Silences Read online

  Published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016

  www.feministpress.org

  First Feminist Press edition, 2003

  Copyright © 1965, 1972, 1978 by Tillie Olsen

  “Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic: The Lessons Silences Has Taught Us” by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc., from Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism, edited by Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc. “Tillie Olsen’s Reading Lists” copyright © 1972, 1973, and 1974 by the Feminist Press, reprinted from Women’s Studies Newsletter.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from Tthe Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First edition, 1978, Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, New York. Portions of this work were first published in substantially different form as: “Silences” in Harper’s Magazine (1965) and Ms. Magazine (1978); “Women Who Are Writers in Our Century” in College English (1972); and the Afterword to Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis, The Feminist Press, 1972.

  For information on material quoted in this volume, see page 303, which constitutes a continuation of this copyright page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Olsen, Tillie.

  Silences / Tillie Olsen; introduction by Shelley Fisher Fishkin — 1st Feminist Press ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-55861-879-4

  1. Literature—Women authors—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Authorship—Sex differences. 3. women and literature. I. Title.

  PN 151.04 2003

  809'.89287—dc21

  The Feminist Press would like to thank the Renée B. Fisher Foundation for its generous support of this project. The Press also gratefully acknowledges the support of Elaine Reuben, Florence Howe, Nancy M. Porter, Panthea Reid, Janet Zandy, Lynda Koolish, and Martha Boesing.

  Text design of title copyright © 1978 by Walter Harper

  Printed on acid-free paper by Transcontinental Printing

  1110090807765432

  Acknowledgments

  To every writer quoted or named herein: for much of the content, as well as comprehension, in this book.

  For means and time: the Radcliffe Institute (where “Silences” came into being); the MacDowell Colony (where I worked on Rebecca Harding Davis); the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, who made possible the first work on this book.

  For help when asked: Ann Lipow, Pat Ray, for books. Marilynn Meeker and Rachel Klein for literate copy-editing. Hannah Green and Mary Anne Ferguson for reading the entire ms., and Laurie Olsen, who kept with it from its beginning. Florence Howe, who (1971) did all she could to make Life in the Iron Mills and my afterword a book actuality. Julie Jordan, Martha Parry, Sue Gardinier, Kathie Olsen, Julie Edwards, Karla Lutz, Jack Olsen, Sally Wick Begardy, Pat Koontz, Addy and Merle Brodsky. For help when asked. And for other reasons.

  For inviting me to speak in 1971, and thus bringing “One Out of Twelve” into being: the Women’s Commission of the Modern Lan-guage Association.

  For remaining, reminding: My mother and my father, Sara Vore Taylor, Genya Gorelick, Jack Eggan, Patricia Thompson, Constance Smith, Michelle Murray (whose as yet unpublished journals must not be lost into silence), Theodora Ward, Amy Schechter, Harold Rice, Avrum Olshansky. All earth and air for years, now. “Shine on me still.”

  To the unnamed here, whose work and beings are also sustenance; among them those whose life coursings have schooled me ineradicably in the shaping power and inequality of circumstance; beginning when I was a child at Kellom and Long Schools in Omaha and crossed the tracks to Central High School (my first College-of-Contrast).

  [This] is sent out to those into whose souls the iron has entered, and has entered deeply at some time of their lives.

  —Thomas Hardy, of his

  Jude the Obscure

  For our silenced people, century after century their beings consumed in the hard, everyday essential work of maintaining human life. Their art, which still they made—as their other contributions—anonymous; refused respect, recognition; lost.

  For those of us (few yet in number, for the way is punishing), their kin and descendants who begin to emerge into more flowered and rewarded use of our selves in ways denied to them;—and by our achievement bearing witness to what was (and still is) being lost, silenced.

  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.

  These are not natural silences, 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.

  This book is about such silences. It is concerned with the relationship of circumstances—including class, color, sex; the times, climate into which one is born—to the creation of literature.

  It consists of two talks given nearly a decade apart—“Silences” (1962), “Women Who Are Writers in Our Century” (1971); an essay-afterword, “Rebecca Harding Davis,” written in 1971 to accompany reprint of work by a forgotten nineteenth-century woman writer; and a long aftersection: “Silences—II,” “The Writer-Woman—II,” for essential deepenings and expansions.

  This book is not an orthodoxly written work of academic scholarship. Do not approach it as such. Nor did it come into being through choosing a subject, then researching for it. The substance herein was long in accumulation, garnered over fifty years, near a lifetime; the thought came slow, hard-won; the talks and essay, the book itself, elicited.

  A passion and a purpose inform its pages: love for my incomparable medium, literature; hatred for all that, societally rooted, unnecessarily lessens and denies it; slows, impairs, silences writers.

  It is written to re-dedicate and encourage

  I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance.

