That Tillie Olsen's work is radically perfectibilistic in spirit and vision is obvious to most of her readers. Less obvious is that the two principal sources of that vision derive directly from her experience as a Jew and as a woman.

What is most deeply Jewish in Olsen is the secular messianic utopianism she inherited from her immigrant parents. That is, her political and social ideology directly reflects the radical Jewish background in which she grew up. But while her Jewish background provides a foundation for Olsen's basic political vision, it would be a mistake to view Jewishness itself as the living core, either in theme or imagery, of her work. Her experience as a woman is much more central, and is especially noticeable in her patterns of imagery. From the weak propagandistic early poetry to the great "Tell Me a Riddle," Olsen repeatedly emphasizes the human body and the mother/child relationship, aspects of human experience strongly identified with the female.

This is not to suggest that Olsen's explicit "femaleness" makes her work restricted in scope or marginal. Her habitual focus on the body does not suggest, for example, that the human is merely a body. On the contrary she grounds the spiritual in the body in very concrete and physical terms, emphatically insisting on the wholeness of the human. For Olsen the physical body makes the spiritual condition manifest: disfigurement, mutilation, and especially starvation are body images or ideas employed repeatedly to reflect both self-estrangement and estrangement from the world. Generally, hunger, eating, and feeding (nurturing) are the pivotal experiences that directly link the mother/child relationship on the one hand to the Jewish radical political vision on the other.

Olsen's vision lies between the Realist emphasis on victimization and the puniness of the individual, and the over-optimistic emphasis on the sheer human potentiality of some of the Romantics. In Olsen, human beings experience ravening hungers of all kinds: physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual. But when these hungers are fed, the individuals develop their potential and give to others and to the world at large: fulfilled people are productive and nurturing in turn. In Olsen's view the deepest human hunger is to be fruitful, so human beings satisfy their own needs best by giving. The negative conclusions of this Rousseauvian view are likewise drawn: those who are prevented by circumstances from developing their productive and nurturing natures will be inclined in turn to become victimizers and stultifiers of others.

The Rousseauvian dimension of Olsen's work is most obviously demonstrated by the fact that in each of her fictions there is a child at or near the center of the story. The child poetically embodies mankind's two dominant characteristics: potential and hunger. Moreover, since she sees each individual human life and all human life in general as parallel journeys toward greater consciousness, what happens to the child is emblematic of the condition and fate of humankind.

Since for Olsen the deepest human hunger is to be fruitful, mothering, in its ideal form, is an example of intense fulfillment. It is also a source of knowledge. Through the experience, the mother discovers human potential and all the forces that operate to limit it; she comes to see human beings as born with enormous possibilities for joy, growth, and productivity which are unnaturally thwarted through class, age, sex and race prejudice.

What is implicit about nurturing and motherhood in her fiction is made explicit in Silences, where she insists on the "comprehensions possible out of motherhood" and specifies that these comprehensions include "the very nature, needs, illimitable potentiality of the human being--and the everyday means by which these are distorted, discouraged, limited, extinguished." Moreover, Olsen asserts that because motherhood is a neglected theme in literature (neglected because mothers are not usually able to become writers), these comprehensions have not yet "come to powerful, undeniable, useful expression." Thus there are "aspects and understandings of human life as yet largely absent in literature." Olsen's own fiction is itself an attempt to redeem that "loss in literature."

The next section of this essay will explore what is Jewish in Olsen's work, the following two will focus on what is female: first, her treatment of the body and second, the mother/child relationship both as fact and metaphor. Tillie Olsen has said "What is Yiddish in me . . . is inextricable from what is woman in me, from woman who is mother." The concluding section will suggest the accuracy of that self-analysis.

II

"Still Eva Believed and Still I Believe"

Olsen's Jewishness is a thorny subject. Because her mother was a non-Jew, for Orthodox Jews Olsen is not, in fact, Jewish. Moreover, Olsen considers herself an atheist and proudly describes her father as "incorruptibly atheist to the last day of his life." Nonetheless, Olsen considers herself a Jewish atheist, and "Tell Me a Riddle," her greatest fiction, is also one of the finest works of American Jewish literature.

