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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 239
have appeared, and it is true that what Valerie Miner terms ''this current infatuation with motherhood" might be traced to Olsen. But Olsen never sets mothers against women like May Sarton's magnificent spinster who "stand on their own." In fact, she does the opposite. As Gottlieb says, Olsen's writing has directly and indirectly helped to create connections "between body and mind, between female experience and the realm of thought, between a woman who at this moment is predominantly a mother and one who at this moment is a writer."
21
While Olsen continues to show clearly the differences among women, including those between women who are mothers and those who are not, she steadfastly affirms that those differences are not inherently divisive, ought not to be used as weapons of reproach or sources of guilt, and do not lend themselves to ranking except when one is obeying the dictates of patriarchal thought.
Gottlieb writes that "between the 'experience' of motherhood and the patriarchal 'institution,' a system of man-made myths and 'false-namings' exists that twists the experience itself into something far more anguished and confining than it would naturally be. What it could be under vastly different circumstances we cannot fully know."
22
Olsen's stories express more powerfully than those of any other writer I know the needless anguish and confinement, asking that her readers, sons and daughters all, "enter the pain" of their mothers' lives.
23
But Olsen never gives up on the possibility that pregnancy, birth, and the essential arts of mothering could be one way for a woman to give birth to herself; they could be replenishing acts for mothers, their children, and a hungry society. In the imagery of Olsen's fiction, they could be hearty bread, stone that preserves the valuable lessons of the past, and a flood filled with life.
Notes
1. Citations of Olsen's major works appear in the text. I have used the following editions and abbreviations:
Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother
(Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1984);
Silences
(New York: Dell, 1980), designated as
S; Tell Me a Riddle
 
Page 240
(New York: Laurel-Dell, 1981); and
Yonnondio: From the Thirties
(New York: Laurel-Dell, 1981), designated as Y.
2. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Bantam, 1976), 237.
3. For example, Edith Sumner Kelly's
Weeds
was published in 1923 and was not reprinted until 1972, in the appropriately named Lost American Fiction series of the Southern Illinois University Press. Agnes Smedley's
Daughter of Earth,
published in 1929 and reprinted in a shortened version in 1935, did not reappear until 1973, when The Feminist Press reprinted it.
4. Valerie Miner, ''The Light of the Muse," review of May Sarton,
The Magnificent Spinster, Women's Review of Books
3, No. 3 (December 1985), 7.
5. Lisa See, "PW Interviews: Tillie Olsen,"
Publisher's Weekly
(23 November 1984), 79.
6. Olsen's Personal Statement, in
First Drafts, Last Drafts: Forty Years of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University,
prepared by William McPheron with the assistance of Amor Towles (Stanford: Stanford University Libraries, 1989), 63.
7. Tillie Lerner, "I Want You Women Up North to Know," reprinted in Selma Burkom and Margaret Williams, eds., "DeRiddling Tillie Olsen's Writings,"
San Jose Studies
2, No. 1 (February 1976), 67-69.
8. Linda Kathryn Yoder, "Memory as Art: The Life Review in Contemporary American Fiction," Ph.D. diss., West Virginia University, 1983.
9. Erica Duncan, "The Hungry Jewish Mother," in Cathy Davidson and E. M. Broner, eds.,
The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature
(New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), 232.
10. Olsen, lecture/reading and correspondence, 8 March 1992.
11. Olsen, quoted in See, "PW Interviews," 79.
12. The Jerusalem Bible, 1966.
13. "Tillie Olsen: Witness as Servant,"
Polit: A Journal for Literature and Politics
1 (Fall 1977), 5.
14. Mary K. DeShazer, "'In the Wind of the Singing': The Language of Tillie Olsen's 'Tell Me a Riddle'," paper presented at the symposium, "Tillie Olsen Week, The Writer and Society," 21-26 March 1983. Sponsored by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois,
et al.
 
Page 241
15. Rebecca Harding Davis,
Life in the Iron Mills; or The Korl Woman
(Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1972), 31-33, 64.
16. Olsen, quoted in Linda Matchan, ''The Staggering Burden of Motherhood,"
Boston Sunday Globe
(11 May 1986), 98.
17. See Yoder, "Memory as Art," 100; and Judith Arcana,
Our Mothers' Daughters
(Berkeley: Shameless Hussy Press, 1979), 188.
18. Tillie Lerner, "The Strike" reprinted in Jack Salzman, ed.,
Years of Protest: A Collection of American Writings of the 1930's
(New York: Pegasus, 1967), 139.
19. Annie Gottlieb, "Feminists Look at Motherhood,"
Mother Jones
(November 1976), 51.
20. Ibid., 51, 52.
21. Ibid., 53.
22. Ibid., 52.
23. Duncan, "The Hungry Jewish Mother," 232.
 
Page 243
RACHEL BLAU DuPLESSIS
To ''Bear My Mother's Name": Künstlerromane by Women Writers
No song or poem will bear my mother's name....
Perhaps she was herself a poetthough only her
daughter's name is signed to the poems that we know.
ALICE WALKER,
"In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" (1974)
The love plot and
Bildungs
plot are fused in a particular fictional strategy, a figure emerging in a range of narratives from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
Aurora Leigh
to Margaret Atwood's
Surfacing.
*And the central struggle between designated role and meaningful vocation is negotiated by different narrative tactics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts.
1
The figure of a female artist encodes the conflict between any empowered woman and the barriers to her achievement.
2
Using the female artist as a literary motif dramatizes and heightens the already-present contradiction in bourgeois ideology between the ideals of striving, improvement, and visible public
From
Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 35-63. Condensed with the permission of the author.
* Ed. note. In an introductory chapter, DuPlessis argues that prior to the twentieth century, gender ideologies are inscribed in two primary, sometimes overlapping, plots: the romance, or love plot, and the quest, or
Bildung,
involving the character's growth and development. Twentieth-century women's fiction writes multiple, complex plots displacing the conventional endings for women protagonists in either marriage or death. "Künstlerromane" means, literally, "artist-novels." These are novels in which the artist's development is central.
 
Page 244
works, and the feminine version of that formula: passivity, ''accomplishments," and invisible private acts.
For bourgeois women, torn between their class values and the subset of values historically affirmed for their gender caste, the figure of the female artist expressed the doubled experience of a dominant ideology that was supposed to be muted in them and that therefore became oppositional for their gender. Making a female character be a "woman of genius" sets in motion not only conventional notions of womanhood but also conventional romantic notions of the genius, the person apart, who, because unique and gifted, could be released from social ties and expectations.
3
Genius theory is a particular exaggeration of bourgeois individualism, and its evocation increases the tension between middle-class women as a special group and the dominant assumptions of their class. Because it is precisely expression and the desire to refuse silence that are at issue in artistic creation, the contradiction between dominant and muted areas can also be played out in the motif of the imbedded artwork, another narrative marker of these
Künstlerromane.
Aurora Leigh
(1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning is the mid-century text of an emergent ideological formation, as
Ruth Hall
(1855), a sweet American book, is that of dominant sentiments.
Aurora Leigh
is a booklength narrative poem about the fusing of artist and woman, and the testing of values surrounding class and spiritual vision.
4
In the final moments of this work, the artist Aurora accepts her suitor in marriage, having discovered that all her notable successes are compromised without affection.
5
Passioned to exalt
The artist's instinct in me at the cost
Of putting down the woman's, I forgot
No perfect artist is developed here
From any imperfect woman.
(380)
Aurora's expostulation of Love's primacy at the end of the work ("Art is much, but Love is more. / O Art, my Art, thou'rt much, but Love is more!" 381) is well separated from
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