Tell Me a Riddle (56 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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the queerness of people.'' For Olsen, literal and figurative images of hunger express the healthy, essential needs of every part of the human psyche and of the human community, becoming a wedding of body and spirit and a powerful force drawing people out of isolation toward each other.
The logic of Olsen's imagistic connections between hunger and mothering raises a further question: What would mothering look like if it were not maimed by the "sex-classrace world" in which it now exists? I believe Olsen's answer is exactly the same as the answer to the same question about hunger: mothering could be,
can
be healthy, generous, curious, eager for connections, even rapturous. Olsen's language again suggests possibilities of both starvation and plenty. Eva calls her children
morsels.
Suggesting something small, fragile, and tasty, this word holds both potential menace and tenderness. David says to Eva, "You are the one who always used to say: better mankind born without mouths and stomachs than always to worry for money to buy, to shop, to fix, to cook, to wash, to clean." Eva's answer"How cleverly you hid that you heard. I said it then because eighteen hours a day I ran. And you never scraped a carrot or knew a dish towel sops"reveals that she was not renouncing hungry people or the task of feeding them but rather the unspoken rules of the patriarchal family.
David calls Eva "a woman of honey," meaning, of course, the opposite; Eva concurs with his opinion of her, thinking during an argument, "(Vinegar he poured on me all his life; I am well marinated; how can I be honey now?)." This exchange would seem to reinforce the image of Eva as food, and bitter food at that, but Olsen gives neither David nor Eva the last word. As she often does, here she uses David's ironical epithet to tell some deeper truth about Eva, . . . whose wisdom she wants her readers to taste, and find nourishing and even delicious.
Another important passage linking mothering and hunger goes even further in suggesting possible yields. It is the famous one in which Eva tries to explain to herself why she cannot hold her grandson: "Immediacy to embrace, and the breath of
that
past: warm flesh like this that had claims and nuzzled away all else and with lovely mouths devoured; hot-
 
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living like an animalintensely and now; the turning maze; the long drunkenness; the drowning into needing and being needed.'' Eva uses similar words to describe her daughter Vivi, caught in "the maze of the long, the lovely drunkenness" of mothering. With some justification, critics have described this passage on mother love as "violent" and the language that of addiction or even cannibalism.
17
I propose a parallelor perhaps subterraneaninterpretation, suggested by words like
intensely, maze, lovely drunkenness,
and
drowning,
all of which say that mothering can be an ecstatic experience having much in common with intense creative and communal activity. Olsen creates here something far more interesting than a new version of the cliché that turns mothering into a metaphor for the creative process. Instead, she suggests that mothering is one of many analogous human experiences that involve one wholly, dissolving tight boundaries and sweeping one into "the seas of humankind." Because of their power, such experiences are both dangerous challenges and exhilarating adventures; they threaten annihilation and at the same time promise fullness of life.
The images Olsen uses for all these experiencesthe flood, the high tide, the powerful underground riverseem to have come to her early from the 1934 San Francisco longshoremen's strike. At any rate, they appear for the first time in "The Strike," her account of that event. The longshoremen are a river "streaming ceaselessly up and down, a river that sometimes raged into a flood, surging over the wavering shoreline of police, battering into the piers and sucking under the scabs in its angry tides. HELL CAN'T STOP US. . . . That was the meaning of the seamen and the oilers and the wipers and the mastermates and the pilots and the scalers torrenting into the river, widening into the sea."
18
Flood images almost disappear in the landlocked heat of
Yonnondio;
we hear them only briefly in Anna's songs"Oh Shenandoah I love your daughter / I'll bring her safe through stormy water," and "I saw a ship a sailing / And on that ship was me." They reappear more than twenty years later in the stories collected in
Tell Me a Riddle
and later still in
Silences.
I suspect that the expanded meaning of this imagery in later works reflects what twenty years as mother and writer taught Olsen about the hidden
 
