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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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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 itself
the 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
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