Tillie Olsen: Breaking the Myth

Tillie Olsen’s Point of View: Breaking the Myth

Middle-aged women of the nineteen-fifties are stereotyped as Edith Bunkers of the television series “All in the Family.” They stayed home, took care of their children and their husbands and kept their houses immaculately clean, all the while enjoying this bliss. They didn’t always agree with their spouses, but wouldn’t have dreamed of arguing and had no ambition to be more than the perfect housewives. They greeted their children with large smiles and waited impatiently for grandchildren to help tend. And if there is any real validity in this stereotype, where did Tillie Olsen, writing during the fifties, get inspiration for her female characters? A Jewish Socialist American, Olsen spent twenty years after writing for the Communist party in 1930 raising children, working outside the home, and dreaming about going back to her writing (Schultz 1997). Rather than allowing this time of nurturing others to pull her down, however, she used it to her advantage. Shultz remarks that it “…fed her writing, helping to provide her with material to counter one of the prevailing American myths of the 1950s – the myth of the domestic ideals” (online). Building on her social and political background, Tillie Olsen’s choice of point of view and writing style in “Tell Me A Riddle” challenges not only the stereotype of the “typical” older woman, but also goes against social ideas of the decade and established literary notions.

Literature of the early twentieth century moved away from Victorian ideals and toward Modernism. A breaking of the rules was a prominent feature of writing of the time. However, there were still recognizable guidelines; recognized either because they were strictly followed or purposely broken. One of those was, and still is, the use of point of view. A major element in fiction, point of view helps to form the structure of the work. “Tell Me A Riddle” shows a creative and jarring use of and break with traditional point of view. The story begins in third person, with a narrator describing the scene and only a hint of the background. “For forty-seven years they had been married. How deep back the stubborn, gnarled roots of the quarrel reached, no one could say…” (Olsen 1956/60, 779). As the rules would dictate, readers expect the story to continue being narrated, seeing the whole scene from a rather distant perspective. However, Olsen departs from literary convention with the way she switches point of view.

“Lennie wrote to Clara: They’ve lived over so much together; what could possibly tear them apart?” (780). This ends a very short paragraph that briefly introduces the children; all seven of them. The next section begins with: “Something tangible enough” (780). David, Eva’s husband, seems to be answering Lennie’s question as the reader begins to realize the point of view has changed. This question and answer effect is continued throughout the story:
“Good protective reaction, observed Nancy to herself. The workings of hos-til-ity.
‘Nancy could take her. I just don’t like how she looks. Let’s have Nancy arrange an appointment.’
‘You think she’ll go?’ regarding his wife gloomily.” (783)

Nancy interrupts her father with her thoughts; Paul appears to read his sister’s mind, and narration returns to David. We catch ourselves thinking they are all one mind seeing everything.

This combination of omniscience and introspection is carried further with Olsen’s use of stream of consciousness. However, she again changes the form from its original use to delve more deeply into her characters. The origins of the technique included “maintain[ing] an authorial control of linguistics and grammar that would not necessarily be possible for that psyche” (Schultz 1997, online). The characters’ thoughts were written in a style too advanced to actually belong to them and the characters were often either of the upper classes or societal outcasts of an especially sensitive nature (1997). We can look at Djuna Barnes’ “Nightwood” (1937) as an example. Olsen, on the other hand, writes about ordinary working-class people using dialect and language appropriate for the characters. This personalized style moved literary fiction from being elitist to being available to the whole population; a socialist style of writing, it belongs to all equally.

“…whenever any of us of that class and/or sex and/or color, generally denied enabling circumstances, come to what the world recognizes as achievement, it is not by virtue of our … I don’t say ‘dazzling,’ but you know, very special qualities, qualities which are expressed and used in everyday life, unnoticed, unseen … but by virtue of our special luck, combined with whatever capacities we have” (Olsen Interview, Materassi, 1988, online).

Social issues were a prominent theme in Olsen’s work, including “Tell Me A Riddle.” The unnoticed and unseen in not only literature, but also in society, became revered in her writing. This is especially true in regards to women in general and mothers in particular. Because of their given roles in the early twentieth century, mothers did not often become writers (Lyons 1986). Their experiences became lost in the every day task of taking care of others.

Olsen became a forerunner of the second wave’s fight to communicate the reality of womanhood and motherhood by literally writing the body. “For Olsen the physical body makes the spiritual condition manifest: disfigurement, mutilation, and especially starvation are body images or ideas employed repeatedly to reflect both self-estrangement and estrangement from the world” (1986, online). Eva’s battle with cancer is symbolic of her battle with society and gender roles. “She did not know if the tumult was outside, or in her. Always a ravening inside, a pull to the bed, to lie down, to succumb” (Olsen 1956/60, 783). Her life had been spent nurturing others. She had mentally and physically given all of herself to her husband and children and as the children left, she became empty. The years of being taken for granted and giving in to her husband had hardened her against him: “(Vinegar he poured on me all his life; I am well marinated; how can I be honey now?)” (785). But she couldn’t come to terms with whether to blame society or herself, outside or in, finally giving in to the whole situation, accepting and letting it take her instead of fighting.

