in you and it is power. I will put my Truth in you and it is power."
The response is "O Yes" (55). Soon after, the narrator says, "Powerful
throbbing voices. Calling and answering to each other" (56). The narrator
captures the vibrant force of the unity within the heteroglossia when she
says, "A single exultant lunge of shriek" (56).
What are we to make of this univocalizing of heteroglossia? The sexual
implications that have been accumulating in this scene and that culminate in
the orgasmic "single exultant lunge of shriek" invite an instructive
digression into Mae Gwendolyn Henderson's discussion of an orgasmic
"howl" in Toni Morrison's Sula. Henderson, who skillfully employs
Bakhtinian analysis, observes of Sula's orgasmic cry: "The howl, signifying
a prediscursive mode, thus becomes an act of self-reconstitution as well as
an act of subversion or resistance to the 'network of signification'
represented by the symbolic order. The 'high silence of orgasm' and the
howl allow temporary retreats from or breaks in the dominant discourse"
(33). The "single exultant lunge of shriek" has very similar functions in the
church scene in "O Yes." The parishioners have repeatedly experienced the
intense repetition of the constraining assertion/affirmation and
promise/affirmation structures that mimic the dominant discourse of power
to which the congregation members are subjected outside the church. The
shriek becomes an act of "self-reconstitution" and, at the same time, a
"subversion or resistance to the 'network of signification"' that constrains
the parishioners.
Henderson argues persuasively that Sula's orgasmic howl occurs at the
moment at which she is located "outside of the dominant discursive order"
but also when she is poised to re-enter and disrupt the discursive order. For
Henderson, Sula's howl becomes a primary metaphor for African-American
women writers whose objective is not "to move from margin
 
 Page 289

to center, but to remain on the borders of discourse, speaking from the

vantage point of the insider/outsider'' (33, 36). This point of difficult
balance is, I suggest, where Olsen places the African-American
congregation at the moment of the "single exultant lunge of shriek."
But what more is there in the story to justify such a reading of this
univocalizing of heteroglossia? Alva, Parialee's mother, will give us some
indications. After Carol's near-faint, Alva blames herself for not having
been more attentive to Carol's being brought into a situation she had no
basis for understanding. Attempting to explain the situation to Carol after
the fact, Alva says, "You not used to people letting go that way.... You not
used to hearing what people keeps inside, Carol. You know how music can
make you feel things? Glad or sad or like you can't sit still? That was
religion music, Carol." Speaking of the congregation Alva says, "'And
they're home Carol, church is home. Maybe the only place they can feel
how they feel and maybe let it come out. So they can go on. And it's all
right"' (59-60). So we seem to have our answer. The univocalizing of
heteroglossia is a shared singular escape of people who are trapped in
multiple ways. They seem to choose to surrender the heteroglossia of their
suffering to the univocal escape of the church/home. But is it "all right"?
The story's first section ends with an italicized rendering of what Alva did
not say to Carol. This reveriewhich remains silent, unspoken to Carolstands
as a response (like the earlier italicized responses of the congregation and
the choirs) to an earlier series of the preacher's assertions. Earlier in the
sermon the preacher proclaims: "He was your mother's rock. Your father's
mighty tower. And he gave us a little baby. A little baby to love." The
congregation responds: "I am so glad" (54). Alva's silent reverie begins:
When I was carrying Parry and her father left me, and I fifteen years old, one thousand miles
away from home, sin-sick and never really believing, as still I don't believe all, scorning, for
what have it done to help, waiting there in the clinic and maybe sleeping, a voice called:
Alva, Alva. So mournful and so sweet: Alva. Fear not, I have loved you from the foundation
of the universe. (61)
 
 Page 290

Alva follows the voice ''into a world of light, multitudes singing," and the
reverie ends: "Free, free, I am so glad" (61). The reverie's mixture of dream
and reality parallels the mixture of the imaginary and the real in the sermon
situation and seems to stand as Alva's singular response (not an affirmation)
to the preacher's assertions in the sermon. But this is not a completely
singular response, and it is not totally devoid of affirmation. When Alva
acknowledges, "still I don't believe all," she locates herself, like
Henderson's African-American female writer, both within and outside the
church, inside yet resisting the univocality, outside yet resisting the
conflation of the imaginary and the real. But we must remember that this is
what Alva does not say to Carol, or to Helen, or as far as we know to
anyone other than us. What is the force that creates this silence? Is it the
circumstances of Alva's daily life? Is it the church?
We cannot begin to answer these questions without looking at the structure
of the second part of the story. Just as Alva's reverie functions as a response
to the sermon, the second part of the story stands as a response to the first
part. In the second part, which takes place in the world of Helen and Len (or
Lennie) and their daughters, Carol and Jeannie, a univocalizing force
parallels that of the church in part one. In the second part the force against
heteroglossia is the junior high school, which officially and unofficially
attempts to separate Carol and Parialee, univocalizing Carol and other white
students while shutting out Parialee and other African-American students.
Because she is African-American, Parialee will not be tracked into Carol's
accelerated classes; and even if she were initially admitted to them, the
necessity to care for younger siblings while her mother works the four-to-
twelve-thirty night shift would quickly put her behind in her studies. Carol
is "college prep," whereas Parialee will likely not finish junior high,
predicts Jeannie, a 17-year-old veteran of the public school system.
According to Jeannie, "you have to watch everything, what you wear and
how you wear it and who you eat lunch with and how much homework you
do and how you act to the teacher and what you laugh at. . . . [ellipsis
Olsen's] And run with your crowd" (63). Peer pressure is tremendous, and
Carol and Parialee would be ostracized for
 
