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.8 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.
At first the Feminist Press had the reprint field to itself. Then other publishers, recognizing the validity of the idea as well as its commercial potential, began series of their own. Virago, Seal Press, and the Women’s Press launched reprint series in the mid-1970s, and Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, Oxford, Beacon, Rutgers, Pandora, Illinois, Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations Press, Northeastern, and scores of others began them in the 1980s. These series, usually in paperback, have transformed the scope of what can be read and taught in the literature classroom.
Rutgers’s American Women Writers Series, for example, under the editorial direction of Joanne Dobson, Judith Fetterley, and Elaine Showalter, has resurrected neglected work from the 1820s to the 1920s by such writers as Fanny Fern, Lydia Maria Child, Rose Terry Cooke, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Harriet Beecher Stowe, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Louisa May Alcott, Alice Cary, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Maria Cummins, Mary Austin, Caroline Kirkland, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Nella Larsen. The Northeastern Library of Black Literature, guided by Series Editor Richard Yarborough, has reprinted work by writers such as George Schuyler, William Demby, Julian Mayfield, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, W. E. B. DuBois, J. Saunders Redding, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Albert Murray, and Gayle Jones. The Literature of American Labor series launched by Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations Press, edited by Cletus E. Daniel and Ileen A. DeVault, has reissued novels by Theresa Malkiel and K. B. Gilden. And Oxford University Press’s Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, shaped by series editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has made the work of writers such as Pauline Hopkins, Anna Julia Cooper, Frances E. W. Harper, Nancy Prince, Angelina Weld Grimke, Mary Seacole, Harriet Jacobs, Mrs. N. F. Mossell, Phillis Wheatley, Effie Waller Smith, Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Elizabeth Keckley, Maria W. Stewart, Mrs. A. E. Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Ann Plato, Emma Dunham Kelley, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Sojourner Truth available to scholars and teachers.
The same impulse that led publishers to begin reprint series led them to publish new anthologies of forgotten writers as well, books designed to make their way easily into college classrooms. The scholars who proposed and edited these anthologies often found their inspiration in Silences. As Mary Anne Ferguson put it (paraphrasing Whitman on Emerson), “I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Tillie brought me to a boil” (Ferguson 1988). Images of Women in Literature, a widely taught anthology now in its fifth edition, was the result. Ferguson was not the only scholar on whom Silences had this effect. Others include Michele Murray (A House of Good Proportion: Images of Women in Literature); Mary Helen Washington (Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories By and About Black Women, Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960, and Midnight Birds: Stories by Contemporary Black Women); Helen Barolini (The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women); Arlyn Diamond and Lee Edwards (American Voices, American Women); and Susan Koppelman (Between Mothers & Daughters, Images of Women in Fiction, Old Maids: Short Stories by Nineteenth Century U.S. Women Writers, and The Other Woman) (Olsen 1988; Washington 1988; Koppelman 1988). The anthology of broadest scope that is an outgrowth of Olsen’s work on the subject of silences is The Health Anthology of American Literature, which endeavors to integrate previously forgotten writers fully into American literary study, and which has been transforming the way American literature is taught in college classrooms for more than ten years (Lauter, 1991; Heath 1990; Gordon 1990; McMillen 1991).9
Silences has stimulated the rediscovery of “lost” women writers outside the English-speaking world as well. The Swedish edition of Silences, for example, included an extended afterword by Swedish critics that cited Olsen’s text as having inspired their recovery of Scandinavian women writers whom literary history had forgotten.10
The attention Olsen paid to diaries, letters, and other neglected genres prompted scholars to take these forms more seriously than they had previously been taken. Once again, some striking anthologies, such as Revelations, Mary Jane Moffat’s and Charlotte Painter’s collection of women’s diaries, were the result. Moffat wrote Olsen,
My Diaries course, which would never have happened but for you, was wonderful. . . . Charlotte Painter & I are preparing a collection of extracts from women’s diaries & letters for Random House. . . . Our focus is on the inner life, the steps toward individuality women have recorded in the life-in-process diary form. We include examples of lives you introduced me to, or suggested: Ruth Benedict; Kathe Kollwitz; Dorothy Wordsworth; Alice James. We were interested in the diary or journal as a valid literary form for women. . . . I think of you as “Tillie Appleseed.” Generations will thank you as I do now, far too sparingly (Moffat to Olsen, 15 October 1973).
