Tell Me a Riddle (44 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 177
ELAINE NEIL ORR
A Feminist
Spiritual Vision
I am serious about the images I make.
MIRIAM SCHAPIRO,
''Notes from a Conversation
on Art, Feminism, and Work"
The last step in this process is to leave God. I take this to
mean, in religious terms, that we have to leave the Lord
in order to find God in our brothers and sisters. We have
to give up obedience to find solidarity. We have to give
up relationships of domination, even if our role in them is
the servant's role. We have to overcome the master-
servant relationship and become one with our brothers
and sisters....
That would be a major step in the direction we have to
travel. I think what we need in order to take that step is a
new language, and feminists (both male and female) are
working hard today to develop a language that says
more clearly what it amounts to and means to leave God
for God's sake.
And so ... I ask God to make me quit of God for God's
sake. And with that I would like to close.
DOROTHEE SOELLE,
The Strength of the Weak
If spiritual Being begins in life experience, we are in the process of disclosing the truth, the light, and the way. Human beings are then responsible for all that is in us to be. We leave the God of dominion, power, and priority, for divinity that is on the journey, among the people. Dorothee Soelle, German
From
Tillie Olsen and a Feminist Spiritual Vision
(Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 167-183.
 
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feminist theologian, says we can no longer use sentences like ''Christ is the Son of God" as a departure for theology. She suggests that sentences derived from human experience, like "Mrs. Schmidt has been waiting for seventeen months for an 8-by-12 foot room in a nursing home," are more promising beginnings for religious understandings. Such a sentence, she says, "can lead us somewhere" in contemplating the nature of God.
1
Tillie Olsen's narrative and poetic texts "can lead us somewhere" in our search for truth, light, and way. Moments within the texts (words, images, metaphors) and the span of the stories themselves confront us with news of a world in which people struggle for identity and purpose. Emerging language patterns (like life/miracle/flower) are the writer's means of evoking in readers a comprehension like her own. The otherness we confront in Olsen is the depth of her longing and faith arising from abused and despised life. For readers instilled with a theological sense of our helplessness and God's supreme power, the notion that human care and community may be the locus for the world's and divine's recreation is alien indeed.
Reading Olsen with a religious interest, we come to ask why it is that for so long we have needed God to be separate from us. Why have we needed to deny change and to fear a humane world? Why do we prefer destruction, and why do we use God as a reason for it? In a vision of life that supposes the expansion of Being in human becoming, we begin to wonder why it has been assumed that divinity is diminished in human contexts. In other words, reading a woman writer like Tillie Olsen religiously accomplishes a major task in the present work of feminist theologians. It allows us to make "the mysterious turn" to an entirely different way of thinking about holiness and redemption, about beauty and salvation. Olsen's body of work is a source of new thinking about what matters in the intertwined realms of physical and spiritual life, about what efforts are lasting.
A Metaphorical Rendering
From the perspective of Olsen's latest period, we can fruitfully reflect upon a metaphorical pattern that has developed
 
Page 179
through her writing, communicating a vision of human transformation.
2
It is telling that the metaphors are mixed, drawn from nature and human manufacture. Using the
journey
or quest motif, Olsen pictures the human search for a viable place to be, an environment or home in which one may grow and
blossom.
Inheriting an abused and broken world, people search the past and their environment to discover what inheritances may nurture life. The yields of the search, like the members of the community, are
threads of a whole
to be woven or
pieced
together in a pattern of humane coexistence. Thus, full human being, like a quilt or a mosaic, is envisioned as a coherent and patterned search for truths faithful to human needs and visions and leading to actions that elicit mutual well-being and wholeness. Like Nelle Morton, who writes in a different mode, Tillie Olsen shows that ''the journey is home."
3
Not ends but beginnings and makings are the goal. The way is the negotiated, not pure way of being faithful in relationship. Movements toward human unfolding and being cast light on the journey, disclosing what is essential and true "for human beings in our time."
4
Faithfulness to one's own time and circumstance, not allegiance to distant worlds, is the calling echoed in Olsen's literature.
JOURNEYING
To journey at one's will is an expression of freedom. At the same time, journeying may be a quest for freedom. The literary use of journeying as a leitmotif for human dreams and visions is standard. As reflected in a contemporary anthology such as
Myths and Motifs in Literature,
the journey or quest motif in Western literature has largely been concerned with the individual (almost always male) and "his hopes to find the Self" through "a slow process forward to a final goal (heaven) along a linear movement of time."
5
Recently, feminist scholars have begun to identify trends and patterns in the female quest, as reflected in literature by women. One such study is Carol Christ's
Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest.
6
Christ suggests the often communal nature of women's quests and the grounding of women's struggle in the historical reality of their traditional voicelessness. The pattern she discovers in
 