  —André Gide

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic: The Lessons Silences Has Taught Us by Shelley Fisher Fishkin

  PART ONE—SILENCES

  Silences in Literature—1962

  One Out of Twelve: Writers Who Are Women in Our Century—1971

  Rebecca Harding Davis—1971, 1972

  PART TWO—Acerbs, Asides, Amulets, Exhumations, Sources, Deepenings, Roundings, Expansions

  Silences in Literature—II

  Silences of the Great in Achievement

  Silences—Its Varieties

  The Work of Creation and the Circumstances It Demands for Full Functioning

  Subterranean Forces—And the Work of Creation in Circumstances Enabling Full Function

  When the Claims of Creation Cannot Be Primary

  The Literary Situation (1976)

  The Writer-Woman: One Out of Twelve—II

  Blight—Its Earliest Expression

  A Sense of Wrong Voiced

  Literacy

  One Out of Twelve—The Figures

>   The Baby; the Girl-Child; the Girl; the Young Writer-Woman

  The Damnation of Women

  The Angel in the House

  Freeing the Essential Angel

  Wives, Mothers, Enablers

  Blight. The Hidden Silencer—Breakdown

  Hidden Blight—Professional Circumstances

  Hidden Blight—Some Effects of Having to Counter and Encounter Harmful Treatment and Circumstances

  Other Obstacles, Balks, Encumbrances in Coming to One’s Own Voice, Vision, Circumference

  PART THREE

  Creativity; Potentiality. First Generation

  Excerpts from Life in the Iron Mills

  Miscellany

  Excerpts from My Heart Laid Bare

  Tillie Olsen’s Reading Lists

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic: The Lessons Silences Has Taught Us

  Shelley Fisher Fishkin

  A reader picking up Harper’s Magazine in October 1965 would have learned from the cover that a number of famous writers “and others” contributed to the issue. “And others” included Tillie Olsen—whose exclusion from the cover list of contributors gave ironic resonance to the themes of omission, erasure, and invisibility that her article so eloquently explored.

  In ways that the editors of Harper’s never suspected, “and others” was a marvelously rich and prescient by-line for Tillie Olsen—one which she mischievously contemplates reclaiming some time in the future.1 For Olsen’s project in that Harper’s article on “Silences in Literature,” the first published version of material that thirteen years later would be incorporated into her book Silences, involved coming to terms with—and throwing her lot in with—the “others” whose voices had been drowned out and forgotten in the course of literary history, and with the “others” whom circumstances had prevented from coming to voice at all.

  The notion, now accepted as a truism, that a woman’s personal experiences could be directly relevant to her insights as a critic was as foreign to the world of literary criticism in the United States in 1965 as the concept of analyzing “silences” was. The “New Criticism,” of course, was by then solidly enthroned. The text itself—and the text most definitely by itself—was championed as the proper object of criticism. In that critical climate, Olsen’s concern not only with the lack of texts, but also with the details of the lives of those who failed to produce texts, stood out as particularly bold and original. Olsen wrote for all those silenced, and for all those not silenced. In her view, the achievement of those who were not silenced (including herself) bore witness by its very existence to what might have been, in the shadows of what never was.

  In an effort to understand the impact of Silences on our time, I interviewed or corresponded with more than sixty scholars, critics, creative writers, publishers, and editors. They ranged in age from their twenties to their seventies. They lived on the East and West coasts, in the Southwest, the Northwest, the Midwest, and Puerto Rico. They worked both inside and outside the academy and the world of academic publishing. They were male and female (although predominantly female) and were white, black, Chicana, Puerto Rican, and Asian American. I examined scores of articles and books that included references to or discussion of Silences. I consulted Olsen’s own heavily annotated copy of Silences, as well as the file of letters she had received about the book, which she generously made available to me. I also conducted several extended interviews with Olsen herself.2 This research documents a story that has not yet been told: it is the story of Tillie Olsen “and others”—some of those others whose lives she changed with the lessons she taught.

  A clear consensus emerged from these investigations: Silences changed what we read in the academy, what we write, and what we count; it also gave us some important tools to understand and address many of the literary, social, economic and political silencings of the present and the potential silencings of the future. The critical habits it encouraged and helped instill are still with us in the classroom and in the bookstore, informing what literature is read and taught and the ways in which it is interpreted and evaluated. The problems and dangers Olsen underlined show no signs of disappearing, and her analysis remains as contemporary today as it was when it was first written.

  Before examining the influence of this volume and its impact on our time, this essay will outline how Silences came to be, and what, in brief, it set out to do.