 Page 291

attempting to be friends. Jeannie contrasts their ''for real" working-class

school with one in a nearby affluent neighborhood where it is fashionable
for whites and African-Americans to be "buddies": ". . . three coloured kids
and their father's a doctor or judge or something big wheel and one always
gets elected President or head song girl or something to prove oh how we're
democratic" (65).
The junior high school has its parallel to the preacherthe teacher, Miss
Campbell (nicknamed "Rockface")and in this parallel Olsen further
suggests dangers in the monologic impulses within the church's
heteroglossia. Godlike in the junior high school kingdom, the bigoted
teacher has the power to decide whether Parialee can be trusted to take
Carol's homework assignments to her when Carol has the mumps: "Does
your mother work for Carol's mother?" Rockface asks Parialee. "Oh, you're
neighbors! Very well, I'll send along a monitor to open Carol's locker but
you're only to take these things I'm writing down, nothing else" (67). Like
the preacher, Rockface has the power to make Parialee respond. In drill
master fashion, Rockface insists: "Now say after me: Miss Campbell is
trusting me to be a good responsible girl. And go right to Carol's house....
Not stop anywhere on the way. Not lose anything. And only take. What's
written on the list" (67). However, we know of this not because Parialee
told Carol. The account of Rockface appears in a passage that parallels
Alva's reveriewhat she did not say to Carol. The passage in which Parialee
accounts for Rockface appears in a section in which she has been talking to
Carol, but the Rockface passage begins: "But did not tell." The knowledge
we have of Rockface from Parialee is, like the knowledge we have of Alva's
inner world, one more silence in Carol's world.
What are we to make of this chilling structural parallel between the worlds
of the dominant and the marginalized, the oppressor and the oppressed?
Certainly we must hear Olsen's warning that the marginalized imperil their
identities by replicating, even through mimicry, structures of the dominant
discourse. The African-American congregation risks imposing on itself the
dominant culture's reductive and oppressive structures. But has the
congregation yet succumbed? Perhaps not. Perhaps they as a collective,
unlike the individuals Emily
 
 Page 292

and Whitey, keep their identities apart from what they mimic (or in
Whitey's case, what mimics him). Perhaps insofar as the
assertion/affirmation structure (so dangerously reminiscent of the dominant
discourse's reductive structures) remains embedded in a cacophonous
atmosphere of heteroglossia, it remains a viable form of mimicry and the
African-American church maintains a delicate ecology of inside/outside
with alternative structures and voices constantly checking and offsetting the
structures of an oppressive discourse. Certainly the scene within the church
approximates what Bakhtin identifies as heteroglossia in its fullest
playcarnivalin which people's multiple voices play in, around, and against
the dominant culture's hierarchical structures. Perhaps insofar as the
African-American church remains a world about which Alva can say, ''still I
don't believe all," a world where she can be simultaneously inside and
outside, it remains a dynamic social unit capable of resisting its own
oppressive impulses.
Those readers who are strangers to the powerful culture of the African-
American church cannot be sure how to assess that world and, like Carol,
experience an abundance of meaning that approaches silence. In fact, Carol
is a very useful point of reference for Olsen's readers. The story is a tangled
web of explanations Carol never hears about historical circumstances that
have enmeshed her. Carol hears neither Alva's reverie, which partly
explains the phenomenon in the church, nor Parialee's account of Rockface.
Further, as the story nears its end, Carol in desperation asks Helen a basic
question, openly pleading for a response: "Mother, why did they sing and
scream like that? At Parry's church?" But in place of a response we find:
Emotion, Helen thought of explaining, a characteristic of the religion of all oppressed
peoples, yes your very own greatgrandparentsthought of saying. And discarded.