Olsen hardly affirms all things Jewish. She looks at traditional Judaism as having served a useful purpose in the past by providing a sense of solidarity and strength, a refuge in a terrible world of oppression. But for all its positive effects, traditional Judaism for Olsen is inextricably linked with much that is negative or limiting: superstition, patriarchy, parochialism, and an enclosed, static life which reinforced life-stifling traditions as the price of security and continuity.

In an interview, Olsen recently remarked, "I still remain with the kind of Yiddishkeit I grew up with." By this she refers to her Jewish socialist background. According to her, that background fostered two essential insights. First, "knowledge and experience of injustice, of discrimination, of oppression, of genocide and of the need to act against them forever and whenever they appear." And second, an "absolute belief in the potentiality of human beings."

Olsen's vision of the world parallels Eva's in "Tell Me a Riddle," and Eva is on the one hand a spiritual portrait of the artist as an old woman and, on the other a wonderfully moving evocation of a segment of the Jewish community. That is, even Eva's insistence "Race, human; religion, none," is a not atypical Jewish response.

Olsen has said that she began "Tell Me a Riddle" in order to "celebrate a generation of revolutionaries," and her portrait of Eva and David is indeed a celebration of fervent Jewish revolutionaries during the early years of the century and of a time of boundless hopes and richly humanist fervor. These Jewish socialists, whom Irving Howe also celebrates in World of Our Fathers, were dedicated to building a new society, a world-wide international community in which all human beings "would live without want in freedom and fulfillment." Theirs was a socialism that was more than political and economic; it was founded on a profound idealism, an idea of human liberation and secular utopia. Opposed to traditional Judaism, socialist Jews transferred messianism, one of the traditional elements of Jewish experience, to secular dreams.

"Tell Me a Riddle" then is a deeply Jewish story. The Yiddish-inflected speech and "old country curses" are obviously of Jewish origin. David's ideal, to retire in dignity and community to his workers' haven evokes memories of Jewish Workmen's Circles. Even the bait with which David unsuccessfully tempts Eva to the home is particularly Jewish; he tells her there is a reading circle which studies Chekhov and Peretz, a Russian and a Jewish author united by their understanding and love of the ordinary person, of basic, unimproved humanity.

Through Eva, Olsen makes her clearest fictional statement about traditional Judaism. When one of her children tells Eva that the hospital puts patients on lists so that "men of God may visit those of their religion" and that she is on the Jewish list, Eva responds: "Not for rabbis." It is not that Eva denies being Jewish but that she refuses the religious views and consolation of the rabbis.

When asked by her daughter Hannah to light the Sabbath candles, Eva refuses and accuses Hannah of doing it for ignoble reasons: "Not for pleasure she does it. For emptiness. Because his [her husband's] family does. Because all around her do." She calls Hannah's heritage and tradition "superstition! From the savages afraid of the dark, of themselves: mumbo words and magic lights to scare away ghosts." Eva's dismissive attitude toward ritual parallels that of her "real life" contemporaries: in the early years of the century young Jewish radicals held costume balls on Yom Kippur to flaunt their separation from a "benighted" past. What infuriates Eva most is Hannah's nostalgia for the past. For the forward-looking Eva the past means "dark centuries" when religion stifled women and encouraged the poor to buy candles instead of bread. It was when the poor chosen Jew was "ground under, despised, trembling in cellars" and later a Holocaust victim--"and cremated. And cremated." When her husband David asks whether the terrible victimization of the Jews is the fault of religion, Eva does not answer. But clearly she sees Judaism as a backward religion and has no faith in a God who permits his chosen people to suffer so excruciatingly. Instead of traditional religion she believes Hannah should teach universal humanism: "to smash all ghettos that divide us--not to go back, not to go back."

Eva's undying faith in their youthful messianic hopes, "Their holiest dreams" is the story's vision of a secular utopia. Both the vision and the faith in human possibility mirror Jewish socialism of the early years of the century and Olsen's own abiding Yiddishkeit: "that joyous certainty, that sense of mattering, of moving and being moved, of being one and indivisible with the great of the past, with all that freed, ennobled man." Although Eva's sacred text is not the Bible but the Book of Martyrs, and Socrates not Moses is her hero, her vision embodies both the messianic hope and universalist worldview of a particular kind of secular Jew.

