Flowing against the Traditional Stream: Consciousness in Tillie Olsen's "Tell Me a Riddle"

Abstract

Mention Tillie Olsen's Me in roomful of academics, and they are likely to respond with an almost unanimous interpretation of text. Most critics see work as an emotional tale of woman's re-emergence into person-ness after years of entrapment in roles of wife and mother. Appearing first in late 1950s and early 1960s, Olsen's stories that are collected in Tell Me Riddle are now, in this era of feminist consciousness, seen as being harshly critical of ways in which patriarchy injured countless women by forcing them into domestic roles that constrained their creativity and denied their sense of identity. I do not deny that these elements appear in Me Riddle. Yet I find such feminist readings too narrow and as reductionist in approach as initial reviews which sought to pigeonhole Olsen as merely another ethnic writer.(1) Olsen speaks not only of plight of women in her story Me Riddle; she also tells of ways in which patriarchal, capitalistic powers so shape nature of culture that they invade domestic sphere as well, thereby affecting all people within home through institution of marriage. She portrays this invasion with people who are not only class, but who are also immigrants to show how deeply embedded into American Dream such cultural values are. To tell tale of this family, Olsen does not rely on forms of proletarian realism that her Communist peers advocated in 1930s (Rosenfelt 388); instead, she draws on fictional technique that previously had been reserved for elitist or especially exceptional protagonists--stream of consciousness. Olsen had given up her writing as member of Communist Party in 1930s for family responsibilities, and did not focus again on her writing until 1950s. Not surprisingly, her fiction of this draws on same political and social concerns that she had explored earlier. In her works of 1950s, though, Olsen draws directly upon her own experiences as mother and wife. She writes of this twenty-year in her book Silences: In twenty years I bore and reared my children, usually had to work on paid job as well, simplest circumstances for creation did not exist. Nevertheless writing, hope of it, was the air I breathed, so long as I shall breathe at all. In that hope, there was conscious storing, snatched reading, beginnings of writing, and always the secret rootlets of reconnaissance. (19) While she writes of demanding chores and obligations of this period, she does not seem to regret those years, which she describes as having for her a full extended family life (19). Instead, these years fed her writing, helping to provide her with material to counter one of prevailing myths of 1950s--the myth of domestic ideal. Although Olsen found academic support for her writing from Stanford, social and political atmosphere of late 1940s and early 1950s was hardly comfortable for Leftists such as Olsen. Deborah Rosenfelt observes that McCarthyism directly touched Olsen: ...she and her family endured soul-destroying harassment typically directed at leftists and thousands of suspected leftists during that period (380). Olsen had seen some moderate successes of Communism in greater unionization of industrial workplace. Yet post-World War II ideology differentiated working men from Leftists of 1930s because it was economically desirable to do so. As Joanne S. Frye observes, The prevailing anticommunist feeling made it difficult to communicate power of these [communist] beliefs, socialist conviction that human beings must work together in social movements to implement necessary changes (82). Lary May similarly explains that industrial unions had been slow to develop in United States because a largely Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie remained separated from racially and ethnically divided class (130). …