Aren't you now, haven't you had feelings in yourself so strong they had to come out some
way? ("what howls restrained by decorum")thought of saying. And discarded.

Repeat Alva: hope . . . every word out of their own life. A place to let go. And church is
home. And discarded.

The special history of the Negro peoplehistory?just

 
 Page 293

you try living what must be lived every daythought of saying. And discarded.

And said nothing. (70)

Once more, Carol is met with silence.

We as readers may, like Carol, expect answers to our many questions about
the disjunctures and potential connections among the lives and worlds of
the story's characters. But Olsen, no more than Helen, supplies definitive
answers. We are privileged to hear more than Carol hears, but Olsen does
not answer our questions about how the lives and worlds might be
connected. Is Helen's silence at the end of ''O Yes" a failure in relation to
her daughter? Is Olsen's silence in relation to us a failure of authorial
responsibility?
To address these questions I turn to my discussion's second major division,
Olsen's reworking of relationships among writer, text, and reader. Helen's
silence provides insight into Olsen's designs on us as readers and our
relationships to issues of dominant and marginalized people and their
discourses. To return to Meese's previously-cited observation, Olsen
repeatedly "calls upon the reader to write the text-no longer her text, but
occasioned by it and by the voices speaking through it" (110). Helen thinks
but does not say: "Better immersion than to live untouched" (71). Structured
immersion is what Olsen plans for us. Olsen demands that we not be
passive receptors, but that we, in Bakhtinian terms, join in the heteroglossia.
Olsen has skillfully structured textual gaps and developed strategies for
readers' identifying with charactersstructures and strategies that require
readers to contribute to the emergence of heteroglossic meaning. In those
gaps and moments of identification we are not given free rein as readers,
but we are asked to act responsibly as members of a complex human
community.
To observe Olsen's craft in teasing out our active participation, I return first
to "Tell Me a Riddle." Eva craves solitude: "Never again to be forced to
move to the rhythms of others." And she is tired of the talk: "All my life
around babblers. Enough!" Eva exercises her greatest control and feels
triumphant when she manages to gain and maintain periods
 
 Page 294

of silence. Olsen has given us a difficult kind of central character, one

whose fierce desire for the silences she believes she has earned resists the
telling of her story. We as audience are caught in the uncomfortable position
of hearing the story of someone who wants her story left in silence. We are
interlopers. We, like David, violate Eva's solitude and silence, and the
narrator, seemingly torn between telling the story and honoring Eva's
longing for silence, contributes to our discomfort.
The story's title and the presence of the phrase ''tell me a riddle" in the story
itself indicate sources of our uneasiness. In the story, the phrase "tell me a
riddle" appears in the context of the "command performance." On the visit
to daughter Vivi's, a visit Eva felt forced to make when she really wanted to
go home, the narrator tells us very nearly from Eva's own perspective:
"Attentive with the older children; sat through their performances
(command performance; we command you to be the audience). . . ." Here
the traditional notion of "command performance" is reversed. It is not the
performer who enacts her role by command; it is the audience who
performs its role by command. Eva is trapped. She is once again at the
mercy of others' needs and desires.
In her role as command audience, Eva "watched the children whoop after
their grandfather who knew how to tickle, chuck, lift, toss, do tricks, tell
secrets, make jokes, match riddle for riddle." She watched David interact
with the grandchildren in the expected ways, in all the ways in which she
would not: "(Tell me a riddle, Grammy. I know no riddles, child)." Eva, the
command audience, plays her attentive role up to a point, but she does not
fully meet expectations. To the command "Tell me a riddle" she responds
with a form of her prized silence, thwarting conventional expectations about
grandparent-grandchild interactions.
Conventional expectations about interactions between us as audience and
Eva and her story are also thwarted. We cannot be merely passive listeners
to Eva's story. Whereas monologic discourse is, again, as Bakhtin asserts,
"deaf to the other's response," even the title "Tell Me a Riddle" signals the
necessity of our response. From the moment we read the title, we are told to
act: "Tell Me a Riddle." We expect to hear a
 
