Silences (5 page)

Writing

What we write, and who gets to write, is in jeopardy as well. We must continue to attend to what Olsen labeled “political silences” (143)—including “complete silencing by governments” (143). The
Writers in Prison Committee Reports,
prepared annually
by International PEN, remind us of the writers around the world who have been imprisoned, and are still in prison, for the political content of their work, victims of brutal silencing by their governments.

Troubling as well are the “silences where the lives never come to writing” due to such factors as illiteracy and poverty. According to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in recent times 44 percent of
African Americans could not read the front page of a newspaper (Gates 1988). The functional literacy rate of the free black population in America in 1865 was probably higher than it is today.
²¹
We are also reminded that more than 75 percent of the women in the world today are women of color, and of these, 90 percent are illiterate.
²²
Who will write their stories?

Olsen’s book, with its groundbreaking
discussions of the agonizing tensions between motherhood and creativity, between sustaining life and creating art, makes us particularly sensitive to those whose “lives never come to writing” because Federal restrictions on birth control and abortion information or denied access to abortion clinics effectively sentence them to early unwanted motherhood. The 1980s witnessed a disturbing increase
in violent attacks on abortion clinics and on doctors and nurses who perform abortions, culminating, in 1993, in the murder of a doctor. Patients have been the victims of public humiliation, psychological warfare,
and entrapment by fake clinics.
²³
The ultimate victim of these attacks and prohibitions is the woman (typically poor, young, and trapped) who will be locked out of the cultural conversation
by the demands of the unwanted pregnancy she must carry to term.

Arithmetic

The way we “count” is under attack as well. Even today, for a number of students and professors, two black writers on an American literature syllabus is one too many. What the token woman was to the course syllabus of an earlier era, the token African American or Asian American or Native American writer may be to the
course syllabus of the present. Those who attack multicultural initiatives in education complain about “bumping” a “good” white male writer and replacing him with a “bad” minority writer. If genius, as Olsen suggests frequently throughout
Silences
, is an equal opportunity employer, we must break down the spurious argument that “diversity” and “quality” are oppositional terms, and we must insist
that the writers we teach “count” because their work matters.

There is another sense in which the way we count is being challenged. Olsen drew our attention to what she called “virulent destroyers: premature silencers.” It is an accurate phrase to describe the devastating illness, HIV-AIDS. HIV-AIDS activists in this country have used the slogan “Silence = Death” in urging people to speak up
for urgent research and treatment, as well as for compassion and civil rights for HIV-AIDS victims. The amount of potential creativity lost to HIV-AIDS worldwide is staggering, yet still we are encouraged by some to “discount” that phenomenon as something that happens only to people who “don’t count.” Like the Danes who donned armbands identifying themselves as Jews to foil the Nazis’ efforts to determine
whom to count in their genocidal plans, we have to resist efforts to divide and conquer: we have to insist, as
Silences
taught us, that we all can and do count.
Silences
’s legacy today is the courage to assert that “we all count”—and that we have the right to read—and write—ourselves.

Notes

This essay would not have been possible without the help of Tillie Olsen, who generously shared her time
and her thoughts with me during the spring of 1988, and who continued to make her personal papers and correspondence available to me during the years that followed. I am also grateful to Elaine Hedges, Carla Peterson, Lillian Robinson, Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, and Sarah Weddington for their critical comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Modern Language Association
Convention in 1988.

1
. Olsen 1988. She is considering reclaiming the by-line as “Ann Dothers.”

2
. The individuals whose names I will be citing represent only a small fraction of the number of people—inside and outside academia—for whom
Silences
has been an extremely important book.

3
. While Olsen herself refers to this talk as having taken place in 1962, the date on the transcript of the tape
of the talk in the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin is March 15, 1963. For more information on Olsen’s experience at the Radcliffe Institute 1962–1963, see Diane Middlebrook’s essay in
Listening to
Silences (Hedges and Fishkin 1994). Olsen also gave several other undocumented informal talks around this time, such as one at the Boston Public Library in 1963 (Ferguson
1988).

4
. Other panelists were Adrienne Rich, Ellen Peck Killoh, and Elaine Reuben (see Hedges 1972).

5
. See “Tillie Olsen’s Reading List,” a four-part series originally published between 1972 and 1974 in
Women’s Studies Newsletter,
1:2, p. 7; 1:3, p. 3; 1:4, p. 2; II:1, pp. 4–5. The series is reprinted at the back of this volume.

6
. Paul Lauter recalls the title of this course as “The Literature
of Poverty, Oppression, Revolution, and the Struggle for Freedom” (Lauter 1991).

7
. The page where Olsen notes a period of silence in Jane Austen’s life, for example, is completely blank except for the following: “Jane Austen (1775–1817). The years 1800–1811. Woman reasons: she was powerless in all major decisions deciding her life, including the effecting of enabling circumstances for writing”
(140).

8
. The notes prefacing an early reading list suggest that “each entry should be read with the following in mind. (1) The hard and essential work of women, in and out of the home (‘no work was too hard, no labor too strenuous to exclude us’). (2) Limitations, denials imposed; exclusions and restrictions in no way necessitated by biological or economic circumstances. (3) How human capacities
born in women—intellect, organization, art, invention, vision, sense of justice, beauty, etc.—denied scope and development, nevertheless struggled to express themselves and function.” See
page 293
in this volume.

9
.
Silences
helped prompt Paul Lauter to organize through the Feminist Press the Reconstructing American Literature project in 1979, which led to the publication in 1983 of a volume
of syllabi, course materials, and commentary under that title (Lauter 1991).
The Heath Anthology
(1990) was an outgrowth of that project.

