Silences Read Online Free Page B

before, but which Silences foregrounded; foremost among these was the complex tensions between art and motherhood. Ursula Le Guin, for example, in a 1987 meditation on this subject, confesses that she “stole (manyof the) quotations [in a recent work of hers] from Tillie Olsen’s Silences, a book to which” her own work, she writes, “stands in the relation of an undutiful and affectionate daughter: ‘Hey, Ma, you aren’t using this, can I wear it?’” Le Guin retains a special affection for Olsen’s book because of the ways in which it empowered her as a writer: “Along in the seventies, when feminism tended toidentify the Mother as the Enemy . . . I had three kids whom I liked and a mother whom I liked and a mother-in-law whom I liked, and I felt guilty. I felt I should not speak from my own experience, because my experience was faulty—not right” (Le Guin 1987). Silences encouraged Le Guin to value the truth of her own experience—without suppressing the complexities and tensions that experience entailed.For other women it cleared a space in which, secure in the knowledge that they were not alone, they could explore the anguished choices they had tomake—often daily—between children and work. As Deborah Rosenfelt has put it, “ Silences reassured women that they weren’t crazy. It gave us permission to speak about things we had buried or kept to ourselves before” (Rosenfelt 1988).
    Olsen forged bondsbetween the writers about whom she wrote, and the writers for whom she wrote. “Here we all are, then,” wrote Alix Kates Shulman, “the writers invoked in Silences and those of us who read them, comprising a writers’ workshop. We are sitting in a circle, sharing our experiences and ideas, . . . searching for a common truth, growing stronger and more confident and more determined through our mutualsupport and inspiration” (532–33). Readers sensed, quite rightly, that Tillie Olsen, too, was a warm and welcoming member of that circle. Indeed, Olsen herself once claimed with characteristic modesty, “I assure you I am not as good a writer as some of you may think I am. It is you and what you bring to it . . . the common work that we do together” (Olsen 1983, 64).
    Arithmetic
    Just as Silences has changed the way we read and the way we write, it has also changed the way we count. The book demonstrated the dramatic power of a “rhetoric of arithmetic” 15 to make explicit conditions of exclusion, imbalance, and neglect. Affirming and building on work by Elaine Showalter and Florence Howe, Olsen’s essay, “One Out of Twelve: Writers Who Are Women in Our Century” (originally published in 1972,and republished in Silences in 1978) taught the simple lesson that adding up the number of women (and minorities) present in “literature courses, required reading lists, textbooks, quality anthologies, the year’s best, the fifty years’ best, consideration by critics or in current reviews,” etc., was itself a valuable critical tool. 16 Over the next twenty years that tool would be picked up, forexample, by Bonnie Zimmerman in her 1982 essay “One Out of Thirty: Lesbianism in Women’s Studies Textbooks”; by Paul Lauter in his 1983 article on “Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon”; and by Charlotte Nekola, in her 1987 essay, “Worlds Unseen: Political Women Journalists and the 1930s.” The practice of “counting” remains enormously useful to dramatizeand document inconcrete terms the inequalities and inequities women and minorities continue to confront. Silences taught us how to count, and it taught us that we count. Respect for ourselves, our voices, and those of our foremothers (however faint and forgotten) is one of the most important legacies it has left us.
    Dissenting Voices
    Not every reader, it should be said, has been enthralled with Silences. Whenthe book appeared, several critics, in fact, faulted Olsen for having inscribed in it her own set of silences