 Page 295

story, but we are told to tell a riddle. We, like Eva, are a command audience,
and we, like Eva, find ourselves responding with our own versions of
silence. We, the command audience, have been identified with Eva, the
command audience, and with her desire for silence. Again, we are put in the
uncomfortable situation of wanting to be silent listeners to the story of
someone who wants her story left in silence.
Why should we be submitted to this discomfort? On one level we are put in
this position because of the narrator's sympathy with Eva's desires. Eva's is
a story that needs to be told, yet the narrator sympathizes with Eva's hunger
for silence. The compromise for the narrator is to disrupt our complacency
as audience. We will hear the story, but not on our terms: We will hear the
story as a command audience. What better way to force us to realize the
complexity of Eva's situation than to force us into a position resembling
Eva's experience as command audience? But there is another reason for our
discomfort. As in Yonnondio and Silences, Olsen disrupts our passivity,
demanding that we as readers share responsibility for completing Eva's
story.
But how do we exercise our responsibility? We have some clues in David's
response to Eva. To David it seemed that for seventy years she had hidden
an ''infinitely microscopic" tape recorder within her, "trapping every song,
every melody, every word read, heard, and spoken." She had caught and
was now releasing all the discourse around her: "you who called others
babbler and cunningly saved your words." But the harsh realization for
David was that "she was playing back only what said nothing of him, of the
children, of their intimate life together." For David, the air is now filled
with sound; yet that sound is the equivalent of silence. To him the danger
referred to in my discussion of "I Stand Here Ironing"that multivocal,
heteroglossic discourse may result in the equivalent of silencehas become
reality.
However, here we have a new perspective on the danger. The danger lies
not in the discourse but in the audience. Because David hears nothing of
Eva's life with him, the sounds become meaningless. His is an
individualistic, self-centered response. But, crucially, what are these sounds
to us as command audience? We have experienced the discomfort
 
 Page 296

of being listeners to the story of one who does not want her story told, but
now, at the end of her life, she speaks. If we identify with David's
individualistic perspective, we will not understand Eva; her sounds will be
the equivalent of silence. However, if we value Eva's identification with all
humankind, we are an audience for whom Eva's last words have meaning.
Olsen aids us in valuing Eva's links to all humankind. One of those aids is a
resuscitated David with whom we are invited to identify once he has
remembered what he had long forgotten. Finally, David comes to a partial
understanding of Eva's last words. When she brokenly repeats part of a
favorite quotation from Victor Hugo, David remembers it, too, reciting
scornfully: '''in the twentieth century ignorance will be dead, dogma will be
dead, war will be dead, and for all humankind one countryof fulfillment'?
Hah!" (120). But Eva's feverish cantata finally awakens in the old man
memories of his own youthful visions:
Without warning, the bereavement and betrayal he had shel-
teredcompounded through the yearshidden even from
himselfrevealed itself,
uncoiled,
released,
sprung
and with it the monstrous shapes of what had actually hap-
pened in the century. (120)

David realizes with sudden clarity the full price of his assimilation into
America's "apolitical" mainstream: "'Lost, how much I lost."' (121). He and
Eva "had believed so beautifully, so . . . falsely?" (ellipsis Olsen's):
"Aaah, children," he said out loud, "how we believed, how we belonged." And he yearned to
package for each of the children, the grandchildren, for everyone, that joyous certainty, that
sense of mattering, of moving and being moved, of being one and indivisible with the great of
the past, with all that freed, ennobled. Package it, stand on corners, in front of stadiums and
on crowded beaches, knock on doors, give it as a fabled gift.
 
 Page 297

David also realizes that Eva's revolutionary faith did not die with his: ''Still
she believed? 'Eva!' he whispered. 'Still you believed? You lived by it?
These Things Shall Be?"' (123). This story's epigraph, "These Things Shall
Be," is the title of an old socialist hymn expressing hope for a future just
society. Another riddle, then, is the puzzle of revolutionary consciousness:
Under what circumstances does it develop, dissipate? How does it sustain
itself when confronted by "monstrous shapes"the rise of fascism, two world
wars, the extermination of nine million Jews, the threat of global
extinction?
The second aid Olsen provides us in valuing Eva's ties to all humankind is
Eva's granddaughter, Jeannie (the same Jeannie of "Hey Sailor, What
Ship?" and "O Yes," now in her twenties) to whom the legacy of resistance
is passed on. Jeannie, who works as a visiting nurse and has a special
political and artistic sensibility, cares for Eva in the last weeks of her life.
"Like Lisa she is, your Jeannie," Eva whispers to Lennie and Helen,
referring to the revolutionary who taught Eva to read more than 50 years
before. It is at the end of the passage in which Eva compares Jeannie to Lisa
that Eva says, "All that happens, one must try to understand"' (112, 113).
These words comprise Eva's hope for Jeannie and O1sen's most basic
demand on us as active readers. Recognizing the persistent threat of being
so flooded with meaning that we may be faced with meaninglessness and
the equivalent of silence, we must persist in the attempt to understand. In
that attempt we must recognize the dangers of the bourgeois individualism
into which we, like David, are constantly tempted to retreat. Olsen provides
structures, such as the command audience structure I have discussed, to
force us out of our passive individualistic roles as readers and to invite us
into a web of interconnected, heteroglossic roles.4If we accept the
invitation, we must do more than value Eva's identification with all
humankind: We must remember if we have forgotten (the model of David)
or learn if we have never known (the model of Jeannie) the complicated
histories of worlds like those in which Eva lived and struggled. At the least,
we are required to do our part in keeping alive the historical circumstances
of oppressive czarist Russia and the connections among all oppressed
groups. Eva and Olsen require us to learn the very
 