Olsen’s efforts to seek out and value women’s words about women’s lives, no matter how seemingly trivial or unimportant, helped inspire a scholar like Elizabeth Hampsten, in Read This Only To Your
self, to read critically the private letters of ordinary women (Hampsten 1988, 1982), and prompted Annette Kolodny to recover lost words of American pioneer women (Kolodny 1988, 1984). Teaching us to value, record, and collect that which, in Virginia Woolf’s phrase, “explains much and tells much” (45), Silences also stimulated the gathering of oral histories. It inspired Jean Reith Schoedel, for example, to collect in her book Alone in a Crowd: Women in the Trades Tell Their Stories the oral histories of women who work as steelhaulers, pipefitters, bindery workers, plumbers, longhaul truckers, bus drivers, sailors, carpenters, and firefighters.11
Olsen’s determination to value women’s experiences and their efforts to articulate that experience prompted many students and teachers to listen for muffled speech in places where they had previously assumed there was only silence. Silences originated in Olsen’s awareness of the silencing of faculty wives at Stanford (where she held a writing fellowship in 1956–1957) and Amherst (where she was a visiting professor and writer in residence in 1969–1970) just as much as it derived from her consciousness of the silencing of working-class people in the Midwest and San Francisco (Olsen 1988). Teachers of middle-class students report that Silences allows their students to see the often hidden silences that enveloped their own mothers, sisters, grandmothers, and aunts, and to understand the myriad ways in which circumstances can constrict and stifle creativity (Kolodny 1988). Teachers of working-class and of first-generation college students report the key ways in which this book helps their students approach all of their college reading with new understanding—and with a sturdy respect for the dignity of their own voices and their own potential voices (Marcus 1988). Silences yoked eloquence and insight in a language that spoke to both the common reader and the academic critic (Stimpson 1988).
Writing
Silences has also helped change what we write as literary critics and feminist theorists. Catharine Stimpson put it succinctly: “it was simply one of the texts that helped to found a field” (Stimpson 1988). That field, of course, was feminist criticism and women’s studies. For one thing, Silences helped put the idea of “silencing” itself on the table for discussion—an idea that Lillian Robinson, glancing back to Olsen, calls perhaps the most empowering of feminist critical tools (Robinson 1987, 23). Olsen’s attention to the social forces that silence voices of the marginalized and powerless, to the material circumstances that inhibit creativity, to the politics of reputation and of censorship, and to the psychology of self-censorship, all helped scholars develop compelling critical frameworks.
Olsen’s pioneering work in Silences on the nature of literary reputation (exemplified in her essay on Rebecca Harding Davis) helped stimulate wide-spread questioning about the construction of the literary canon by such critics as Lillian Robinson and Paul Lauter. It informed the kinds of questions Robinson raised in her widely-reprinted essay, “Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon,” and has influenced her approach to such issues as how one might evaluate working-class women’s writing, private writing by women, and popular culture, as well as traditional canonical texts (Robinson 1983, 1978). Lauter, whose book Canons and Contexts explores “alternative assumptions about literary value” (128) also acknowledges his indebtedness to Olsen (Lauter 1991).
Olsens’s ideas about silencing were central to Jane Marcus’s discussion of “the silenced women of history” in her essay “Still Practice: A/Wrested Alphabet: Toward a Feminist Aesthetic” (1984). Indeed, Marcus credits Silences with making it possible for her to break her own silence as a critic. She notes, “I was in silence and silenced when Tillie’s book came out. Silences became my Bible in that it allowed me to identify with people who were more oppressed than I was. Hearing Tillie speak after having been silenced herself for so long made me feel I had to try because I was less oppressed than other people who were silenced” (Marcus 1988). The result was a host of influential articles and books from Marcus on the challenge of hearing and decoding women’s voices in literature, and on the dynamics of the forces that would silence them.
