Silences (2 page)
Authors: Shelly Fisher Fishkin
The Baby; the Girl-Child; the Girl; the Young Writer-Woman
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
Creativity; Potentiality. First Generation
Excerpts from
Life in the Iron Mills
Excerpts from
My Heart Laid Bare
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
In both the conventionally structured and the experimental parts of her book, Olsen draws our attention to a range of silences, including “work aborted, deferred, denied,” “censorship silences,” “political silences,” and “silences where the lives never came to writing.” She explores silences imposed by domestic responsibilities,
by economic hardship, by corroded self-confidence, by “the cost of ‘discontinuity’ (that pattern still imposed on women)” (39).
Olsen requires that we come to terms with the blankness we confront in literary history when we look for writing by women,
working people, and people of color. Are the pages blank because these groups were silenced by circumstances? Because they never came to the point
at which there was literacy, leisure, space, and energy to write in the first place? Or are the pages blank because society erased their words through rejection, dismissal, or devaluation? Olsen demands that we ponder all of these questions, that we ask whether the silence we encounter is there because potential writers have been mute—or because we have been deaf.
The Lessons
Reading
Silences
has helped change what we read. It has given scholars and publishers the confidence to approach buried and forgotten texts with fresh eyes and new understanding, to appreciate journals and other private writings, and to read in women’s artifacts (such as quilts) stories and plots invisible to previous generations.
The reading lists that grew out of Olsen’s Amherst course and out of the talks
she gave on women writers whom she urged us to read, reread, and teach, contained so many names that were obscure and unfamiliar then—Rebecca Harding Davis, Fanny Fern, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Zora Neale Hurston, Agnes Smedley, Sarah E. Wright—so many books impossible to find, out of print.
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The appetite those lists whetted would not have to stay hungry for long. In 1970, Olsen translated the
spirit of her “reading lists” into action by convincing Florence Howe to make reprinting forgotten works a central mission of the Feminist Press. As Howe recounts the story, in 1970, when Tillie Olsen “gave
Life in the Iron Mills
to the Feminist Press and said she had written a biographical and literary afterword that we could have as well, that changed the whole course of publishing for the Press.”
Up to that point the Feminist Press had planned to bring out “short biographical pamphlets about writers and women of distinction in all kinds of work, and . . . feminist children’s books,” observes Howe “but we had not thought of doing works from the past until [Tillie] handed [us]
Life in the Iron Mills,
and
followed that up the following year with
Daughter of Earth
” (Howe). Since those beginnings
in the early 1970s, the Feminist Press has reprinted works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Margaret Fuller, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Meridel LeSueur, Josephine Herbst, Edith Summers Kelley, Fielding Burke, Tess Slesinger, June Arnold, Mary Austin, Katharine Burdekin, Mona Caird, Helen Hull, Elizabeth Janeway, Josephine Johnson, Edith Konecky, Paule Marshall, Moa Martinson, Myra Page, Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps, Elizabeth Robins, Jo Sinclair, Helen Smith, Susan Warner, Dorothy West, Sarah E. Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.