 Page 298

histories to which America's ''apolitical" mainstream would have us remain

oblivious. With Jeannie, we are challenged to carry on Eva's legacy of
resistance.
Olsen provides one further aid in valuing Eva's links to all humankind, an
aid not limited to the collection's final story. The subject of motherhood so
prominent in "I Stand Here Ironing," "O Yes," and "Tell Me a Riddle"
provides a crucial reference point for our accepting a heteroglossia linking
all humankind. Olsen has rightly referred to motherhood "as an almost
taboo area; the last refuge of sexism ... the least understood" and "last
explored, tormentingly complex core of women's oppression." At the same
time, Olsen believes that motherhood is, potentially, a source of "transport"
for women, moving them beyond some of the constraints of
individualism.5Responsible for what Olsen terms "the maintenance of life,"
mothers are often exposed to forms of heteroglossia, with their attendant
benefits and hazards (Silences 34). In exploring the complexity of
motherhood, Olsen renders versions of it that are "coiled, convoluted like
an ear"versions that may serve as models for the necessary hearing of
heteroglossia.
I return to Helen's silence at the end of "O Yes." We can read Helen's
silence as one of several textual comments on the limits of authority;
indeed, it may have been through the experience of parenting that Olsen
learned the limits of authorial control, which her texts so willingly concede.
As an involved parent, one is forced to live intensely "in relation to," as the
boundary between self and other is constantly negotiated. Such negotiating
provides a model in which the ability to listen to constantly changing,
heteroglossic voices is prized. When Carol asks, "why do I have to care?",
the narrator tells us the following about Helen:
Caressing, quieting.

Thinking: caring asks doing. It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter.
Better immersion than to live untouched.... [ellipsis Olsen's] Yet how will you sustain?

Why is it like it is?

Sheltering her daughter close, mourning the illusion of the embrace.

And why do I have to care?

 
 Page 299

While in her, her own need leapt and plunged for the place of strength that was not-where
one could scream or sorrow while all knew and accepted, and gloved and loving hands
waited to support and understand. (71)

Although we risk being flooded by a multiplicity of meaning that

approaches meaninglessness and the equivalent of silence, we as readers
must submit to the ''immersion," the "long baptism" that allows us to be the
proper "ear" for the complexity of heteroglossia.
We have similar models at the end of "I Stand Here Ironing" and "Tell Me a
Riddle." The mother listens to Emily on "one of her communicative nights .
. . [when] she tells me everything and nothing" (19). The mother does not
respond to Emily, but says to herself, to the teacher or counselor, and to us,
"Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloombut in how many does it?
There is still enough left to live by" (20-21). In "Tell Me a Riddle" Jeannie,
who has listened carefully to Eva's dying heteroglossia, is not actually a
mother; but, like a mother, she is a caretaker, a nurturer, a listener.
However, Olsen asks more of us than listening. As Helen says to herself,
"caring asks doing." In none of these models in Tell Me a Riddle is the
mother figure a passive listener; rather, she is a listener responsive to
heteroglossia. Even when multiple voices so overwhelm her that she is
caught in silence (Emily's mother, Helen, Eva), she can sometimes caress or
embrace, knowing the communicative power of such actions. As active
readers, then, we are provided models of careful listening, leading to action.
Olsen does not proscribe the field of political/social action that we as active
readers might enter. However, she does demand that we work to understand
the many voices of the oppressed. In "I Stand Here Ironing," the mother
says of Emily, "Only help her to know," a command the dying Eva echoes:
"All that happens, one must try to understand." These words comprise
imperatives for us. And these mother figures, who live compassionately and
interdependently in a multicultural and heteroglossic dynamic, become
models for us readers.
Olsen demands another, related form of action from her readers. In the
collection, Tell Me a Riddle, we have been ex-
 