The complete familiarity with Jewish immigrant culture revealed in "Tell Me a Riddle" is particularly striking because Jewishness barely touches Olsen's other work. In Yonnondio it appears and disappears suddenly and briefly. Enroute to a farm after finally escaping from a brutalizing coal mining town, Anna Holbrook momentarily blossoms with memories and plans: "School for the kids, Jim working near her, on the earth, lovely things to keep, brass lamps, bright tablecloths, vines over the doors, and roses twining." Suddenly a memory flashes: "her grandmother bending in such a twilight over lit candles chanting in an unknown tongue, white bread on the table over a shining white tablecloth and red wine." Elenore Lester has suggested that "the way Anna's Jewishness is injected and then withdrawn without casting some subtle coloration over her, suggests that the author was cauterizing a rich vein of associations which might have worked for her." Since the novel was never completed there is no way of knowing for sure if or how Olsen would have developed this Jewish thread. As is, the very slightness of the Jewish memory functions to keep the Holbrooks a representative American proletarian family and supports the universalizing aspects of the novel. To explore or develop Anna's Jewishness may well have seemed to the young Olsen to risk parochialism and to undermine the one world vision. The word Jewish itself is mentioned as one of many nationalities, neither first nor last: "Na-tion-al-it-ies American Armenian Chinese Croatian . . . Irish French Italian Jewish Lith. . . ."

The candle lighting ceremony linksYonnondio with "Tell Me a Riddle." That candle lighting is clearly positive in the early novel and denounced by Eva in the later story superficially suggests a change in Olsen, a deepening disaffection and disavowal of her Jewish roots. But the contexts and function of the scenes differ crucially in the two texts. In Yonnondio candle lighting is positive to Anna because her recent past has been so physically and spiritually crippling. Candle lighting in her mind is linked with order and beauty, with home and sweet domesticity. In "Tell Me a Riddle" the candle lighting occurs in the home of Eva's son-in-law, a Jewish doctor. That is, in an affluent, educated home where there is no real need to look back, no need for religion whose purposes have been, in Eva's and Olsen's eyes, outgrown.

"O Yes," the only other Olsen story mentioning Jewishness even obliquely supports this analysis of Olsen's religious attitudes. That story celebrated the Negro church as a place where oppressed Negroes release pent up emotion and "the preaching finding lodgment in their hearts." When her daughter Carol becomes hysterical because of all the intense feeling in the church, Helen thinks of explaining that emotion is "a characteristic of the religion of all oppressed peoples, yes your very own great-grandparents." Traditional religion as a resource, a rock for oppressed people is affirmed, but only as a stage along the way. This is Olsen's overt message. Interestingly, however, at the end of "O Yes" Helen is unable to explain the cruelty and suffering of the world to Carol and feels her own emptiness: "her own need leapt and plunged for the place of strength that was not." What Helen is missing is the warmth and comfort of the church "where one could scream or sorrow while all knew and accepted, and gloved and loving hands waited to support and understand." The Negro church and the religion of her grandparents seem equally impossible solutions.

III

"We are the injured body"

A section of Silences ends with the words, "We are the injured body. Let us not desert one another." Throughout her work Olsen expresses the ways people are psychologically as well as physically thwarted and diminished through bodily images. In her earliest, rather obvious polemical poetry, she denounces capitalist exploitation by envisioning the effects on the workers' bodies. Here the body, standing for the whole self, is destroyed in various ways; in particular, the poor workers' bodies are consumed by the rich.

In "I Want You Women Up North to Know," [the poem appeared in The Partisan, (March 1934), 4, under the name I. Lerner] the seamstresses' bodies are stitched into the garments bought by the wealthy. The dainty dresses that the poor women sew are "dyed in blood," stitched in wasting flesh; "bodies shrivel" in "parching heat." Skeletons and starved children abound. Parallel examples of exploitation and bodily disfigurement and consumption are portrayed: women reduced to prostitution and venereal disease, and an injured male worker "remembering a leg, and twenty-five years cut off from his life by the railroad." Didactic and simplistic, the early poems divide the world into innocent victims whose bodies are eaten, and wicked victimizers with fat, bloated bodies.

