Tell Me a Riddle (51 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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reason is the myth that motherhood is ineffable, that it is an experience so immured in nature that no one can find the words to write about it. According to this myth, mothering is something mothers intuitively know how to do but cannot explain to anyone else. This notion sets them apart from everyonetheir childless sisters, the fathers of their children, and a sterile society. The underside of the myth of ineffability says that even should a woman have the confidence and time to write about motherhood, that experience is too ordinary, narrow, and dull to interest anyone except, perhaps, mothers themselves. A third reason why mothers have not told their stories is ''the patriarchal injunction" Olsen describes in
Silences,
which tells women writers to avoid subjects belonging to the "woman's sphere," not because they are ineffable but simply because they are female. This injunction says to women, "If you are going to practice literaturea man's domain, professiondivest yourself of what might identify you as a woman" (250). Since mothering is an undeniably gendered mark of identification, women writers who want to succeed should avoid this subject at all costs.
Mothers have not fared much better as subjects. Their sons and daughters have often settled for grim or glowing stereotypes, and those stereotypes have passed for truth. As Adrienne Rich writes in
Of Woman Born,
it is "easier by far" for daughters to "hate and reject a mother outright than to see beyond her to the forces acting upon her."
2
Of course, some few writers in every generation have challenged the stereotypes. Daughters of immigrant mothers and daughters growing up in poverty have created portraits of mothers that are both loving and unstintingly honest, and are filled with grief, anger, and, sometimes, admiration. Edith Sumner Kelly's
Weeds
comes to mind, as do Agnes Smedley's
Daughter of Earth
and the novels of Anzia Yezierska. This is the tradition in which Olsen wrote her stories about mothers and mothering. But because most of these works went out of print soon after their publication and have only recently been reprinted, the tradition has been invisible to most readers.
3
A more contemporary reason for the silence by and about mothers is that feminist writers and critics disagree about the value of this subject. While many contemporary
 
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feminists share Olsen's interest, there is by no means a consensus. In a review of May Sarton's 1985 novel,
The Magnificent Spinster,
Valerie Miner reveals this uneasy split: ''For anyone dismayed by the current feminist infatuation for motherhood, it is refreshing to read a novel in which the women do stand on their own."
4
Olsen's interest in mothering can hardly be termed infatuationit is neither fleeting nor romantic yet she is determined to bring to light not only the oppression mothers have suffered but also "the yields possible in circumstanced motherhood," as she says in
Silences.
She is well aware that loving and admiring depictions of motherhood might be read as reproaches by women who have chosen to remain childless. Several years after her famous 1971 talk at the Modern Language Association Forum on Women Writers in the Twentieth Century, Olsen reflected that she barely touched the subject of the gifts mothers give, fearing that the many childless professional women in the audience would hear her remarks as one more version of the "traditional (mis)use" of the joys of motherhood "to rebuke and belittle the hard-won achievement of their lives; more of the societal coercion to conform; family as the only suitable way of life for a female" (S 202).
A stanza from "Cellar Door," a recent poem by Sue Standing which Olsen includes in
Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother,
expresses another familiar dilemma Olsen shares with other women writing about their mothers:
Her hands stained and nicked
from all the peeling, cutting, blanching-
beautiful how she touched things,
how quickly she could thread a needle.
I'm not supposed to love her for this-
smoothing our hair, sewing our clothes,
or on her knees waxing the floor.
Showing mothers' domestic work as beautiful and admirable might seem to women readers like reinforcements of limiting roles or as calls to duplicate the patterns of their mothers' lives.
Olsen's life and the content of her work stand in direct opposition to these reasons, old and new, that have made
 
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motherhood ''the least understood, the most tormentingly complex experience to wrest to truth" (S 254). Her life as a writer and working mother of four daughters contradicts the idea that mothering and writing are by their very nature mutually exclusive activities. Although she writes eloquently in
Silences
of the domestic and economic structures that limited her writing and almost prevented it altogether, she writes just as eloquently of the ways in which her life as mother gave her the substance of her work.
In almost everything she has written, Olsen delineates the distorted shape motherhood has taken in patriarchal society and critiques the cluster of beliefs about it that have been passed on as truth from generation to generation. It is part of her revolutionary work of helping to change "what will not let life be" for women. But Olsen's repudiation of patriarchal motherhood, that "last refuge of sexism," as she calls it,
5
is not in any sense a rejection of mothers or mothering. On the contrary, Olsen considers mothering one of the great untold stories of women's lives and one of the great unmined sources of literary marvels. (Unlike Rich, who uses the word
mothering
to mean the experience and
motherhood
to denote the institution, Olsen uses these words interchangeably. Only the context makes her meaning clear. I will follow Rich's usage throughout this chapter, however.) Olsen insists in
Silences
that the losses to literature and to many other fields of knowledge and endeavor have been incalculable "because comprehensions possible out of motherhood
(including,
among so much invaluable else,
the very nature, needs, illimitable potentiality of the human beingand the everyday means by which these are distorted, discouraged, limited, extinguished)
. . have had . . . to remain inchoate, fragmentary, unformulated (and alas, unvalidated)" (202). The task she has set for herself is to bring those comprehensions to "powerful, undeniable, useful expression" (202). . . .
She writes in
Silences
that "conscience and world sensibility are as natural to women as to men; men have been freer to develop and exercise them, that is all" (42). This conviction seems to have come to her. . . from her own life experiences and from knowing committed socialist women like her mother and the Bundists Seevya and Genya Gorelick, the
 
