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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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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
 
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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
 
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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
 
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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
 
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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
 
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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

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