On the Side of the Mother: Yonnondio and Call It Sleep
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Notes
1. The great mistake is foundationalism, the assumption that a maternal body "gives rise" to any natural effect.
2. Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992), pp. 65-78.
3. A number of theoretical phrasings ("reading as a woman," "reading as a feminist," etc.) rely on a claim of similitude in which categories are kept separate. I emphasize the political dimension of reading implied in the word "with." As Paul Friere writes: "political action on the side of the oppressed must be pedagogical action in the authentic sense of the word, and therefore, action with the oppressed." In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. 53. In my reading, the "oppressed" subject is the textualized mother.
4. For a complex description of American gendering see Sheila M. Rothman, Women's Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideals and Practices, 1870 to the Present (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972).
5. Olsen was in Faribault, Minnesota, when she began; she bore a daughter before her twentieth birthday and stopped writing sometime around 1936. An early chapter ("The Iron Throat") was published in 1934 in Partisan Review. The entire manuscript was recovered in the seventies. Most of the early chapters were intact. Olsen chose from among drafts of the later sections and published them in 1974. See Deborah Rosenfelt, "From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and the Radical Tradition," in Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class, and Race in Literature and Culture (New York: Methuen, 1985), 216-248; see as well Tillie Olsen's "A Note About This Book," which appears at the end of the novel.
6. Regarding time in the novels: Olsen's is set in the twenties; Roth's begins in 1907, and most of the novel is set in the following decade. Interestingly, then, Roth's character Genya shares historical proximity with Olsen's Yiddish mother, who came to Ellis Island following the failed 1905 Revolution in Russia. But Olsen's descriptions of her mother's life (the fullest is evoked in her novella "Tell Me a Riddle") bear little nostalgia.
7. See Rosenfelt, 239.
8. Rosenfelt, 239.
9. Recent critical receptions of Roth's novel are almost entirely honorific and are firmly situated on the side of a masculine subject. See, for example, Lynn Altenbernd, "An American Messiah: Myth in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep," MFS, 35 (1989), 673-87; Naomi Diamant, "Linguistic Universes in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep," CL, 27 (1986), 336-55; and Stephen J. Adams, "'The Nosiest Novel Ever Written': The Soundscape of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep," TCL, 35 (1989), 43-64. For all of these critics' attention to sound, none offers a reading of Genya that struggles with her positioning and silencing. Even feminist mentions of the novel appear to perpetuate a predictable "view" of the mother: for example, Baum, Hyman, and Michel note the Oedipal overtones of the novel but regard them as "not . . . destructive" (p. 246). See Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, Sonya Michel, The Jewish Woman in America (New York: New American Library, 1976).
10. Walter J. Ong, S.J., "A Dialectic of Aural and Objective Correlatives," in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), 1160-61.
11. In The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1988), Kaja Silverman argues that the female voice, like the female body, is circumscribed in film. That is, the female subject's voice no more escapes filmic entrapment than her figure does since both are created through technologies based on masculine desire. I argue that Olsen's aural representation mediated by the daughter's view offers an opening, a way out of the double bind (the shot/reverse shot).
12. See Baum, Hyman, and Michel (pp. 193-205) for a discussion of this tendency in male leftist writers of the thirties, and particularly among Jewish writers: as Jewish men entered the world of work, Jewish women were styled as "American ladies," appropriately positioned at home, grooming the children for American life and at...
