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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 208
thought: ''(Shameful the joy, the pure overwhelming joy from being with her grandmother; the peace, the serenity that breathed.)" Thus is the midwife paid.
15
As for Eva herself, has she reached her goal by the time she dies? We have only Jeannie's report: "On the last day, she said she would go back to when she first heard music, a little girl on the road of the village where she was born. She promised me. It is a wedding and they dance, while the flutes so joyous and vibrant tremble in the air." Vibrant flutesthis is not the way Eva remembered the scene earlier:
"a bare-footed sore-covered little girl . . . danced her ecstasy of grimace to flutes that scratched at a cross-roads village wedding."
Therefore, if Jeannie has repeated her grandmother's words accurately, it may be that Eva has indeed seen through to the truth.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
We can follow Eva no farther towards her wished-for reunion.
Tolstoy lets us experience the fulfillment. When Ivan Ilych realizes that his life has been false, his task is almost completed, though he does not yet know it. He has not only broken down the past, he appears to have emptied himself of any identity at all. He is like an empty vessel, waiting to be filled. And he is filled, with light and with joy. His rebirth occurs just as his pathetic little son comes into the room, takes up his hand, and, weeping, kisses it.
People have offered theological, psychological, and something like scientific interpretations of such a phenomenon. For Tolstoy, the theological, as understood in the Western world, is paramount. Ivan Ilych is rewarded with peace at that moment when he asks for forgiveness from God. Suddenly, "there was no fear because there was no death." This cannot mean that there is no dying, for Ivan Ilych goes on immediately to die, but that because of faith, death has no sting, the grave no victory.
16
His pain too is still real, but now just a given, and no longer a reminder of his absurdity: "'Let the pain be."' Therefore, he is infused with light and joy. Psychologically, Ivan Ilych changes at the moment when he sees oth-
 
Page 209
ers as real. He feels his son's pain, and later his wife's, and he is relieved of the burden of himself. The result is light and joy. Using the methods of the social sciences, the authors of two recent books have concluded that, whether for physiological reasons or others, many dying people do in fact report seeing light, feeling joy, and going gladly.
17
Much mystery remains. Fortunately, I am obliged to pick up only one small part of it. I have tried to establish that Olsen's and Tolstoy's literary styles parallel the lifestyles of their main charactersloose, personal, and fragmented in the first case; tight, social, and linear in the secondand that, to die happily, the characters must at least partially revise the authors. If I am right, why does this revolt of character against creator happen? It is possible, though unlikely in these cases, that the authors intend it. So the unconscious gapes. I cannot believe that the revolt is due to the authors' unconscious selfhatred, wherein they are punished by their very own creatures. In fact, something healthy may be going on. Here is how my thinking runs: These authors are enormously successful. But success tends to reinforce past methods, and the method that succeeds sooner or later becomes the method that limits. Maybe the unconscious minds of these two deeply creative writers have allowed their characters to break down old forms, not in revolt but in exploration of new possibilities for Tolstoy and Olsen. If so, the pattern is recognizable. It is that type of death labor we call evolution.
Notes
1. I have used the Louise and Alymer Maude translation of Leo Tolstoy's 1886 novella
The Death of Ivan Ilych,
in
The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories
(New York: New American Library/Signet, 1960), 95-156. Tillie Olsen's story ''Tell Me a Riddle" was first collected in
Tell Me a Riddle
(New York: Dell, 1961), 63-116. All subsequent quotations are from these editions.
2. She is only sixty-nine, an age our society no longer considers old, but that is how Olsen conceives of her. In Tillie Olsen's
Silences
(New York: Dell, 1983), 58, she makes a reference to the character as "old mother, grandmother."
 
Page 210
3. E.g., Harry Stack Sullivan and Kurt Lewin.
4. Like several others in the story, this phrase is italicized as if to underscore meaning seized on the run.
5. Olsen,
Silences,
58.
6. ''Outsider" is Virginia Woolf's term in
Three Guineas
(1938), a feminist volume that Olsen frequently cites in public lectures and private conversations.
7. D. H. Lawrence developed this concept throughout his work. See, e.g., his letter to Ernest Collings (17 January 1913) in
The Portable D. H. Lawrence
(New York: Viking, 1947), 563: "My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect."
8. "Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted": a phrase from E. M. Forster's novel,
Howard's End
(1910), and used, in part, as its epigraph.
9. In the sense defined by Ralph Freedman in his influential study,
The Lyrical Novel: Studies in Hermann Hesse, André Gide, and Virginia Woolf
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963); that is, a fiction that emphasizes personal experience as revealed through poetic methods more than strictly narrative forms.
10. The clarity that derives from Tolstoy's fervent Christianity.
11. Olsen,
Silences,
268.
12. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross,
On Death and Dying
(New York: Macmillan, 1970).
13. Eva's first physician misses the diagnosis, but this serves an aesthetic rather than moral goal in that it allows Olsen to observe what I have termed Eva's "Laurentian" behavior while the cancer is still unknown to her intellect.
14. It may be helpful to see their methods as Rogerian. Carl R. Rogers, who believed that the good therapeutic relationship was paradigmatic of any good interpersonal activity-and that the object of both was to help others become persons-outlined three conditions for the helper. He or she was to be "congruent" (i.e., genuine), to have "unconditional positive regard" for the client, and to evince "accurate empathy." See "The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change,"
Journal of Consulting Psychology
21 (1957): 95-103.
15. Cf. Mary de Santis, the private duty nurse in Patrick White's novel,
The Eye of the Storm
(New York: Viking, 1974), for
 
Page 211
whom the care of an elderly, disintegrating woman is a religious experience.
16. I Corinthians 15:55 (KJV).
17. Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson,
At the Hour of Death,
rev. ed. (New York: Hastings House, 1986); and Raymond A. Moody, Jr.,
Life After Life
(New York: Bantam Books, 1976). Cancer, or any lingering terminal illness, provides time for this kind of death labor, but Moody accumulates evidence that the same process, much condensed, also occurs in some traumatic near-death experiences.
 
Page 213
MARA FAULKNER
Motherhood as Source and
Silencer of Creativity
From one of her earliest pieces of writing-''I Want You Women Up North to Know" (1934)to one of her most re
centMother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother
(1984)Tillie Olsen has been passionately interested in mothers as writers and as subjects of literature. Motherhood as both source and silencer of creativity is one of Olsen's main themes, and she has spent her life rescuing mothers from silence, inarticulate awe, distortion, and sentimentality.
In her afterword to
Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother,
Olsen says that even in this book about mothers, "least present is work written by mothers themselves. Whatever the differences now (including literacy, small families), for too many of the old, old reasons, few mothers while in the everyday welter of motherhood life, or after, are writing it. That everyday welter, the sense of its troublous context, the voice of the mother herself, are the largest absences in this book. And elsewhere" (275- 76).
1
It does not take much imagination to discover what the "old, old reasons" are. One reason mothers have not written their stories is that women have been told, blatantly or subtly, that they must choose between motherhood and other creative work, including writing. (Olsen lists in
Silences
the many women writers who were childless, some by choice, many because they were convinced they had no choice.) Another old
From
Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 35-63. Condensed with the permission of the author.

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