 Page 300

posed to many moments in which characters sensitive to heteroglossia have

been so inundated with complexity of meaning they have lapsed into
silence. We have heard what the unnamed mother in ''I Stand Here Ironing,"
Alva, Helen, and Eva have not been able to say to those most immediately
connected to them. If the silence is perpetuated, these characters risk, as do
Emily and Whitey, being subsumed by the dominant discourse. Olsen
requires us, as readers of the complete collection, to hear the various
oppressed voices and to make and articulate connections among them,
connections the separate characters may not be able to see, or may only
partially see. With such actions we become collaborators with Olsen in the
democratizing enterprise of amplifying dominated and marginalized voices.
We join her in a commitment to social change.
The "riddle" which Olsen's work challenges us to engage requires that we
consider political activity not as something confined to a single class, party,
gender, ethnic group, or cause but as something undertaken within a
kaleidoscopic social field and, simultaneously, within "the fibres of the self
and in the hard practical substance of effective and continuing
relationships" (Williams 212). Olsen's genuinely democratic content
articulates itself in multivocal texts that prefigure postindividual cultural
forms. In a sense, Olsen's sociopolitical vision has enabled her to write what
cannot be written. Tell Me a Riddle's form represents a "pre-emergence,
active and pressing but not yet fully articulated, rather than the evident
emergence which could be more confidently named" (Williams 126). With
Virginia Woolf in "The Leaning Tower," Olsen's texts proclaim: "Literature
is no one's private ground; literature is common ground" (125).

Notes
1. For discussions of history of reading strategies and earlier defenses of
indirect and figurational structures against schemes for linguistic
reductionism, see Bartine.
2. In the edition of Tell Me a Riddle I have used for this essay, the title story
is "for two of that generation, Seevya and Genya." In
 
 Page 301

the 1989 edition, Olsen also dedicates the story to her parents. Genya
Gorelick had been a factory organizer in Mozyr, a famous orator, and the
leading woman of the Jewish Workers' Alliance, the Bund of
prerevolutionary Russia. Her son, Al Richmond, has written about the role
Gorelick played in the 1905 revolution, when she was just nineteen:
The 1905 revolution burst forth like the splendid realization of a dream, shaking the Czarist
regime enough to loosen its most repressive restrictions, so that revolutionaries at last could
address the public, not any more through the whispered word and the surreptitious leaflet but
openly and directly in large assemblies. She discovered her gifts as a public orator. She was
good, and in her best moments she was truly great. (8; cited in Rosenfelt, ''Divided" 19)

3. Olsen told me in an interview (11 July 1986, San Francisco) that she
modelled Whitey partly on Filipino men she knew "in the movement" who
hungered for contact with families at a time when U.S. immigration law
kept Filipino women and children from entering the U.S.
4. Patrocinio P. Schweickart outlines a promising model for reading based
on a joining of reader-response theory and feminist theory. Her model
contains some of the characteristics Olsen's writing demands of readers.
Schweickart finds that feminist theory can move "beyond the individualistic
models of [Wolfgang] Iser and of most reader-response critics" toward a
"collective" model of reading. Describing the goal of that model,
Schweickart observes that "the feminist reader hopes that other women will
recognize themselves in her story, and join her in her struggle to transform
the culture" (50, 51). It must be added that Olsen, like Schweickart, would
have women and men "join her in her struggle to transform the culture."
5. Silences 202. For an enlightening discussion of Tell Me a Riddle in
relation to other works dealing with motherhood, see Gardiner. Gardiner
also suggests Jeannie's function as a model for readers when she notes that
"at the end of the story, Jeannie has absorbed her grandmother's
consciousness," allowing Eva to be "the agent of a revolutionary and
transcendent ideal that can be passed from woman to woman, of a
commitment to fully human values" (163).
 
 Page 302

Works Cited
Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1981.
Bartine, David. Early English Reading Theory: Origins of Current Debates.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989.
Reading, Culture, and Criticism: 1820-1950. Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 1992.
Eagleton, Terry. Against the Grain, Essays 1975-1985. London: Verso,
1986.
Marxism and Literary Criticism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1976.
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. ''A Wake for Mother: The Maternal Deathbed in
Women's Fiction." Feminist Studies 4 (June 1978): 146- 165.
Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics,
and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition." Changing Our Own
Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. Ed.
Cheryl A. Wall. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
Meese, Elizabeth A. Crossing the Double-Cross: The Practice of Feminist
Criticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Olsen, Tillie. Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother. Old Westbury:
Feminist Press, 1984.
Silences. New York: Dell, 1978.
Tell Me a Riddle. 1961. New York: Dell, 1979.
Richmond, Al. A Long View from the Left: Memoirs of an American
Revolutionary. New York: Dell, 1972.
Rosenfelt, Deborah. "Divided against Herself." Moving On, April/ May
1980: 15-23.
"From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and the Radical Tradition." Feminist
Studies 7 (Fall 1981): 371-406. Reprinted here and in Judith Newton and
Deborah Rosenfelt, eds., Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class,
and Race in Literature and Culture (New York: Methuen, 1985), 216-48.
Schweickart, Patrocinio P. "Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory
of Reading." Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts,
eds. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio
 
 Page 303

P. Schweickart. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. Translated by
Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977.
Woolf, Virginia. ''The Leaning Tower." The Moment and Other Essays.
London: Hogarth, 1952.
 
