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different ways poverty has affected the man and the woman. David longs to be free from responsibility and fretting about money, so that he can use ''the vitality still in him"; Eva, remembering the desperation and humiliation of years of making do with remade clothes and begged meat bones, vows to "let him wrack his head for how they would live," for she "would not exchange her solitude for anything." "Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others" is a refrain echoing through the text. David longs to be surrounded by friends; Eva longs only to be left alone. The years of struggle to keep her family fed and clothed have transformed her capacity for engagement in the lives of others into its obverse: the terrible need for solitude, for "reconciled peace."
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When Eva falls ill, and the illness turns out to be terminal cancer, David finds himself compelled to become a caretaker himself. Concealing the seriousness of Eva's condition from her, but fearing to stay home alone with her in her dying, he takes her on a pilgrimage, first to visit a daughter and her family in Ohio, and then to Venice, California, which in those years was home to a community of older, working-class Jews. As her condition deteriorates, Eva becomes delirious, pouring out fragments of poetry and song from her youth. Tended in her illness not only by David but by her granddaughter, Jeannie, a nurse, Eva passes on to Jeannie the legacy of her earlier years. It is crucial to the way "Riddle" works as art that Olsen reveals the dimensions of that legacy only gradually; only gradually do we realize that this grouchy, sick grandmother, this silent bitter woman who wants only solitude, was once an orator in the 1905 revolution, that she and her husband met in the prison camps of Siberia, that she had once publicly articulated a passionate vision of human possibility and human liberty. Through this narrative strategy, Olsen suggests the tragic dimensions of social silencings: those imposed upon working class people by physical and intellectual deprivation, isolation, and routinized work; and those imposed upon women by role-related demands and patriarchal ideologies antagonistic to the act of creative articulation. Read this way, Eva's final utterances in "Tell Me a Riddle," her coming to speech again at last, become an act of resistance and creation, both cathartic and political.
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