used, she reflects the human moral choice to bring need into alignment with resource. From this perspective, we conclude politically and religiously that an imbalance or nonalignment of goods and people is evil, and that in regaining the original holiness/wholeness and promise of the universe, we are responsible to right such imbalance.
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Stevie's rebirth is elicited by sustained use of piecing imagery. Acts leading to wholenessbringing parts together, teaching a skill, meeting human needsare the seeds of holiness. Because individual human wholeness cannot be fully and timelessly achieved, the human community must impart wholeness, offering the individual a place in the pattern of life. Moving from the domestic sphere to the contexts of industry and technological waste, Olsen universalizes the metaphor, making clear her vision of redemption as the historical and material reconstruction of beauty and health out of waste and brokenness.
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The metaphor of piecing contributes to the moral vision Olsen describes in her interviews and talks. Her first sentence is structurally parallel with Anna's thought (what can be saved, what cannot) in these remarks: ''Our situation . . . is: what do we keep, what do we discard. What is going backward, what narrows us, limits us, makes us too liable to hatreds, bigotries, closing off, not recognizing what the central enemy is, where our allies lie, where our common humanity lies." 22
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Olsen's view of intergenerational responsibility may also be interpreted in terms of"piecing." She understands that the dreams and struggles of revolutionaries form the basis, indeed are the beginnings, of our present struggle, knowledge, and hope. 23 Like Will's coat converted from Mazie's, such an attitude suggests that we inherit possibilities and hopes from the previous generation. Our task is to sort, discard, and piece, to find what is fitting for a life of commitment to human unfolding, and out of our inheritance, to weave a garment for today.
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Women have long been needleworkers. They have designed their art for beauty and warmth. Piecing images, Olsen is a word worker, a designer of life in fiction, poetry, and report. Like earlier women workers, she starts with what is
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