10
. Olsen 1988.
Silences
has also been translated into Norwegian and Dutch.

11
. Schoedel wrote, “Finally, I want to help overcome what my favorite writer, Tillie Olsen, calls ‘women’s silences of centuries.’ Accounts of women’s lives, in particular working
class women’s lives, have not been viewed as worth recording” (xiii).

12
. Other critics not previously mentioned for whom
Silences
has been important include Elizabeth Meese, Dale Spender, Valerie Trueblood, Alix Kates Shulman, Helen MacNeil, Sandra Whipple Spanier, and Adrienne Rich, who commented on the significance of
Silences
for criticism: “Tillie Olsen’s
Silences
will, like
A Room of One’s
Own,
be quoted wherever there is talk of the circumstances in which literature is possible” (Rich 1982).

13
.
Silences
“offered a lot of solace and inspiration” to Lim, who found it “very exciting. It encouraged me to do the work I often doubted doing.” Plays of Lim’s such as “XX,” which deals with the oppression of women from ancient China to the contemporary United States, have been produced
in San Francisco. She has published her poetry and a collection of her plays, which she characterizes as “hard-edged feminist” drama (Lim 1989).

14
. Citing Olsen’s recognition of the importance of “foreground silences,” Sondra Zeidenstein writes, “In breaking the silence imposed by their culture, [the writers in
A Wider Giving
] have had to give themselves time and permission, seek out training,
face rejection and self-doubt, fight the negativity sometimes ingested from their own mothers, begin to develop their craft and, hardest of all, summon the strength again and again to continue” (Zeidenstein xiii-xiv).

15
. I am indebted to Carla Peterson for the concept of a “rhetoric of arithmetic” (Peterson 1988).

16
. Olsen was not the first to use the concept of “counting.” Indeed, she readily
credits both Showalter and Howe with having sparked her awareness of the value of this technique. In the essay Olsen cites Elaine Showalter’s article, “Women and the Literary Curriculum” (
College English,
May 1971) as a pioneering precursor. (Olsen 1982, 28) Olsen notes: “I have developed this almost compulsive what I call the Florence Howe Test, after the person I first saw do it. You take any
anthology, any list—look at the contents of a magazine, or at who is being discussed in a book of criticism, a textbook. . . . You run your finger down and you count the number of men who are in it and you count the number of women, and you discover that in the second century in which women have come to writing at all, usually you will find one woman in about every nine to ten men. It is astonishing
that you find this disparity even in the fields of poetry and story—which women have been more likely to write in the past because they presumably do not take as much time, or rather, they fit in more easily between other things, better than forms that require long, concentrated attention—it is astonishing that is, if you assume that human beings are born with similar capacities when it comes
to thinking, to dreaming, to creating. I am of those who very strongly believe that this capacity to create is inherent in the human being and has not to do with the body, with the sex into which you are
born. I believe that there is the strongest relationship between circumstances and actual creative production” (Olsen 1972). Olsen’s distinctive contribution was introducing a larger audience
to this valuable tool.

17
. These complaints were raised by several graduate students, both women and men, in my American Studies graduate seminar at the University of Texas at Austin in the spring of 1990. Two years earlier I heard similar comments from a prominent feminist critic I had interviewed who did not wish to be cited by name.

18
. In an article on campus trends,
Time Magazine
, for instance,
noted with disapproval the fact that “a University of Texas professor of American Studies has constructed a course on 19th–century writers to alternate between famous white men one week and obscure women the next, in part to illuminate ‘the prison house of gender.’”
Time’s
assumption, of course, was that the women writers were obscure because they deserved to be obscure—not because social or political
factors might have helped deny their work the attention it deserved (Henry 66). See also D’Souza 51–79. For two cogent and eloquent challenges to the position embodied in the
Time
article, see Paul Lauter’s
Canons and Contexts
and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s
Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars.

19
. “[We write] because we have more fear of silence than of speech.” (Direct translation: of words)
Rosario Ferré, “Porque Escribe la Mujer.” Variant on this quotation contained in “Entrevista breve con Rosario Ferré,” conducted by Krista Ratkowski Carmona, supplied by Ferré. Stanford speech (which was in Spanish) replaced “I” of Carmona interview with “Women.” Ferré spoke of the importance of
Silences
to her own work in an interview (Ferré 1988).

20
. Two related areas of concern are the ghettoization
within women’s studies courses of material on women of color (see Zinn and also Alarcón, 1990) and the ghettoization and exclusion of gay and lesbian writers from a range of academic enterprises (see Beam et al., 1988; Poulson-Bryant; “As Quiet as It’s Kept”; McDaniel). Unfortunately, homophobia in academia has led to a rise of self-censorship on the part of a number of gay and lesbian
scholars (Zimmerman 1988).

21
. Gates noted that he arrived at this statement through consultation with historian John Hope Franklin.

22
. Statistics gathered by Norma Alarcón (personal communication).

23
. I am indebted to
Roe v. Wade
attorney Sarah Weddington for sharing with me her clipping file of hundreds of articles on this subject, documenting instances of harassment, violence, and intimidation
in every section of the country.

Works Cited

Adams, Phoebe-Lou. Review of
Silences. Atlantic Monthly.
Sept. 1978, 96.

Alarcón, Norma. “Chicana Feminist Literature: A Re-vision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object.”
This Bridge Called My Back:
Writings by Radical Women of Color.
Ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Albany, N. Y.: Kitchen Table Press, 1983.

——.
Telephone interview. Fall 1988.

——. “The Theoretical Subject(s) of
This Bridge Called My Back
and Anglo-American Feminism.”
Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras.
Ed. Gloria Anzaldúa. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990. 356–69.