 Page 305

Selected Bibliography

Works by Tillie Lerner Olsen

FICTION
''The Iron Throat." (Tillie Lerner). Partisan Review 1,2 (April-May 1934):
3-9. Became first chapter of Yonnondio.
"Not You I Weep For." Ca. 1931. In First Words: Earliest Writings from
Favorite Contemporary Authors, edited by Paul Mandelbaum. Chapel Hill,
N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1993.
"Requa." Iowa Review 1 (Summer 1970): 54-74. Reprinted as "Requa I" in
Best American Short Stories, edited by Martha Foley and David Burnett.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Reprinted as "Requa-I" in Granta: New
American Writing (September 1979): 111-32.
Tell Me a Riddle. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1961. Reprinted New York:
Delacorte, 1979; reprinted New York: Delta, 1989. Includes "I Stand Here
Ironing," first published as "Help Her to Believe," Pacific Spectator 10
(Winter 1956): 55-63; "Hey Sailor, What Ship?", New Campus Writing 2
(New York: Putnam, 1957); "O Yes," first published as "Baptism," Prairie
Schooner 31 (Spring 1957): 70-80; and "Tell Me a Riddle," New World
Writing 16 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960), 11-57.
Yonnondio: From the Thirties. New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour
Lawrence, 1974; reprinted New York: Dell, 1975; New York: Delta, 1981.
POEMS
"At Fourteen Years." In First Words: Earliest Writings from Favorite
Contemporary Authors, edited by Paul Mandelbaum. Chapel Hill, N.C.:
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1993.
"I Want You Women Up North to Know." (Tillie Lerner). The Partisan 1
(March 1934): 4. Reprinted in Writing Red: An Anthology of American
Women Writers, 1930-1940, edited by Charlotte Nekola and Paula
Rabinowitz. New York: The Feminist Press, 1987.
"There Is a Lesson." (Tillie Lerner). The Partisan 1 (April 1934): 4.
Reprinted in Burkom and Williams (below).
NONFICTION PROSE
"Dream-Vision." In Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother: Mothers on
Mothering, selected and shaped by Tillie Olsen. Old Westbury: The
Feminist Press, 1984.
Foreword to Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate. New
York: Continuum, 1986.
 
 Page 306

Introduction to Allegra Maud Goldman, by Edith Konecky. New York: The

Feminist Press, 1987.
''Mothers and Daughters." With Julie Olsen Edwards. In Mothers and
Daughters: That Special Quality: An Exploration in Photography, edited by
Tillie Olsen, Julie Olsen Edwards, and Estelle Jussim, 14-17. New York:
Aperture, 1987.
"Personal Statement." In First Drafts, Last Drafts: Forty Years of the
Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, prepared by William
McPheron with the assistance of Amor Towles. Stanford: Stanford
University Libraries, 1989.
Silences. New York: Delacorte, 1978. Includes previous essays: "Silences in
Literature," first published in Harper's 231 (October 1965): 153-61; "One
Out of Twelve: Women Who Are Writers in Our Century," first published in
College English 34 (October 1972): 6-17; and "Rebecca Harding Davis:
Her Life and Times," first published as "A Biographical Interpretation,"
afterword for Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills (Old Westbury:
The Feminist Press, 1972; 1985).
"The Strike." (Tillie Lerner). Partisan Review 1, 4 (September-October
1934): 3-9. In Years of Protest: A Collection of American Writings of the
1930's, edited by Jack Salzman. New York: Pegasus, 1967. Reprinted in
Nekola and Rabinowitz, above.
"The Thirties: A Vision of Fear and Hope." Newsweek (January 3, 1994):
26-27.
"Thousand-Dollar Vagrant." (Tillie Lerner). New Republic 80 (August 29,
1934): 67-69.
"The Word Made Flesh." In Critical Thinking/Critical Writing. Educational
Service Publication. Cedar Falls, Iowa: University of Northern Iowa, 1984.

SELECTED FURTHER READING

Burkom, Selma, and Margaret Williams. "De-riddling Tillie Olsen's
Writings." San Jose Studies 2 (February 1976): 64-83. Reprinted in Nelson
and Huse.
Coiner, Constance. "Literature of Resistance: The Intersection of Feminism
and the Communist Left in Meridel Le Sueur and Tillie Olsen." In Left
Politics and the Literary Profession, edited by Lennard J. Davis and M.
Bella Mirabella. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 162-85.
. Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le
Sueur. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Coles, Robert. "Reconsideration." Review of Tell Me a Riddle. New
Republic 6 (December 1975): 29-39. Reprinted as "Tillie Olsen: The Iron
and the Riddle." That Red Wheelbarrow: Selected Literary Essays by
Robert Coles. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988. 122-127.
Duncan, Erica. "Coming of Age in the Thirties: A Portrait of Tillie Olsen."
 
