Silences (3 page)

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 Yourself,
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).