The novel Yonnondio, also begun in the thirties, evokes a similar vision of the world and employs similar body imagery. In the first chapter the nameless narrator mourns the waste of a young boy's life as he enters the coal mines and contrasts the "skeletons of starved children" with the "fat bellies" of the capitalists. Later in the novel when the Holbrook family loses their farm despite their unceasing work, the politicians are seen as vultures, and the father, Jim Holbrook, says that the banks "batten on us like hogs."

Olsen also uses two body images to integrate major sections of the novel and to establish parallels and contrasts between the two sections. The opening section (part of which was first published under the title "The Iron Throat") is dominated by an image of the mine as the "earth's intestines," as a place where the earth "sucks you in." The climax of the terror comes when an insane miner (a victim turned into a crazed victimizer) attempts to throw a child, Mazie Holbrook, into the mine: the miner imagines the mine as a ravenous woman "hungry for a child" to devour. The very fact that the miner sees woman as devourer rather than nurturer demonstrates the extremity of his condition, a result of the economic and social conditions in general.

The third major section of Yonnondio, like the opening one, is dominated by a nightmare body image: the packing house is a monstrous heart, which, rather than pumping healthy blood, pumps "the men and women who are the streets' lifeblood, nourishing the taverns and brothels and rheumy-eyes stores, bulging out the soiled and exhausted houses, and multiplying into these children playing so mirthlessly in their street yards where flower only lampposts."

In the stories the human condition is not seen in such dichotomous terms--victims and victimizers--but the same body and eating imagery abounds, developed in subtler, more complex ways. In these stories Olsen often uses eating as symbolic of a character's sense of self and world, as the link between the individual and the universe. Eating is a clear indication of a character's psychic state, and healthy eating indicates a sense of total well-being, an at-homeness in the universe.

Eating is significant because to eat is to assert and fulfill the claims of the self. Eating also means taking a part of the world, making it part of the self, absorbing part of the world. In Olsen's work the eating process reflects the ultimate mystery of life and death and an awareness that humans kill other living organisms in order to survive. For Olsen the proper response to the plant or animal sacrifice necessary to human life is a kind of reverence or natural piety. Her characters express this natural piety by eating, not to become bloated, but in order to grow and produce and, in turn, nourish others: they eat so that they can feed others.

In "I Stand Here Ironing" the daughter Emily's thinness, her early inability to eat, and her subsequent ravenous appetite all suggests her lack of nourishment on every level. Although the narrator/mother remembers the "sleek" young society women who raise money for an institution where children like Emily wear "gigantic red bows and ravaged looks", it is not just the fat bellies who cause Emily's thinness. Sent to an institution to gain weight by a well-meaning mother and social worker, Emily returns thin and stays thin. As her mother tells it, "Food sickened her, and I think much of life too."

Here the problems are not all solvable by eliminating the vultures of the earth. Emily's hunger and subsequent legendary appetite have many causes, including her mother's youth and anxiety, her father's cowardice and withdrawal, her own slowness and darkness in a world that prizes quickness and blondness. Her hunger also has one surprisingly positive effect: out of her despair, expressed by both her early thinness and later insatiable appetite, she develops a gift, the art of comic mimicry. And while the memory of a heartless teacher who belittled Emily for her fear has "curdled" in the mother's memory, the mother refuses to see Emily as doomed or as passive victim--a dress "helpless before the iron."

"Hey Sailor, What Ship?" also interweaves body and eating imagery into its texture in important ways. Some of the imagery reflects the social/political concerns of the earlier work. For Lennie, Whitey is a tie to "a world in which men had not eaten each other." One of the memories Whitey tries to drown in liquor is the time of brotherhood when "whoever came off the ship fat shared." Now part of Whitey's problem with authority on the ship stems from his complaint about "rotten feed"--symbolic of the exploitation of the workers.