Olsen’s writing on silence and silencing was the “subtext” for Annette Kolodny’s reinterpretation of the literary treatment of the American West in her book, The Land Before Her (Kolodny 1988, 1984), and for Norma Alarcón’s revision in This Bridge Called My Back of the cultural significance of the figure of “La Malinche” (Alarcón 1988, 1983). It helped inspire Elaine Hedges’s recovery and reinterpretation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper as a text intimately concerned with the silences inscribed by turn-of-the-century gender relations (Hedges 1988, 1973).
[Speaking personally for a moment, I might add that Olsen’s charge that we recover and attend to voices that had been dismissed or ignored for reasons of race or class or gender helped prompt me to explore the role that several forgotten black speakers—a ten-year-old servant, a cook, and a teenaged slave—played in the development of Mark Twain’s art in Huckleberry Finn (Fishkin 1993); it also encouraged me to reevaluate the role played by neglected or maligned women writers and women family members throughout Mark Twain’s career (Fishkin 1994).]
Bonnie Zimmerman, Rosario Ferré, Linda Wagner-Martin, Margaret Randall, Hortense Spillers, and many others also cite Olsen’s ideas about silencing and silence as having been central to their ability to frame empowering critical paradigms, whether those paradigms focus on exclusion or erasure based on sexual preference, gender, race, class, political views, or all of the above (Zimmerman 1988; Ferré 1988; Wagner-Martin 1988; Olsen 1988; Spillers 1988).12 As Linda Wagner-Martin commented, “it would be hard to find a feminist critic [of our generation] who was not influenced in keys ways by Silences.”
In addition, Olsen’s exploration of the theme of silence has helped shape critical writing and research agendas in fields outside of literature. Legal theorist Robin West, for example, draws heavily on Silences in her examination of the voices that were left out of legal history and the law (West 1988); and the book was also the background for Susan Griffin’s interpretation of pornography as “a desire to silence eros” in her book Pornography and Silence (Griffin 1981, vii, 1).
In addition to stimulating critical writing, Silences has helped inspire new creative writing—poetry, drama and fiction. It encouraged the Chicana writer Helena María Viramontes to draw, from her own culture, luminous, moving short stories (Viramontes 1985; 1988), and helped move Asian American playwright Genny Lim to put on stage the drama that inhered in the culture she knew well (Lim 1988).13 Gloria Naylor has said that “Silences helped me keep my sanity many a day” (Naylor to Olsen, 29 July 1988). Sandra Cisneros refers to Silences as ‘“the Bible.’ I constantly return to it” (Cisneros 1988). Margaret Atwood has observed that what Olsen has to say in Silences “is of primary importance to those who want to understand how art is generated or subverted and to those trying to create it themselves” (Atwood 1982). And Mary Stewart, referring to a collection of her poetry, wrote that “it was Silences that gave me this poem, which in turn gave me all the poems that have followed . . .” (Stewart to Olsen, 28 September 1985). Silences was similarly inspiring for Alice Walker: “As much as I learned from Tell Me a Riddle, I learned even more from Tillie’s landmark classic and original essay ‘Silences: When Writers Don’t Write,’ which I read while living in Cambridge in the early ’70s, raising a small daughter alone and struggling to write myself” (Walker, n.d.). And Walker has also noted, “There are a few writers who manage in their work and in the sharing of their understanding to actually help us to live, to work, to create, day by day. Tillie Olsen is one of those writers for me” (Walker 1982). Silences has helped inspire other creative talents, including those of Maxine Hong Kingston, Ursula Le Guin, Alix Kates Shulman, Caryl Churchill, Margaret Randall, Margaret Laurence, Joyce Johnson, and Anne Sexton (Kingston 1982; Le Guin 1987; Shulman 1979; Churchill 1987, p. 77; Olsen 1988; Magnuson 1988; Middlebrook 1991).
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).
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