Tillie Olsen's Reproductive Aesthetics

Abstract

Tillie Olsen's Reproductive Aesthetics Louise Mccune David and Eva, married for forty-seven years, with several adult children long departed from their care, cannot agree how they will spend the rest of their days. David wants to move to the Haven, a cooperative retirement community where the couple's needs—for recreation, socialization, medical attention—will be not only met, but anticipated. He points to the fixtures of their worn-in home life: that wheezing vacuum begging for repair, those dirty dishes stacked in the sink, the feeling that this miserable day is no different from any other. He turns to his wife, inspired: there will be no wheezing vacuums and no dirty dishes at the Haven. There, they will be relieved of their boredom, their responsibilities, and, not least, each other. They will have reading groups to attend and outdoor space to roam. Owing to these distractions, the resentment between them may be left to wither. Like so, David makes his case, but Eva holds her line. There is no way that she will go. It's not that Eva finds their house agreeable. In fact, 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. So why does she insist upon staying? In Eva's words, she is "use't."1 She's used to the tedium of keeping a home, used to boredom and isolation, used to being all used up. For too long, she was beholden to her children, to their "tracking, smudging, littering, dirtying, engaging her in endless defeating battle" (she's kept score), and to her husband's messes, too (T, 77). She seems now to want to enjoy whatever small prizes remain after a lifetime of surrender: a small library that's been read to tatters, a record player audible only at its loudest setting, and—most of all—the stillness of a house finally emptied of children. Residence at the co-op would entail new neighbors, a new schedule, and all the trappings of communal living, so Eva demurs. Party to her protest are the very same household implements which figured in David's appeal. She runs the offending vacuum. She stands over the sink and scrubs the dirty dishes. She's too exhausted to move to the [End Page 883] Haven, and she says so by turning away from her husband's desires, toward the very same tasks that have been exhausting her for years. My interest in Tillie Olsen's novella about David and Eva, titled, Tell Me a Riddle, has to do with Eva's contradictory refusal: though she makes it quite clear that she is aggrieved by the overlapping burdens of being a mother, homemaker, and wife, she resolves to remain in her family house and attached to the various discomforts of being there. Even when presented with the option to leave, Eva doubles down on the place that's made her miserable. I will refer later in this article to a transformation in Eva's demeanor that occurs over the course of the narrative: in brief, when Eva does finally quit her domestic routine, her angry resistance turns into maudlin reminiscence, as though she can only sustain her objection to the many sacrifices she's made on account of her gender for as long as she's still making those sacrifices. All told, reading Eva's response has proven difficult. 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. As she is beset by...