Word: olsens
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...Olsen manages to transcend her own personal frustration to empathize with all people whose creative efforts society thwarts. Silences is more than a memoir or a narrow feminist polemic. Though the book did grow out of her own "special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly mute at having to let writing die over and over again in me," Olsen eloquently and passionately documents a spectrum of circumstances, most beyond the control of the writer, that corrupt or destroy his art. (Olsen criticizes the language's invidious bias towards the male...
...Olsen's most significant contribution lies in her perceptive discussion of the environment that nurtures creativity, and of those which destroy it. Why is it that only one out of every 12 writers is a woman? Why, in the period between 1850 to 1950, did only eleven black writers publish more than two novels? Why don't more poor people write? In the first place, Olsen contends, the most fundamental prerequisite for sustained, flourishing productivity, "the even flow of daily life made easy and noiseless," is a luxury the vast majority cannot afford. For mothers whose lives are "distraction...
...STILL AS OLSEN goes on to point out, writing requires much more than just this "homely underpinning." A "conviction as to the importance of what one has to say, one's right to say it. And the will, the measureless store of belief in oneself to be able to come to cleave to, find the form for one's own life comprehensions" is also essential. To have that kind of confidence, a writer needs to be taken seriously and appreciated. Here Olsen is at her best. She painstakingly identifies the societal attitudes and practices that leech away a person...
...preface to Silences, Tillie Olsen takes a sentence from Andre' Gide as her epigram: "I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance." It is in her discussion of the subtler, unspoken, often unconscious ways society has of grinding human beings down that she comes closest to inspiring hope in the reader. By asking the writer "questions" is this true? Is this all?" Olsen overturns values that too many repressed people unconsciously accept. Here she lists the insights stored up during her period of silence. Each is a revelation in miniature, liberating the reader from widely--held misconceptions, many...
...large portion of the book (137 pages mainly consisting of quotes from and about writers) is devoted to buttressing the statements made in the essays. Olsen largely overcomes the problem of disjointedness by carefully organizing and tying these quotes together. She cites famous authors who have suffered "silences"--among them Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, and Jane Austen--as well as the less well-known, and the selections give on a good sense of the hell a lot of people have gone through for the sake...