Tell Me a Riddle Read Free

who write of the other human dimensions,
realms.
Teach women's lives through the lives of the women who
wrote the books, as well as through the books themselves. . . .
Help create writers, perhaps among them yourselves.
(44-45)
Olsen's work as a scholar and teacher during this time exemplifies her commitment to her own mandates. She compiled influential reading lists of neglected writings for the Radical Teacher and the Women's Studies Newsletter, and she helped identify "lost" texts for reprinting by The Feminist Press, the first of many small presses devoted to the writings of women. One of these was the story that had been so important to her as a young girlRebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills. Olsen's "Biographical Interpretation" of Harding Davis's life and work richly recreates the world in which her predecessor lived and wrote, arguing that Davis's literary gifts diminished as she assumed the prescribed, and desired, roles of wife and mother as well as the burden of writing for money. In commenting on Rebecca Harding Davis's last years, Olsen hypothesizes a secret life reminiscent not only of the grandmother's in "Tell Me a Riddle" but also of her own sense of life buried within her during her non-writing years: "Probably to the end of her days, a creature unknown to those around her lived on in Rebecca, a secret creature still hungry to know; living . . . ecstatically in nature. . .; 'with her own people, elsewhere' in the . . . red-brick house" (151).
In 1978, Olsen published Silences, an innovative collection that includes her previous essays, an extended gloss on them, and excerpts from the work of other writers, culled from her "jottings"hundreds, maybe thousands of note-cards and scraps on which over the years she recorded passages to remember. Silences catalogues all the various forms

 

Page 12
of silencing that befall writersespecially, though not exclusively, women; especially, though not exclusively, those who must struggle for sheer survival.
Tillie Olsen's life and work form a bridge between the activism and culture of the ''red decade" of the thirties and the movements of the sixties and seventies, especially the women's movement, which provided an eager audience for her work. An important influence on the feminist writers, critics, and students of the seventies and eighties, Olsen has also contributed to "the larger tradition of social concern" both as a writer of fiction and a scholar and teacher whose efforts have been crucial to the democratization of the American literary canon.
Tell Me a Riddle and "Tell Me a Riddle"
"Tell Me a Riddle" is the title story of Olsen's only collection, published in 1962. The other stories are "I Stand Here Ironing," "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" and "O Yes," all written in the 1950s. Originally conceived as sections of a novel, the stories portray the lives of members of an extended family over three generations. David and Eva of "Tell Me a Riddle" are the first generation; their childrenClara, Vivi, Hannah, Sammy, Helen, and Davy, killed in World War IIthe second generation; and Jeannie and Carol, Helen and Lennie's children, representative of the third. All the stories explore the interrelatedness of the "private sphere" and the "public"; set within the home, constructed from the rhythms and language of daily familial life, they constantly expand their scope to illustrate the location of the family within a larger set of social relations. In "I Stand Here Ironing" a mother broods in a sustained monologue on the ways in which growing up in anxious poverty has affected, perhaps limited, her daughter's capacities; at the conclusion her fierce prayer is that her child's will to live is strong enough to transcend the hard soil of her youth: "Only help her to knowhelp make it so there is cause for her to knowthat she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron." 10 In the elegaic "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" an old sailor friend of Lennie's and