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| | The fingers stroked, spun a web, cocooned Mazie into happiness and intactness and selfness. Soft wove the bliss round hurt and fear and want and shamethe old worn fragile bliss, a new frail selfness bliss, healing, transforming. Up from the grasses, from the earth, from the broad tree trunk at their back, latent life streamed and seeded. (119)
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The transformation here is not the political conversion that was to have taken place later, but one based on human love, on the capacity to respond to beauty, and on the premise of a regenerative life cycle of which mother and daughter are a part.
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To be sure, Olsen wanted to weave this emphasis on ''selfness," and this image of a regenerative life cycle that prefigures, but does not itself constitute, social and economic regeneration into a larger structure that would incorporate both personal and political transformation. Yet the hope Yonnondio offers most persuasively, through its characterizations, its images and events, and its present conclusion, is less a vision of political and economic revolution than an assertion that the drive to love and achieve and create will survive somehow in spite of the social forces arraigned against it, because each new human being is born with it afresh.
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It is with this "humanistic" rather than "Marxist" optimism that the novel now ends. In the midst of a stifling heat wave, Baby Bess suddenly realizes her own ability to have an effect on the world when she makes the connection between her manipulations of the lid of a jam jar and the noise it produces, so that her random motions become, for the first time, purposeful: "Bang, slam, whack. Release, grab, slam, bang, bang. Centuries of human drive work in her; human ecstasy of achievement; a satisfaction deep and fundamental as sex: I can do, I use my power; I! I!" (153). And her mother and sister and brothers laugh, in spite of the awesome heat, the rising dust storms. Then for the first time the family listens to the radio on a borrowed set, and Mazie is awed at the magic, "transparent meshes of sound, far sound, human and stellar, pulsing, pulsing" (153). This moment of empowerment and connection is linked to the revolutionary vision, and Anna's final, "The air's changin', Jim. I see for it [the heat wave] to
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