Silences (4 page)

Silences
also played an empowering role for older writers. As Susan Gubar has observed, “no one else has recorded [as] faithfully [as Tillie Olsen has] the tribulations and triumphs of speech after long silence” (Gubar 1988). Teaching the importance of being aware of but not defeated
by what Olsen called “foreground silences” (when many years of silence precede the first creative effort), Olsen’s book also inspired
A Wider Giving: Women Writing after Long Silence
(1988), an “anthology of poetry, prose and autobiographical narrative by contemporary women writers who made their major commitment to creative writing after the age of forty-five,”
¹⁴
and other first books of fiction
by older women such as
The Calling,
by Mary Gray Hughes (Marcus 1988).

Olsen’s book prompted many writers to explore in both fiction and nonfiction themes that had been largely taboo before, but which
Silences
foregrounded; foremost among these was the complex tensions between art and motherhood. Ursula Le Guin, for example, in a 1987 meditation on this subject, confesses that she “stole (many
of the) quotations [in a recent work of hers] from Tillie Olsen’s
Silences,
a book to which” her own work, she writes, “stands in the relation of an undutiful and affectionate daughter: ‘Hey, Ma, you aren’t using this, can I wear it?’” Le Guin retains a special affection for Olsen’s book because of the ways in which it empowered her as a writer: “Along in the seventies, when feminism tended to
identify the Mother as the Enemy . . . I had three kids whom I liked and a mother whom I liked and a mother-in-law whom I liked, and I felt guilty. I felt I should not speak from my own experience, because my experience was faulty—not right” (Le Guin 1987).
Silences
encouraged Le Guin to value the truth of her own experience—without suppressing the complexities and tensions that experience entailed.
For other women it cleared a space in which, secure in the knowledge that they were not alone, they could explore the anguished choices they had to
make—often daily—between children and work. As Deborah Rosenfelt has put it, “
Silences
reassured women that they weren’t crazy. It gave us permission to speak about things we had buried or kept to ourselves before” (Rosenfelt 1988).

Olsen forged bonds
between the writers
about
whom she wrote, and the writers
for
whom she wrote. “Here we all are, then,” wrote Alix Kates Shulman, “the writers invoked in
Silences
and those of us who read them, comprising a writers’ workshop. We are sitting in a circle, sharing our experiences and ideas, . . . searching for a common truth, growing stronger and more confident and more determined through our mutual
support and inspiration” (532–33). Readers sensed, quite rightly, that Tillie Olsen, too, was a warm and welcoming member of that circle. Indeed, Olsen herself once claimed with characteristic modesty, “I assure you I am not as good a writer as some of you may think I am. It is you and what you bring to it . . . the common work that we do together” (Olsen 1983, 64).

Arithmetic

Just as
Silences
has changed the way we read and the way we write, it has also changed the way we count. The book demonstrated the dramatic power of a “rhetoric of arithmetic”
¹⁵
to make explicit conditions of exclusion, imbalance, and neglect. Affirming and building on work by Elaine Showalter and Florence Howe, Olsen’s essay, “One Out of Twelve: Writers Who Are Women in Our Century” (originally published in 1972,
and republished in
Silences
in 1978) taught the simple lesson that adding up the number of women (and minorities) present in “literature courses, required reading lists, textbooks, quality anthologies, the year’s best, the fifty years’ best, consideration by critics or in current reviews,” etc., was itself a valuable critical tool.
¹⁶
Over the next twenty years that tool would be picked up, for
example, by Bonnie Zimmerman in her 1982 essay “One Out of Thirty: Lesbianism in Women’s Studies Textbooks”; by Paul Lauter in his 1983 article on “Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon”; and by Charlotte Nekola, in her 1987 essay, “Worlds Unseen: Political Women Journalists and the 1930s.” The practice of “counting” remains enormously useful to dramatize
and document in
concrete terms the inequalities and inequities women and minorities continue to confront.
Silences
taught us
how
to count, and it taught us
that
we count. Respect for ourselves, our voices, and those of our foremothers (however faint and forgotten) is one of the most important legacies it has left us.

