Tell Me a Riddle Women Writers (New

title:
Brunswick, 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, Working class--Fiction, Aged
subject
women--Fiction, Olsen, Tillie.--Tell me a
riddle.
publication date: 1995
lcc: PS3565.L82T45 1995eb
ddc: 813/.54
Cancer--Patients--Fiction, Married people--
Fiction, Working class--Fiction, Aged
subject: 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 StatesFiction.
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 113
and Tillie Olsen's Omaha Past
LINDA RAY PRATT
From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and the Radical 133
Tradition
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 243
Women Writers
RACHEL BLAU DuPLESSIS
 ''No One's Private Ground": A Bakhtinian Reading of 271
Tillie 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.2 Like 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."3 They 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."6 He 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."7 In 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."9 The 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."10 In 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 postwar 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 Esquire13 and 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," 17 and 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"18 and Catherine R. Stimpson's
"Tillie Olsen: Witness as Servant,"19 both 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."20 Constance 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.22
Elenore 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." 23 Linda 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."25 Her 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."26 The 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
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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
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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."
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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.2 These 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.4 After 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.6 Olsen 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.8 By 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.9 He 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
 Page 129
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
 Page 130
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.
 Page 131
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.2 Some 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:
 Page 135
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.5 Literary 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."6 At 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";7 the 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.9 Yet 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,12 as
were "The Strike" and "Thousand-Dollar Vagrant," two essays based
on her involvement in the San Francisco dock strike. 13 In "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,
 Page 150
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.16 And 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.19 A 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."24 The
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.25 Yonnondio 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.28
On 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."29 Olsen 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,
 Page 163
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.33 Gold, 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."34 In
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.36
Not 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.38 Yet 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.42 Inman 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."43 The 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.
 Page 174
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.
 Page 176
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.
 Page 178
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
 Page 179
through her writing, communicating a vision of human
transformation.2 It 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."3 Not
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."4
Faithfulness 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.6 Christ 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
 Page 180
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."7 For Baker, the writer
makes an "effort at return," which then leads to emergence. Journeys
in a literature like Olsen's are the representation 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."8 These
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-
 Page 182
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."9
Thus, 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
 Page 183
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."13 In 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."15 The 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
 Page 188
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.20 She 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
 Page 191
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
 Page 192
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.23 Like 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.
 Page 197
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."
 Page 199
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
woman2 and 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.3 As 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,"4 and 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.5 In 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
 Page 201
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.6 Even 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.7 Her 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
 Page 202
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;9 her 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
 Page 204
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.11 Socially 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;13 they 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.16 His 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."
 Page 210
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
 Page 211
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."2
Of 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
 Page 215
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."4 Olsen'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
 Page 216
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,5 is 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.6 Olsen 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-
 Page 220
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."9 That 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 seait clears 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,
 Page 222
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
 Page 224
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
 Page 227
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." 14 While 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-
 Page 228
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
 Page 230
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
 Page 231
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
 Page 234
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.17 I
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
 Page 236
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."20 Although 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."21 While 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."22 Olsen'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
 Page 240
(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.2 Using 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.3 Genius 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.4 In 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.7 Vocation, 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
 Page 246
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.9
And, 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-
 Page 248
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.12 The 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.17 In 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.19 The 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." 20 When 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.21 By 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.22 All 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.23 By 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.24 As 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."25 It 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.28
The 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.29 This 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-
 Page 255
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
 Page 256
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.31 This 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
 Page 257
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."35 The death or
generational displacement of the mother in plots involving a daughter
artist may be
 Page 258
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.37 The
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.38 Her suffering and her
memories crack her
 Page 259
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,
 Page 260
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.42 The 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.43 This 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."46 William
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.47 It is
clear that the fusion of the artisanal and high art has been
 Page 263
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).
 Page 264
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
 Page 265
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
 Page 281
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-
 Page 282
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-
 Page 283
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.4 If 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.5 Responsible 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:
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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