Silences Read Online Free

college students report the key ways in which this book helps their students approachall of their college reading with new understanding—and with a sturdy respect for the dignity of their own voices and their own potential voices (Marcus 1988). Silences yoked eloquence and insight in a language that spoke to both the common reader and the academic critic (Stimpson 1988).
    Writing
    Silences has also helped change what we write as literary critics and feminist theorists. CatharineStimpson put it succinctly: “it was simply one of the texts that helped to found a field” (Stimpson 1988). That field, of course, was feminist criticism and women’s studies. For one thing, Silences helped put the idea of “silencing” itself on the table for discussion—an idea that Lillian Robinson, glancing back to Olsen, calls perhaps the most empowering of feminist critical tools (Robinson 1987,23). Olsen’s attention to the social forces that silence voices of the marginalized and powerless, to the material circumstances that inhibit creativity, to the politics of reputation and of censorship, and to the psychology of self-censorship, all helped scholars develop compelling critical frameworks.
    Olsen’s pioneering work in Silences on the nature of literary reputation (exemplified in heressay on Rebecca Harding Davis) helped stimulate wide-spread questioning about the construction of the literary canon by such critics as Lillian Robinson and Paul Lauter. It informed the kinds of questions Robinson raised in her widely-reprinted essay, “Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon,” and has influenced her approach to such issues as how one might evaluate working-classwomen’s writing, private writing by women, and popular culture, as well as traditional canonicaltexts (Robinson 1983, 1978). Lauter, whose book Canons and Contexts explores “alternative assumptions about literary value” (128) also acknowledges his indebtedness to Olsen (Lauter 1991).
    Olsens’s ideas about silencing were central to Jane Marcus’s discussion of “the silenced women of history” inher essay “Still Practice: A/Wrested Alphabet: Toward a Feminist Aesthetic” (1984). Indeed, Marcus credits Silences with making it possible for her to break her own silence as a critic. She notes, “I was in silence and silenced when Tillie’s book came out. Silences became my Bible in that it allowed me to identify with people who were more oppressed than I was. Hearing Tillie speak after havingbeen silenced herself for so long made me feel I had to try because I was less oppressed than other people who were silenced” (Marcus 1988). The result was a host of influential articles and books from Marcus on the challenge of hearing and decoding women’s voices in literature, and on the dynamics of the forces that would silence them.
    Olsen’s writing on silence and silencing was the “subtext”for Annette Kolodny’s reinterpretation of the literary treatment of the American West in her book, The Land Before Her (Kolodny 1988, 1984), and for Norma Alarcón’s revision in This Bridge Called My Back of the cultural significance of the figure of “La Malinche” (Alarcón 1988, 1983). It helped inspire Elaine Hedges’s recovery and reinterpretation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper as a text intimately concerned with the silences inscribed by turn-of-the-century gender relations (Hedges 1988, 1973).
    [Speaking personally for a moment, I might add that Olsen’s charge that we recover and attend to voices that had been dismissed or ignored for reasons of race or class or gender helped prompt me to explore the role that several forgotten black speakers—a ten-year-old servant,a cook, and a teenaged slave—played in the development of Mark Twain’s art in Huckleberry Finn (Fishkin 1993); it also encouraged me to reevaluate the role played by neglected or maligned women writers and women family members throughout Mark Twain’s