Saint Mazie: A Socialist-Feminist Understanding of Film in Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio: From the Thirties

Film answered two contemporary needs—a more dynamic and imaginative form of expression to match the inventive new conceits of "modern art" that were bursting the old forms at the seams in all other spheres; and a social vision of our industrial world that could best be conveyed by the machine-oriented, collective medium which films are.

Tom Brandon, member of the New York Film and Photo League, a 1930s radical film group¹

Literary and film scholars such as Paula Rabinowitz, Michael Denning, and Saverio Giovacchini have increasingly been challenging reductive and dismissive Cold War accounts of 1930s American culture and politics. These scholars' intensive archival research into journals and magazines and close readings of noncanonical works from the period reveal writers and artists who did not simply subscribe to a dogmatic brand of leftist politics that championed a "socialist realist" aesthetic style over modernist experimentation and capitalist mass culture. Many writers used their literary works to grapple with issues of modernism and mass culture to investigate how both phenomena might be used to enact progressive social change. As a part of this tradition, Tillie Olsen's "proletarian" novel Yonnondio: From the Thirties has been recognized by scholars such as Deborah Rosenfelt, Michael Staub, Constance Coiner, and Barbara Foley as a work in which a socialist-feminist writer used modernist experimentation to investigate the plight of a working-class family. Overlooked, however, is the importance film occupies within the novel. This paper argues that Yonnondio: From the Thirties offers one of the most sophisticated accounts to date of film consumption from a left-wing, feminist perspective. My account significantly revises many contemporary scholars' view of the novel, and of the historic Left in general, as opposed to mass-cultural forms. The novel critiques film's ability to align viewers into identifying with an oppressive materialistic ideology and investigates film's potential to liberate viewers from their immediate conditions by providing them with a totalistic social vision. By taking into account specific viewers' economic and gender backgrounds, Olsen presents an understanding of film that complicates recent Yonnondio scholarship that suggests film in the novel serves merely as an antithesis to progressive social change.

Despite the work of such scholars as Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson, who have explored various nuances of the Frankfurt School's theory of mass culture, a rather reductive account of Frankfurt School theories still prevails among many literary scholars' interpretations of popular culture within Olsen's novel. The Frankfurt School critiqued film only in its most consolidated and reified form within the classical Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and early 1940s and German propaganda. Avant-garde and independent cinema remained unaddressed, because neither shared the same operations of reification and containment exhibited by the "culture industry." Similarly, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer suggest that silent cinema provided a less hegemonic cultural function than sound cinema. They note that the ability to filter our reality through the culture industry "has been furthered by mechanical reproduction since the lightning takeover by the sound film."² And recent film scholarship on early cinema by Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, and Anne Friedberg further elaborates how early cinema requires new interpretive models to understand its ideological functions that classical theories of film spectatorship proposed by Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Louis Comolli, and Laura Mulvey cannot adequately account for.³ Olsen scholars, however, tend to conflate all films as belonging to the culture industry. In contrast to film, these scholars consider books, song, and oral stories viable oppositional resources to capitalist ideology that allow the novel's main protagonist, Mazie, to conceptualize and critique the dehumanization that results from this economic regime. For these critics, film, on the other hand, prevents the novel's characters from critiquing and imagining alternatives to capitalist alienation. In an otherwise excellent contextualization of Olsen's writing within a socialist-feminist tradition, Deborah Rosenfelt writes that one of the novel's characters has "her imaginative capacity absurdly channeled by her exposure to these films, her only escape from her real life as Gertrude Skolnick...