 Page 307

Book Forum 6, 2 (1982): 207-22. Reprinted as ''Tillie Olsen" in

Unless Soul Clap Its Hands: Portraits and Passages. New York:
Schocken, 1984. 31-57.
Faulkner, Mara. Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.
Frye, Joanne S. "Tillie Olsen: Probing the Boundaries between Text and
Context." Journal of Narrative and Life History 3, No's 2 and 3 (1993):
255-268.
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. "A Wake for Mother: The Maternal Deathbed in
Women's Fiction." Feminist Studies 4 (June 1978): 145-65.
Hedges, Elaine and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds. Listening to 'Silences': New
Feminist Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Jacobs, Naomi. "Earth, Air, Fire and Water in 'Tell Me a Riddle.'" Studies in
Short Fiction 23, 4 (Fall 1986): 401-06.
Kamel, Rose. "Riddles and Silences: Tillie Olsen's Autobiographical
Fiction." Aggravating the Conscience: Jewish-American Literary Mothers
in the Promised Land. New York: Peter Lang, 1988. 81-114.
Nelson, Kay Hoyle and Nancy Huse, eds. The Critical Response to Tillie
Olsen. New York: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Orr, Elaine Neil. Tillie Olsen and a Feminist Spiritual Vision. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1987.
Pearlman, Mickey and Abby H. P. Werlock. Tillie Olsen. Boston: G. K.
Hall, 1991.
Pfaelzer, Jeanne. "Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle: The Dialectics of
Silence." Frontiers, forthcoming.
Rosenfelt, Deborah. "Rereading Tell Me a Riddle in the Age of
Deconstruction." In Hedges and Fishkin.
Rubin, Naomi. "A Riddle of History for the Future." Interview with Olsen
in Sojourner (June 1983): 3-4.
Yalom, Marilyn. "Tillie Olsen." In Women Writers of the West Coast:
Speaking of Their Lives and Careers, edited by Marilyn Yalom. Santa
Barbara: Capra, 1983.
 
 Page 309

Permissions
Chronology, reprinted (condensed and adapted) with permission of Twayne
Publishers, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Company, from Tillie Olsen
by Mickey Pearlman and Abby H. P. Werlock. Copyright © 1991 by G. K.
Hall & Co.
''Tell Me a Riddle" by Tillie Olsen, from Tell Me a Riddle published by
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Copyright © 1967 by Tillie
Olsen. Used by permission of Tillie Olsen and Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc.
Explanatory notes to "Tell Me a Riddle" reprinted with minor revisions
from the Heath Anthology of American Literature, volume 2, by permission
of Margaret Roll, Permissions Department, D. C. Heath and Company.
Copyright © 1990.
"Silences in Literature," from Silences by Tillie Olsen. Copyright © 1965,
1972, 1978 by Tillie Olsen. Used by permission of Tillie Olsen and
Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc.
"Tillie Olsen, Personal Statement," from First Drafts, Last Drafts: Forty
Years of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford. Reprinted by permission
of Tillie Olsen. Copyright © 1989.
"The Circumstances of Silence: Literary Representation and Tillie Olsen's
Omaha Past" by Linda Ray Pratt, from The Critical Response to Tillie
Olsen, ed. Kay Hoyle Nelson and Nancy Huse (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1994), 229-243. Copyright © 1994 by Kay Hoyle Nelson
and Nancy Huse. Reprinted with permission of Greenwood Publishing
Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
"From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and the Radical Tradition" by Deborah
Rosenfelt, reprinted from Feminist Studies 7, no. 3 (Fall 1981): 371-406, by
permission of the publisher, Feminist Studies, Inc., c/o Women's Studies
Program, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742.
"A Feminist Spiritual Vision" by Elaine Neil Orr, from Tillie Olsen and a
Feminist Spiritual Vision by Elaine Neil Orr. Reprinted by permission of the
University Press of Mississippi. Copyright © 1987.
"Death Labors" by Joanne Trautmann Banks, from Literature and Medicine
9 (1990): 162-171. Copyright © 1990 by The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
"Motherhood as Source and Silencer of Creativity" by Mara Faulkner, from
Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen by Mara Faulkner.
Condensed by permission of Mara Faulkner. Reprinted by permission of