Dissenting Voices

Not every reader, it should be said, has been enthralled with
Silences.
When
the book appeared, several critics, in fact, faulted Olsen for having inscribed in it her own set of silences or distortions. Joyce Carol Oates, for example, observed that “there is little or no mention” in the book of successful women writers of our time, and suggested counter-examples to Olsen’s relatively bare roster (Oates 1978, 33–34). (Oates went on to characterize “the thinking that underlies
Silences
” as “simply glib and superficial if set in contrast to the imagination that created
Tell Me a Riddle
and
Yonnondio
” (Oates 1978, 34)). Reviewer Phoebe-Lou Adams faulted Olsen’s neglect of the psychological obstacles writers often put in their own paths. Olsen, Adams wrote, “blames everything except that standard known as writer’s block, while quoting the lamentations of a number of writers
(mostly men) who suffered no other impediment” (Adams 1978, 96). More recently, Mickey Pearlman and Abby Werlock have taken exception to Olsen’s characterization of Rebecca Harding Davis’s place in her society (129–30), and some readers have complained about the book’s “whiny” tone, and the spirit of rhapsodic self-pity that they find pervades its prose.
¹⁷

Nellie McKay, citing the large output
of writing by black women in the nineteenth century who wrote and spoke (although for a relatively small audience) feels that the concept of “silence” may be less relevant than the theme of “silencing” for these African American women writers who overcame often crushing “circumstances” to publish prolifically in African American newspapers and magazines. These writers, largely absent from Olsen’s
lists, McKay notes, can be considered “silent” only from the standpoint of the mainstream culture that chose not to hear them (McKay 1988). While Mary Anne Ferguson credits
Silences
with having stimulated her own awareness of a number of black writers with
whom she had been unfamiliar (Ferguson 1988), other critics share McKay’s view that for all its efforts to be attentive to black writers, the
book was ultimately “thinner” on bibliographies for black and Third World writers than it was for white ones. However, it is perhaps unfair to fault Olsen for not being aware of the numerous African American writers whose works have been recovered during the quarter-century since she began her investigation of the subject of silences, especially since her work helped create a climate among scholars
and publishers that made possible this recovery process. Any evaluation of the relationship between
Silences
and writing by people of color must ultimately take into account the views of the large number of minority writers and critics—including Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Sandra Cisneros, Hortense Spillers, Genny Lim, Norma Alarcón, Helena María Viramontes, and Maxine Hong Kingston—who cite
Silences
as a text that has been centrally important for them. As Maxine Hong Kingston put it, “Tillie Olsen helps those of us condemned to silence—the poor, racial minorities, women—find our voices” (Kingston 1982).

Attacks on the Lessons

Silences’s
legacy includes not only new habits of reading, writing, and counting, but also new habits of vigilance. For
Silences
has helped us understand the
dynamics of “silencing” and has given us the tools to cry “foul” when we see in action the forces that silence. It is a book that addresses, in addition to the silences of the past, the silencings of the present and potential silencings of the future. What Olsen flagged as “censorship silences” (9; 142); silences stemming from “critical attitudes; exclusions” (238); “political silences” (9; 143);
“silences where the lives never come to writing” (10; 151); and “virulent destroyers: premature silencers” (9–10; 148) are, unfortunately, still very much with us.