Whitey's present failing condition is also given digestive terms: he hardly eats, and he drinks not to nourish himself, but to poison himself. The key to his woes also seems bodily: he cannot have sex unless he is drunk. And now he also drinks because there are "memories to forget, dreams to be stifled, hopes to be murdered." His body expresses his estrangement from himself and the world; now he has a "decaying body, the body that was betraying him." His desperate attempt to connect with Lennie and Helen and their children, who represent not only family but also his memories, his earlier self, and a hopeful future, is symbolized by his attempt to provide and share a meal with them, a communion through shared food.

In "Tell Me a Riddle," the deepest hungers are embodied, hungers of every kind. In Russia, Eva and David experienced physical hunger as well as hunger for learning, for holy knowledge. In America they had hungry children and hungry souls--hungry for beauty, meaning, sense of purpose, and progress. As the story progresses, Eva wastes away, consumed by cancer until the final day when the "agony was perpetual." Still she refuses to give up the dream of fulfilled human life which is embodied in the old Russian revolutionary song she continues to sing. At the climax of the song, which is interrupted by a "long strangling cough," her husband suddenly awakens from his years-long sleep and self-blindness: "Without warning, the bereavement and betrayal he had sheltered . . . revealed itself,/uncoiled,/releases,/sprung/and with it the monstrous shapes of what he had actually happened in the century." His reaction is immediate and "Olsenian": "ravening hunger or thirst seized him."

Despite the bitterness, recriminations, rage, and disappointment, Eva and David and their love finally triumph. On her last night and in Jeannie's picture they are holding hands: "their hands, his and hers, clasped, feeding each other." The image of love as mutual nourishment, as two people feeding each other, is the antithesis of and the "answer" to the earlier vision of a world of eaters and eaten. And this image of mutual nourishment is linked to another: David looks at Jeannie's art, her drawing of Eva and himself "and as if he had been instructed he went to his bed, lay down, holding the sketch (as if it would shield against the monstrous shapes of loss, of betrayal, of death) and with his free hand took hers [Eva's] back into his." Their life, their love, their humanity nourish Jeannie's art, which in turn, nourishes and instructs their life: life and art feed each other.

Silences is about artists' failure to produce because of inadequate nourishment: here Olsen analyzes the multiple causes that produce silence--all the nagging hungers that thwart productivity. The hunger/feeding metaphor is pursued insistently at every level. In the very acknowledgments of the book Olsen mentions earth, air, and others as "sustenance" for her own efforts. The major theme of her long afterword to Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills is Davis's hunger to make use of herself and her powers, her hunger to give and produce. Olsen explores the many kinds of hunger in Davis's life and the lives of her characters, whose miserable circumstances meant soul starvation. As Davis identifies with her characters, so Olsen identifies with Davis, especially her "hunger to know."

Repeatedly Olsen blames unsatisfied hunger for non-productivity. Analyzing Katherine Anne Porter's long delay in finishing Ship of Fools, Olsen observes that "subterranean forces" need feeding: "before they will feed the creator back they must be fed, passionately fed." Similarly, Olsen describes the destruction of her own powers as a failure in the necessary mutual feeding of art and life: "So long they feed each other--my life, the writing--;--the writing or hope of it, my life--; but now they begin to destroy;."

IV

"Mama Mama you must help carry the world"

Mothers and children are at the heart of almost every Olsen work. The child embodies man's potential greatness and his needy vulnerability. The degree to which adults can mother and nurture children is frequently a sign of their own psychic condition. Because the link between the individual family and the family of man everywhere penetrates Olsen's work, her focus on the nuclear family does not seem narrow or claustrophobic.

In Yonnondio Olsen repeatedly uses the word "baby" to suggest beauty and tenderness. Mazie feels a breeze as "soft, like the baby laughin." Gorgeous colors of fire seem to her "like babies' tongues reaching out to you." The healing beauty of the baby-tongued fire melts "the hard swollen lump of tears" into a "swell of wonder and awe." And when the Holbrooks escape from the coal mines, "the sun laid warm hands on their bodies" and "the air was pure and soft like a baby's skin."

