Tillie Olsen's Reproductive Aesthetics

• Published in: ELH Vol. 90; no. 3; pp. 883 - 907
• Main Author: Mccune, Louise
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.09.2023
• Subjects: Aesthetics; British & Irish literature; Critics; Death & dying; Feminism; Interpersonal relations; Irish literature; Literary canon; Olsen, Tillie; Politics; Prose; Social classes
• ISSN: 0013-8304; 1080-6547; 1080-6547
• DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a907212

[...]she doesn't like it there: she resents the chores, she resents her husband, she resents the clamor and claustrophobia that make up her domestic environment. Some readers call her refusal to leave her home "a social protest" while others chalk it up to inertia (like Dorothy Parker, who refers Eva's refusal to "old age and approaching death and exasperated love").2 When her refusal is transformed, readers see either a "cry of triumph," a valiant turn "away from petty family concerns," or the symptoms of late-stage disease.3 My own reading concludes that the paradoxes of "Tell Me a Riddle," and the critical disagreements that attend them, are reconciled in Olsen's abiding concern that available literary genres could not effectively capture the gendered division of labor and crisis of social reproduction with which she was consistently preoccupied. Ellen Cronan Rose, writing for The Hollins Critic in 1976, celebrated the alleged distance between Olsen's public persona and her prose: at first only familiar with the Olsen who traveled widely to declaim the exclusion of women and the working class from the literary canon, Rose was pleasantly surprised to discover that "in her books, Olsen is no politician, but an artist. Rosenfelt's overarching project was to define a longstanding but underappreciated socialist feminist literary tradition—most definitely a "Procrustean" rubric from Rose's point of view—characterized by "a fundamental opposition to the structure of economic and social relations under patriarchal capitalism.