Olsen emphasizes this breaking of a woman’s spirit with her narrative, which Pfaelzer says includes “gaps, fractured discourse, written intervals, and disassembled point of view”(quoted in Schultz 1997, online). In their first argument of the story, Eva and David point out a gap in the way Eva speaks: “Because you’re use’t. [repeating her phrase] This is a reason, Mrs. Word Miser?” (Olsen 1956/60, 780). Staying home with only her children, Eva hasn’t mastered the language of the country in which they emigrated and uses silence as a self-protective weapon. What she doesn’t say tells the reader much about her. “For in this solitude she had won to a reconciled peace” (781). As the story proceeds, she speaks less, argues less, shares her thoughts only with the reader and even those disappear at the end. She becomes the shadow she tells her husband she isn’t (782).

“‘For our silenced people … century after century their beings consumed in the hard, everyday essential work of maintaining human life. Their art, which they still made – as their other contributions – anonymous; refused respect, recognition; lost.’” (Olsen quoting her book “Silences,” Materassi 1988, online).

Part of the silencing Olsen discusses in “Tell Me A Riddle” is in the dismissal of health concerns for the elderly, especially elderly women. In the early twentieth century, society was being encouraged to control feelings; they were not to express anger or pain (Stearns 1993). This resulted not only in mental anguish remaining concealed, but also in medical conditions being hidden. Eva keeps her internal pain to herself until it becomes bad enough for her husband and children to wonder if there is something wrong. Instead of asking her, David has a daughter take his wife to a doctor and asks the daughter, not his wife, what he had to say: “A real fatherly lecture. Sixty-nine is young these days. Go out, enjoy life, find interests. … Old age is sickness only if one makes it so” (Olsen 1956/60, 783). The doctor brushes her concerns off as psychosomatic, deciding she is not living in an appropriate manner for her age. “Start living like a human being” (783). The conversation that follows between Eva and David is from David’s point of view as he uses the doctor’s pronouncement as another push for Eva to move from her home. “She is silent” (784). Eva refuses to answer the accusation, instead pointing out their differences in the importance of their lives: “‘What is the matter, Mr. Importantbusy, you have no card game or meeting you can go to?’ – turning her face to the pillow” (784). Without saying so directly, Olsen shows the difference in usefulness between older men and older women. David’s meetings and card games have importance while Eva’s needs of staying home and doing her own thing brand her as having a mental illness.

Olsen further breaks away from the stereotypical grandmother-type by showing Eva as unwilling to hold her daughter’s baby. “Unnatural grandmother, not able to make herself embrace a baby” (788). For Eva, the baby brings back too many memories that she has forced out of her mind:

“It was not that she had not loved her babies, her children. The love – the passion of tending – had risen with the need like a torrent; and like a torrent drowned and immolated all else. But when the need was done – oh the power that was lost in the painful damming back and drying up of what still surged, but had nowhere to go. Only the thin pulsing left that could not quiet, suffering over lives one felt, but could no longer hold nor help” (788).

Eva’s children had been her usefulness in life, and with their departure came society’s views that her role in life was over. The things she once loved that her husband tries to bring back to her, still for his own needs, have become bitter in the memory of his refusal to allow her to have them throughout her life, leaving nothing for her to put her love/eroticism into. The baby is not a happy thing for her; it is yet another reminder of all she has lost. And she can see her daughter taking the same path. “Enough the worn face of Vivi, the remembered grandchildren. I cannot, cannot…” (788).

The stream of consciousness technique combined with a shifting third person point of view in “Tell Me A Riddle” becomes a social statement simply with its structure. Olsen defies expectations and points out that writing should accurately represent real people, not simply reinstate socially acknowledged “correct” forms and attitudes. Just as the “real sexual revolution was not about sex … [but] about power” (Douglass 1999, online), women’s writing is not about following guidelines, but about creating them. Her socialist background led her to see the value that was and is in working people and how they were being stifled and silenced. Her years as a wife and mother showed her the inevitable harm to society when women are repressed. Unlike Eva, she continues to fight back with her words that won’t be silenced.

“…working people were the basic creators of all culture, of all civilization, beginning with language, ritual, development of food, clothing, shelter – the greatest inventions we’ve had so far – through the centuries. …the genius that was inherent in them never had the opportunity to express itself…” (Olsen interview, Materassi 1988, online).


Works Cited

Douglass, Lonna. Viewpoint: The sexual revolution was not caused by the pill, which was only a part of a broader cultural empowerment of women. In “The Birth-Control Pill and the Sexual Revolution.” History in Dispute, 2 (1999). Galenet. UMUC Library and Information Services. 20 Nov. 2003. <http://www.umuc.edu/library>.

Lyons, Bonnie. “Tillie Olsen: The Writer as a Jewish Woman.” Studies in American Jewish Literature, 5 (1986): 89-102. Literature Resource Center. UMUC Library and Information Services. 24 Nov. 2003. <http://www.umuc.edu/library>.

Olsen, Tillie. “An Interview with Mario Materassi.” 19 Aug. 1988. Italian Association for North American Studies. 15 Dec. 2003 <http://www.aisna.org/rsajournal2/olsen.html>.

Olsen, Tillie. “Tell Me A Riddle.” The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature. Ed. Mary K.
DeShazer. New York: Longman, 2001. 779-803.

Schultz, Lydia A. “Flowing Against the Traditional Stream: Consciousness in Tillie Olsen’s ‘Tell Me A Riddle.’” MELUS, 22 (Fall, 1997): 113-31. WilsonSelectPlus. UMUC Library and Information Services. 28 Nov. 2003. <http://www.umuc.edu/library>.

Stearns, Peter N. “Girls, Boys, and Emotions: Redefinitions and Historical Change.” The Journal of American History, 80 (Jun., 1993): 36-74. JSTOR. UMUC Library and Information Services. 29 Nov. 2003. <http://www.umuc.edu/library>.