Erina, the epileptic, crippled child from an impoverished, brutalized, and brutalizing family, symbolizes the most humiliated, abused humanity: the child or human as innocent sufferer. The horror of Erina's life is most movingly evoked through her linguistic errors. In the author's brilliant use of children's linguistic errors and connections, Yonnondio resembles another Thirties novel, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. But while the confusion of Roth's David Schearl about the ordinary coal and the coal which purified Isaiah's lips is central to a redemptive vision, Olsen's two most memorable uses of this technique are unequivocally pathetic. Olsen first uses the technique early in the novel when Mazie confuses the word "operator" with the idea of a surgical operation and cannot understand how the privileged coal operator "cut up a mine." In the reader's mind the error is suggestive, for the coal operator does indeed cut up the land and the miners themselves. The later use of the device is much more chilling. The monstrous distortions of her life have taught Erina, a most Dostoevskian character, to interpret the Biblical line, "suffer the children," as "the children suffer." Erina's twisting of the meaning of the word suffer from "allow" into "bear painfully" perfectly embodies Olsen's outraged sense of the world's derangement. It is worth noting that even Erina is not totally reduced to inhumanity. On her way home, "where she will be beaten," she sees a bird "bathing itself, fluttering its wings in delight." Erina feels in herself "the shining, the fluttering happiness" and for a few minutes walks "in the fluttering shining and the peace."

Erina is the novel's deepest and most frightening image of human suffering; Bess, the Holbrook baby, represents human possibility and power. In the midst of an oppressive heat wave, Bess, while playing with a fruit-jar lid, discovers her powers: "Lightning in her brain." the novel celebrates her coming to consciousness: "Centuries of human drive work in her; human ecstasy of achievement; satisfaction deep and fundamental as sex: I can do, I use my powers; I! I!" With her "eternal dream look" Bess is the promise, the possibility.

In "I Stand Here Ironing," the mother speaks of Emily as a tender young plant, bemoans the fact that Emily never had "the soil of easy growth," and concludes that "all that is in her will not bloom." She also remembers Emily's miraculous capacity for learning and delight when she was a baby and trusts that "there is enough left to live by." Similarly, the uncollected story "Requa" suggests that early damage can be overcome, that a hurt, withdrawn child can be reclaimed, that later care can revive a wilting plant.

In "Hey Sailor" Whitey's sense of loss, of his lost past and empty future, is most acute when he touches his friends' children: "It is destroying, dissolving him utterly, this helpless warmth against him, this feel of a child--lost country to him and unattainable." Even more terrible to him is the general horror: "The begging children and the lost, the thieving children and the children who were sold." The relative financial and emotional security of Lennie and Helen's home coupled with their sympathy and moral sense will help to bring their children to fruition, but the reality of other children's lost and wasted lives is not forgotten, never forgiven.

In several of her stories Olsen focuses more on the mother and nurturing process than on the child. In particular, "O Yes" is a story of mothering, especially the moral and emotional aspects. Two women "mother" Carol. Parry's mother Alva tries to teach Carol about the meaning of their release and ecstasy in church, and Helen tries to ease Carol through the "long baptism into the seas of humankind." Alva's classic death and rebirth dream-memory embodies several mother/child relationships. A small boy leads Alva on her journey; in order to ascend, Alva needs her own mother's hands, and the final injunction to Alva as mother completes the journey. The child leads the mother whose journey is helped by her own mother and who is enjoined as mother to "help carry the world." Nurturing is thus the road and the rule.

In Silences Olsen describes motherhood as both the "core of woman's oppression" and her "transport as woman." This dual description of motherhood is most vividly embodied in "Tell Me a Riddle," which brilliantly evokes the complexity and depth of the mother/child relationship, as well as the wisdom and richness that motherhood has brought to this aging mother and grandmother.

Eva looks back at her youthful mothering and remembers the poverty and want, the "old humiliations and terrors," and the "endless defeating battles" of housekeeping. Part of her bitterness is about the poverty, and part is directed at her husband who never thought of her needs, never helped at home, never stayed with the children so that she could have some life outside the home.