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emotional similarities among seemingly disparate experiences. Several passages that use flood images to characterize such experiences will show what those lessons were.
In ''O Yes," innumerable images of drowning and baptism mingle with each other to describe Carol's experience of being drawn into black religious experience and into caring for lives other than her own. The church choir sings:
Wade,
Sea of trouble all mingled with fire
Come on my brethren it's time to go higher
Wade wade
(R 57)
Carol tries to separate herself from the explosive pain and joy of the black congregation by focusing on "a little Jesus walk[ing] on wondrously blue waters to where bearded disciples spread nets out of a fishing boat." But the voices sweep over her "in great humming waves" and she feels herself drowning into "the deep cool green": "And now the rhinestones in Parry's hair glitter wicked; the white hands of the ushers, fanning, foam in the air; the blue-painted waters of Jordan swell and thunder; Christ spirals on his cross in the windowand she is drowned under the sluice of the slow singing and the sway" (57-58).
A passage from "Tell Me a Riddle" picks up similar images of flood and drowning to describe Eva's experience of mothering: "It was not that she had not loved her babies, her children. The lovethe passion of tendinghad risen with the need like a torrent; and like a torrent drowned and immolated all else" (92). Olsen then describes Eva's early revolutionary spirit and the new tasks she believes old age holds for her; the flood imagery declares the commonalities between these three phases of Eva's life: "On that torrent she had borne [her children] on their own lives, and the riverbed was desert long years now. Not there would she dwell, a memoried wraith. Surely that was not all, surely there was more. Still the springs, the springs were in her seeking. Somewhere an older power that beat for life. Somewhere coherence, transport, meaning" (92-93).
 
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Finally, Olsen echoes both ''O Yes" and "Tell Me a Riddle" when she describes in
Silences
the experience of writing and how it feels when writing has to be deferred. For her and for the writers she quotes (James, Woolf, Gide, Kafka), writing is
"rapture;
the saving comfort; the joyous energies, pride, love, audacity, reverence wrestling with the angel, Art" (173). She describes the many times in her life when she had to "leave work at the flood to return to the Time-Master, to business-ese and legalese" (21).
In using this flood imagery to forge links between mothering and other absorbing, creative work, Olsen obviously is not repeating the "moldy theory" that all women must be biological mothers in order to claim their womanhood (S 16); nor does she mean that mothering can or should absorb a woman's whole life. Finally, she is not bitterly or ironically setting mothering alongside political action, religious experience, or writing only to reveal by contrast its dull passivity. On the contrary, her imagery suggests that, far from being dull and repetitive, mothering could and should be high adventure, calling forth compassion, courage, and wonder. It could and should be like art, Olsen says in
Silences,
in "the toil and patience," but also in the "calling upon total capacities; the reliving and new using of the past; the comprehensions; the fascination, absorption, intensity" (18). In addition, viewing mothering as art and as a source of art can help dismantle the walls between women who are mothers and women engaged in other creative work and, at the same time, help bring together the often fragmented selves within individual women.
By demonstrating that her life as mother was one of the main sources of her writing, and in taking the further step of making mothers' lives the center of much of her fiction, Olsen counters one of the old notions about mothers I described at the beginning of this chapter. This notion claims that mothering is an experience so immured in nature there are no words to express it. Olsen's imagery tells a homelier truth: that mothering is neither more nor less expressible, neither more nor less sunk in silence than any other experience that involves one's whole being. Just as it is difficult but possible to write about making love, creating a poem, teaching well,
 
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marching on a picket line, or nursing a dying grandmother, it is difficult but possible to write about mothering.
Annie Gottlieb's 1976 book review entitled ''Feminists Look at Motherhood" helps me to understand the weight of Olsen's influence in bringing mothering out of the hazy, romantic half-light that has obscured it for so long. Gottlieb writes about an honest and joyous dialogue between her, a writer with no children, and her youngest sister, who had just given birth to her first child. It is a dialogue, says Gottlieb, that would have been impossible only a few years earlier:
The birth of my sister's baby would have divided us irrevocably from each otherand from ourselves. She would have passed, for me, into a closed, dim world, inarticulate, seductive and threatening, made up of equal parts of archetypal power and TV-commercial insipidity. And for her, it would have been hopelessly beyond the reach of words she could not begin to formulate and would in any case not have dared to utter, because they would have violated all the accepted canons of motherhood.
She might have feared my educated contempt, for motherhood, while cloyingly idealized, was in no way honored as either a source or an accomplishment of human intelligence.
19
Gottlieb attributes the newfound possibility of communication between herself and her sister to the women whose books about motherhood she is reviewing (Alta, Jane Lazarre, and Adrienne Rich). Their work was made possible, she says, by the Women's Movement, "which in turn has drawn inspiration from the work of a few pioneersforemost among them Tillie Olsen." For Gottlieb, Olsen
"feels
like the first, both to extend 'universal' human experience to females and to dignify uniquely female experience as a source of human knowledge."
20
Although Olsen would hasten to name many predecessors to whom she herself is indebted, I agree with Gottlieb that Olsen is certainly the first whose works have been widely read, studied, and discussed.
In the fifteen years since Gottlieb wrote that tribute, dozens of books about mothers, mothering, and motherhood

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