  The Genesis of Silences

  The book Silences was long in accumulation, as Olsen has said. But she didn’t hoard her insights until the book was completed. Her earliest public discussion of the subject of silences was a talk titled “Death of the Creative Process,” which she delivered from notes at the Radcliffe Institute as part of a weekly colloquium series during the academic year 1962–1963, when she was an Institute Scholar.3 The article Olsen published in Harper’s in 1965 was edited from the taped transcript of this talk. Photocopies of the article seemed to turn up everywhere. Olsen had clearly touched a nerve. Other early talks—on real-life “Shakespeare’s Sisters” silenced by circumstance—included a presentation on a panel titled “The Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century,” moderated by Elaine Hedges at the Modern Language Association Convention in 1971, sponsored by the Women’s Commission of MLA.4 At M.I.T. in 1973 and 1974, Olsen gave “seeding talks” on the subject of “Denied Genius” that focused on “the blood kin of great men,” such as Sophie Thoreau, Alice James, and Dorothy Wordsworth (Olsen 1988). In the early 1970s Olsen began publishing, in the Women’s Studies Newsletter, lists of books to read, reread, and teach, by unjustly forgotten women writers.5 These lists originally grew out of a course Olsen had taught at Amherst in the fall of 1969 on “The Literature of Poverty, Work, and the Human Struggle for Freedom” (Olsen 1988).6 Like the Harper’s article, these lists were widely mimeographed, photocopied, and circulated across the country.

  “The women’s movement and the freedom movement,” Olsen has said, “created an atmosphere that made [her writing on the subject of silences] possible” (Olsen 1988). Olsen’s work, in turn, helped give another dimension to those movements, as it encouraged a generation of activists and scholars to make the ideals that animated their lives shape the ideals that inspired their scholarship. The women’s movement was making the case for taking women’s experiences seriously, and here was Olsen handing out road maps on how to do just that in the study of literature. While many pondered the significance in their lives of the slogan “the personal is the political,” Olsen gave them clues as to how to let that insight inform their work, how to understand the linkage between the personal circumstances of writers’ lives and the art they produced, between their position in the larger society and the culture’s tendency to valorize or dismiss their creative work. The same impulse that led civil rights activists to integrate lunch counters soon began to prompt young academics (often veteran demonstrators themselves) to try to integrate syllabi, to overcome exclusionary practices based solely on gender or race or class. Those who struggled to develop the earliest women’s studies courses were particularly indebted to Olsen’s reading lists, which gave them a sense that there was a literary heritage to be mined, that women’s experiences could be made visible, could be studied and taught. Through her early article and reading lists, and through the hundreds of copies of them that circulated around the country, the ideas Olsen would weave together in book form in 1978 reached larger and larger numbers of writers, critics, and teachers in the 1960s and 1970s.

  Silences, the book version of this material, is dedicated to “our silenced people, century after century their beings consumed in the hard, everyday essential work of maintaining human life. Their art, which still they made—as their other contributions—anonymous; refused respect, recognition, lost;” and also to “those of us (few yet in number, for the way is punishing), their kin and descendants, who begin to emerge into more flowered and rewarded use of our
selves in ways denied to them . . .” (vii). In a handscrawled note on the dedication page in her own copy of the book, Olsen wrote, “we who are most of humanity” (Olsen, Annotations ix). Clearly her book is addressed to the largest audience possible.

  The first essay, “Silences in Literature—1962,” based on the Radcliffe talk (and revised from the version of the talk published in 1965 in Harper’s) is Olsen’s statement about the connection between circumstances (social, economic, psychological, etc.) and the production of art. Olsen’s meditation on the preconditions needed for creativity to flourish draws heavily on writers’ journals and letters and includes reflective comments by Rimbaud, Melville, Balzac, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, Katherine Anne Porter, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Katherine Mansfield, and Olsen herself.

  In the second essay, “One Out of Twelve: Writers Who Are Women in Our Century—1971,” based on the MLA talk, Olsen examines “twentieth-century literature course offerings, and writers decreed worthy of critical attention in books and articles,” (24) and interrogates the striking absence of women. “Why?” she asks insistently, “What, not true for men but only for women, makes this enormous difference? . . . Why are so many more women silenced than men? Why, when women do write (one out of four or five works published) is so little of their writing known, taught, accorded recognition?” (24–25).

  The third essay, “Rebecca Harding Davis—1971, 1972,” which was written as an afterword for the Feminist Press 1972 reprint of Davis’s 1861 story “Life in the Iron Mills,” is an extended biographical and critical reconsideration of a writer Olsen felt had been unjustly neglected.

  Olsen’s wild and quirky “Part Two” dances fugue-like around themes she lays out in clear expository prose in “Part One.” In this experimental section, Olsen dramatizes the theme of “silence” with peculiar immediacy and intensity by confronting the reader, throughout the section, with the “visual silence” of blankness on the page.7 Her bold use of white space focuses the reader’s attention on the books that are not there, the words that are absent—the emptiness that gapes from the pages of literary history (Fishkin 1990, 151–60). It also reminds us of the endless interruptions that still contribute to silences and silencings of those “consumed in the hard, everyday essential work of maintaining human life.” “Part Two,” a montage of fragments, may be read as it was written, with interruptions, in bits and pieces, in time stolen between chores. In the blank spaces between the fragments the reader is given permission to pause, to think, to insert her own response, to recall her own experience, to listen to her own voice in addition to the voices of others.