But her memory is not just of the chafing limitations but also "the love--the passion of tending" that had "risen with the need like a torrent." Eva has now lived through that period: "the need was done." Unlike more limited, traditional women suffering from the empty nest syndrome, she is sure there is more: "Somewhere an older power that beat for life."

Eva is characterized as more than just a biological mother of a large family; she is also a woman concerned since her youth about developing human potential. When she first sees the Pacific Ocean, she looks "toward the shore that nurtured life as it first crawled toward consciousness the millions of years ago." As biological and symbolic mother, Eva looks back at her own family history and at human history, especially the history of life in this century. She sees the revolutionary dreams and the monstrous facts, including millions with "no graves--save air," the holocaust victims. As the seashore reminds Eva of the developing human infant, the aged, including her pathetic friend Mrs. Mays, suggest the terrible waste, the incompletion. The unfulfilled aged suggest that the overall direction may not be higher consciousness but rather destruction and self-destruction: "Everywhere unused the life. . . . Century after century still all in us not to grow."

V

"A song, a poem of itself--the world itself a dirge"

Directly, as in the early poetry, and indirectly, as in Eva's dream in "Tell Me a Riddle," Olsen celebrates human potential, mourns what has been lost, and anticipates a time when the world will be changed so that human capacities will not be wasted.

"A song, a poem of itself--the word itself a dirge," these three phrases of Whitman's introductory explanatory note to his poem "Yonnodio" are emblematic of Olsen's vision and her borrowing of this title for her one and only novel is noteworthy. In Olsen's art, the song and dirge are the poles of human life: the fruit and the blight.

The dirge is not primarily a response to any natural calamity or death. This is clearest in "Tell Me a Riddle." There Eva's excruciating physical decline into death is not the deepest source of pain. In fact, her decision to experience her own death--refusing the sterile, painless, numb hospital death--is a personal triumph: she has chosen a death of her own. She stays with her family and experiences everything, including her own terrible physical pain. For her and for the reader, the deepest agony is, on the contrary, the realization of what has died prematurely in her, what through unnatural causes never flowered. For her the dirge laments what has been thwarted by circumstances--primarily poverty but also rigid sex role prescriptions. Even more than the limitations of her own life, Eva and the author mourn Eva's (and mankind's) dream of peace, freedom, education, humaneness: the fulfillment of the individual and a harmonious society. The deepest dread is the either/or that mankind faces--growth and progress or annihilation. Wasted lives, unused potential, and the threat of nuclear holocaust--this is the dirge in Olsen's work.

The song, the other pole, celebrates what mankind can experience and express. It is the possibility, the undying hope, that never totally relinquished dream. It is the part of Olsen that, in Silences, after listing the lost and ruined writers and analyzing the multiple causes of the blight, insists, "AND YET THE TREE DID--DOES BEAR FRUIT." It is embodied in Eva (with whom Olsen explicitly identifies in Silences) who continues to dream, whose continued hope keeps the dream alive and verifies its essential value and possibility: the "stained words" of her youthful dream song, stained by what the century did to kill the dream, "on her working lips came stainless."

Olsen's exploration of the dirge and song of human life reflects her experience as a Jew and as a woman. Her ideology recapitulates the radical Jewish socialist background in which she grew up; her analysis in terms of the body and the mother/child relationship reflect her deeply felt experiences as a woman. Song and dirge alike emerge from the one radical (in the sense of root, fundamental) condition: the single individual in all his vulnerability, hunger, and yearning potentialities. The uncanny bitter-sweet harmonies Olsen has created by interweaving dirge and song, by vividly depicting the sheltering of or preying upon vulnerabilities, the nurturing or starving of hungers, the fulfillment or blighting of potentials--these give her own music its intense emotional resonance, as the song and dirge merge into a luminous, all encompassing chord: "the poem of itself."
Biographical/Critical Introduction to Tillie Olsen
Source: Bonnie Lyons, "Tillie Olsen: The Writer as a Jewish Woman," in Studies in American Jewish Literature, No. 5, 1986, pp. 89-102. Reproduced by permission.

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