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women to whom she dedicates ''Tell Me a Riddle." This is the story in which a mother's "world sensibility" is most evident, and it seems to be more than coincidence that Olsen began writing it in 1955-56, the year in which all three women died.
6
Olsen found in them and in her own life the combination of experiences that do lead mothers to political consciousness and a commitment to change that reaches far beyond their own families. That combination includes early political involvement, wide reading, and a knowledge of history. In several of her characters, most notably Eva in "Tell Me a Riddle," Olsen brings to "useful expression" a mother's world consciousness.
Finally, Olsen understands well the chasms that exist between mothers and their daughters, and between women who are mothers and those who are not. Yet her work reveals her belief that only full and honest remembering, neither distorted by bitterness nor softened by nostalgia, can bridge those chasms. One of the ways in which Olsen accomplishes this many-faceted task is by embodying in three complex sets of images a blight-fruit-possibility paradigm. Specifically, she uses three constellations of images, centering on hunger, stone, and flood, to describe the blighted circumstances of mothers' lives, to express wonder at the fruit of endurance and beauty their lives have borne, and to sketch the joyful possibilities that mothering could hold for women and for the world. But Olsen transforms these three sets of images into one another with the logic of poetry or dream, setting up echoes and oppositions both within and between works. In the discussion that follows, I will try to show what these image patterns mean and, at the same time, follow their intertwined, shifting course through Olsen's work.
The first of these image patterns revolves around hunger and food. In everything Olsen has writtenher poetry, fiction, essaysshe uses the language of eating, of feast and famine, of nurturing and starvation, of fat bellies and skeleton children to show a blighted world. In several worksmost notably
Yonnondiohunger
is a literal fact of life, the obvious result of chronic, institutionalized poverty; but in every work, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual hungers gnaw even at those characters who are well fed.
 
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The images of food and eating also suggest that life is meant to be a banquet in a plentiful, generous world. In a world of possibility, feeding is an expression of gracious and generous nurturance in an interlocking human and natural ecology; and hungers for food, justice, knowledge, and beauty are all part of the healthy reaching out to life. Even the dead become nourishment for the living. But, at least on the surface, that is not the world of Olsen's stories. She shows us instead a world where to survive one must take food from others. Hunger, of necessity, becomes savagery; food snatched from others and hastily devoured is tasteless; and nourishment given binds people to each other through unending need.
Although Olsen is concerned with all hungry people, the hungers of mothers and children preoccupy her most. Even one of her earliest poems, ''I Want You Women Up North to Know," is filled with the familiar images of starving mothers and their children. There is Catalina Rodriguez, age twentyfour, her "body shrivelled to a child's at twelve, / and her cough, gay, quick, staccato, / like a skeleton's bones clattering"; and Catalina Torres, who "to keep the starved body starving, embroiders from dawn to / night," spurred on by "the pinched faces of four huddled / children / the naked bodies of four bony children, / the chant of their chorale of hunger."
7
Yonnondio
picks up these images of physical deprivation, showing impoverished mothers and their families living in a world that feeds on them instead of providing nourishment. Through Olsen's multiple vision we see both men and women caught in poverty; this same vision, however, shows us the further devastation suffered by poor women, as the additional overlay of sexism leads husbands to feed off their wives and forces mothers and children to devour each other's substance . . .
In "Tell Me a Riddle," Olsen shows even more clearly than in
Yonnondio
the grotesque shape of motherhood in the patriarchy and the immense cost of the institution to mother and children. Again, she totals up the cost by filling this story with the language of starvation, feeding, and eating. Eva, the central character, is a grandmother, with her years of pregnancy and child rearing far behind her. Yet in describing her, Olsen uses images that suggest both pregnancy and starva-

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