Page 180
women's texts, however, is by and large a radical break with the past and a mystical, futuristic naming of a new reality.
Houston A. Baker's
The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism
may offer a better parallel for understanding Olsen's use of the metaphor: ''The black writer, having attempted the journey, preserves details of his voyage in that most manifest and coherent of all cultural systemslanguage. Through his [sic] work we are allowed to witness, if not the trip itself, at least a representation of the voyage that provides some view of our emergence."
7
For Baker, the writer makes an "effort at return," which then leads to emergence. Journeys in a literature like Olsen's are the re-presentation of historical quests, which in turn spark new worlds and imaginative voyages. Out of people's past comes the way of journeying in the present. Language, then, is a kind of map, a rendering of valleys and highways, of crossroads and destinations.
A book like Nelle Morton's
The Journey Is Home
is a language map for feminist scholars. It records the way women have come in recent years (to self and other understanding and truth) and charts paths for their continued journeying. In the process of Morton's own use of the image in relation to women's lives, new or different meanings emerge. While we journey politically, historically, and geographically, we also journey spiritually. In a note at the end of her book, she writes, "Maybe 'journey' is not so much a journey ahead, or a journey into space, but a journey into presence. The farthest place on earth is a journey into the presence of the nearest person to you."
8
These sentences are evocative for literary criticism. The reading journey is one into presence, into the presence of characters and of their world, where we learn as much about ourselves as about the peopled text.
Olsen's reconstructionist vision shares a basic impulse expressed by Carol Christ in the conclusion to her book, the impulse toward integration. Olsen's use of journeying expands the possibilities for understanding the human quest by an integration of past and future, self and other, male and female. Depicting in her first fiction the quest for a better life, in later stories Olsen uses the journey to illuminate her characters' communal struggles for understanding and for a sense of meaningful participation in life.
 
Page 181
A journey bridges the first two settings of
Yonnondio.
Though there are other brief episodes of happiness in the novel, this scene (Chapter 3) is uniquely joyful, marked by singing and bodies in relationship: ''Willie slumbered against Mazie's shoulder. Ben drowsily had his head in her lap, staring into the depthless transparent green above. . . . . 'Roses love nightwinds, violets love dew, angels in heaven, know I love you.' Their voices were slow curving rhythms, slow curving sounds. Voices, rising and twining, beauty curving on rainbows of quiet sound" (38). Throughout the chapter, the emphasis is less on the passage from place to place than on the community created by the travel. The family's bodily support of one another is imagized in the twining voices. The passage suggests an understanding of human bondedness and the possibility of human cooperation.
Mazie is infused with feelings of expansion: "[She] stood up, her hands on the wagon seat, screaming with delight. The wind came over her body with a great rush of freedom" (35). A range of nature imagessnow, wind, rainbow, sunshinepoints to the characters' anticipation and wonder as they travel. The girl, in particular, senses the flow of life's energies and intuits her connection with the vast possibilities of the new geography.
Joyous, exhilarating, the journey is portrayed from Mazie's perspective as a wondrous moment, for Anna it is a hallmark of the future: "with bright eyes [she] folded and unfolded memories of past yearsplans for the years to come" (38). The family's search is for work, home, schooling, for identity and connection. In their moving, the Holbrooks express their dearest hopes: "A new life . . . in the spring" (38). Thus the journey is metaphoric of the desire for opportunity and renewal. They hope not merely for survival, but for beginning and building: "lovely things to keep, brass lamps, bright tablecloths, vines over the doors, and roses twining" (38). Things of material beauty suggest a sense of permanence and belonging, where children can ponder questions and invite their souls to wander, where relationships that offer sustenance for life can be fostered.
In the Holbrooks' journeying, two human quests are metaphorically intertwined: one, the necessary quest for sus-

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