Reading

Take “censorship silences,” for example. An offensive has been mounted on several fronts regarding what, and whom, we read.
National studies reveal that the number of challenges to specific library books and school materials
increased steadily from 1983 to 1990 (Reichman 8; Ervin 1991). A significant number of the censorship initiatives against schools and libraries have been sponsored by organized far-right groups such as Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association (formerly the National Federation of Decency); Robert Simonds’s Citizens for Excellence in Education, the activist wing of the National Association of
Christian Educators; Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum; and Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America (“People for” 1986–87, 9). Through efforts ranging from challenging specific texts in school districts and in the courts to taking over school boards, these groups have worked to remove from classrooms and libraries novels, textbooks, and other curricular material that challenges traditional sex
roles, or that praises the contributions of minorities, women, or labor unions to American society (Reichman 27–45). They helped to create what watchdog groups like People for the American Way call an alarming “climate of intolerance” in American secondary school classrooms (“People for” 1987–88; “People for” 1988). In this climate of intolerance students’ own writing is not immune from attack: in
Lolo, Montana, a group of fundamentalist parents persuaded the school board to ban students’ writing journals. They objected to the candor and openness that writing journals inspired (“People for” 1986–87, 14).

Silencing in college classrooms tends to take more subtle forms. Rather than “censorship silences,” here we find what Olsen referred to as the silencing that stems from “critical attitudes;
exclusions” and their potentially devastating effect on those who, due to “class, sex, or color” are “still marginal in literature, and whose coming to voice at all against complex odds is an exhausting achievement” (146).
Silences’
s legacy in publishing—reprint series and textbooks like the
Heath Anthology
—may make it easier than ever before to integrate previously neglected women and minority
writers into college courses. Many individuals and institutions, however, have launched a campaign to exclude these voices from the curriculum. In the 1980s individuals like Allan Bloom and former Secretary of Education William Bennett publically challenged the validity of courses, reading lists, and programs of study that valued contributions of women and minorities
to world culture. In the 1990s
scholars who share Bloom’s and Bennett’s perspective united under the banner of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) to achieve the same goals. This organization’s journal,
Academic Questions,
frequently has run attacks on feminist criticism and African American Studies (Weisberg 1991, 34–39); S. Diamond 1991, 45–48).

NAS members find the idea of expanding the canon to include those previously
excluded from it repugnant. Their rhetoric often waxes hyperbolic: one member urged colleagues to fight the good fight against “a new dark ages, preserving what is worth preserving amid the barbaric ravages in the countryside and the towns of academe” (quoted in Weisberg 1991, 37). Those “barbaric ravages” refer to many of the texts recovered by scholars inspired by Olsen’s
Silences
or written
by imaginative writers whom Olsen’s work helped empower. A budget of half a million dollars a year, mainly from conservative foundations, funds NAS members’ fight to keep college courses and curricula as close as possible to what they were when
they
were in college. NAS arguments have captured the imagination of a number of mainstream publications—including
Time, The Atlantic Monthly,
and
The
New Republic
—who have added their voices to a chorus of diversity bashing. Despite these efforts, however, it is unlikely that the NAS and its supporters will succeed in rolling back twenty years of innovative and responsible curricular transformation on American campuses.
¹⁸

If Tillie Olsen’s book
Silences
alerts us to the dangers of the silencings of the American Family Association, Citizens
for Excellence in Education, and the National Association of Scholars, it also urges us to be more sensitive to the dynamics of our own silencings. We must make sure that efforts to expand the canon do not simply replace it with a counter-canon with its own new and different patterns of exclusion or ghettoization—patterns that may grow out of ethnocentrism or homophobia, diseases not confined, unfortunately,
to diversity bashers.

The last decade, for example, has seen a dramatic increase in writing by Latinas. As Puerto Rican feminist writer Rosario Ferré has put it, “(Escribimos) porque le tenemos mas miedo al silencio que a la palabra.”
¹⁹
Despite the heady proliferation of new Latina voices, Latina writers are only sometimes included in American literature
courses and women’s literature courses,
and only recently have they made their way into literary anthologies. Scholars need to cultivate the critical and linguistic skills to respond to these voices with the intelligence and respect they deserve. Teachers of American literature, for example, need to make sure that they don’t exclude from their syllabi and criticism works that draw on multiple linguistic and cultural traditions—such as
Gloria Anzaldúa’s book
Borderlands/La Frontera
—because they are afraid of grappling with a text that maps the borderlands of our culture.
²⁰