Silences
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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 individua
ls 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
Writing
What we write, and who gets to write, is in jeopardy as well. We must continue to attend to what Olsen labeled “political silences” (143)—including “complete silencing by governments” (143). The Writers in Prison Committee Reports, prepared annually by International PEN, remind us of the writers around the world who have been imprisoned, and are still in prison, for the political content of their work, victims of brutal silencing by their governments.
Troubling as well are the “silences where the lives never come to writing” due to such factors as illiteracy and poverty. According to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in recent times 44 percent of African Americans could not read the front page of a newspaper (Gates 1988). The functional literacy rate of the free black population in America in 1865 was probably higher than it is today.21 We are also reminded that more than 75 percent of the women in the world today are women of color, and of these, 90 percent are illiterate.22 Who will write their stories?
Olsen’s book, with its groundbreaking discussions of the agonizing tensions between motherhood and creativity, between sustaining life and creating art, makes us particularly sensitive to those whose “lives never come to writing” because Federal restrictions on birth control and abortion information or denied access to abortion clinics effectively sentence them to early unwanted motherhood. The 1980s witnessed a disturbing increase in violent attacks on abortion clinics and on doctors and nurses who perform abortions, culminating, in 1993, in the murder of a doctor. Patients have been the victims of public humiliation, psychological warfare, and entrapment by fake clinics.23 The ultimate victim of these attacks and prohibitions is the woman (typically poor, young, and trapped) who will be locked out of the cultural conversation by the demands of the unwanted pregnancy she must carry to term.
Arithmetic
The way we “count” is under attack as well. Even today, for a number of students and professors, two black writers on an American literature syllabus is one too many. What the token woman was to the course syllabus of an earlier era, the token African American or Asian American or Native American writer may be to the course syllabus of the present. Those who attack multicultural initiatives in education complain about “bumping” a “good” white male writer and replacing him with a “bad” minority writer. If genius, as Olsen suggests frequently throughout Silences, is an equal opportunity employer, we must break down the spurious argument that “diversity” and “quality” are oppositional terms, and we must insist that the writers we teach “count” because their work matters.
There is another sense in which the way we count is being challenged. Olsen drew our attention to what she called “virulent destroyers: premature silencers.” It is an accurate phrase to describe the devastating illness, HIV-AIDS. HIV-AIDS activists in this country have used the slogan “Silence = Death” in urging people to speak up for urgent research and treatment, as well as for compassion and civil rights for HIV-AIDS victims. The amount of potential creativity lost to HIV-AIDS worldwide is staggering, yet still we are encouraged by some to “discount” that phenomenon as something that happens only to people who “don’t count.” Like the Danes who donned armbands identifying themselves as Jews to foil the Nazis’ efforts to determine whom to count in their genocidal plans, we have to resist efforts to divide and conquer: we have to insist, as Silences taught us, that we all can and do count. Silences’s legacy today is the courage to assert that “we all count”—and that we have the right to read—and write—ourselves.
Notes
This essay would not have been possible without the help of Tillie Olsen, who generously shared her time and her thoughts with me during the spring of 1988, and who continued to make her personal papers and correspondence available to me during the years that followed. I am also grateful to Elaine Hedges, Carla Peterson, Lillian Robinson, Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, and Sarah Weddington for their critical comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Modern Language Association Convention in 1988.
1. Olsen 1988. She is considering reclaiming the by-line as “Ann Dothers.”
2. The individuals whose names I will be citing represent only a small fraction of the number of people—inside and outside academia—for whom Silences has been an extremely important book.
3. While Olsen herself refers to this talk as having taken place in 1962, the date on the transcript of the tape of the talk in the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin is March 15, 1963. For more information on Olsen’s experience at the Radcliffe Institute 1962–1963, see Diane Middlebrook’s essay in Listening to Silences (Hedges and Fishkin 1994). Olsen also gave several other undocumented informal talks around this time, such as one at the Boston Public Library in 1963 (Ferguson 1988).
4. Other panelists were Adrienne Rich, Ellen Peck Killoh, and Elaine Reuben (see Hedges 1972).
5. See “Tillie Olsen’s Reading List,” a four-part series originally published between 1972 and 1974 in Women’s Studies Newsletter, 1:2, p. 7; 1:3, p. 3; 1:4, p. 2; II:1, pp. 4–5. The series is
reprinted at the back of this volume.
6. Paul Lauter recalls the title of this course as “The Literature of Poverty, Oppression, Revolution, and the Struggle for Freedom” (Lauter 1991).
7. The page where Olsen notes a period of silence in Jane Austen’s life, for example, is completely blank except for the following: “Jane Austen (1775–1817). The years 1800–1811. Woman reasons: she was powerless in all major decisions deciding her life, including the effecting of enabling circumstances for writing” (140).
8. The notes prefacing an early reading list suggest that “each entry should be read with the following in mind. (1) The hard and essential work of women, in and out of the home (‘no work was too hard, no labor too strenuous to exclude us’). (2) Limitations, denials imposed; exclusions and restrictions in no way necessitated by biological or economic circumstances. (3) How human capacities born in women—intellect, organization, art, invention, vision, sense of justice, beauty, etc.—denied scope and development, nevertheless struggled to express themselves and function.” See page 293 in this volume.