Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1997 by Harvey Teres

BETTER RED: THE WRITING AND RESISTANCE OF TILLIE OLSEN AND MERIDEL LE SUEUR by Constance Coiner. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. xii 282 pages. $45

Both Meridel Le Sueur and Tillie Olsen began their writing careers during the 1930s and were strongly influenced by the orthodox communist left (both joined the Communist Party). After experiencing some success as proletarian writers during the 1930s and 1940s, they endured lengthy periods of silence after which they reemerged to the plaudits of a new audience influenced by the radicalism,, and feminism of the 1960s. Better Red, written by a member of this audience, takes its place as the most comprehensive, nuanced, balanced, and intelligent treatment available of these writers' work and their times. The book includes biographical information, original material derived from interviews with both authors, helpful historical surveys of Party politics and culture, and interpretations of important individual works.

Better Red is organized as follows. Chapter One describes the proletarian literary movement of the 1930s and the Communist Party's influence in it; Chapter Two outlines the Party's position on the so-called "woman question." Chapters Three and Four are devoted to Le Sueur: Three provides a biographical sketch and evaluations of two relatively orthodox pieces of reportage, "Women on the Breadlines," and "I Was Marching"; Chapter Four focuses on the more open, heterodox texts, namely The Girl, "Our Fathers," "Annunciation," and "Corn Village." Chapters Five through Seven describe a similar movement away from closed, polemical writing and toward complexity in Olsen's work. This section includes fascinating discussions of Yonnondio: From the Thirties, Tell Me a Riddle, and Silences.

What interests Coiner most about Le Sueur and Olsen is their ability to avoid the tendentiousness and androcentrism typical of Party-sponsored proletarian literature during the 1930s, and to substitute an abiding concern to depict experiences that shape women's lives, such as domestic labor, sexuality, childbirth, and childrearing. Coiner chiefly argues that the value of the heterodox texts mentioned above is grounded in their incipient feminism, which resists both bourgeois values and leftist dogmatism. Employing Bakhtin's terminology, Coiner claims that these texts operate dialogically: they are multi-voiced, democratic, and therefore emancipatory, as opposed to the monological texts of orthodoxy, which offer a single voice of authority and are thus closed off to diversity and change. As Coiner herself acknowledges, Le Sueur's and Olsen's texts are not always successful in resisting orthodox pieties; indeed Coiner is opposed to "compensatory" critics who counter neglect of works such as these with reverence for them. To her credit she identifies some of the salient deficiencies of these writers and attempts to account for them through recourse to their limiting, "silencing" political and cultural surroundings.

With Better Red Coiner has made at least three major contributions. The first is her sympathetic but ironic and disciplined critique of Party politics--namely the vicissitudes of the Party's handling of the woman question, and its Manichaeanism (gender versus class, realism versus modernism, the personal versus the political, "us" versus "them"). A second major accomplishment is her patient appeal for the importance of these two unique writers. Until relatively recently Le Sueur, Olsen, and others burdened with the label of "proletarian writer" have been vilified or at best ignored. Readers may not always concur with Coiner's high regard for the quality of these writers' efforts, but they will come to admire their work nonetheless. Certainly they will not be inclined to dismiss them as an entire generation of readers and critics once did. Finally, Coiner dwells where few other critics do, even fellow feminist critics today: at the intersection where gender and class meet. I know of no more subtle and fresh treatment of this crucial subject. If this book receives the attention it deserves, it will help to reorient contemporary feminist scholarship so that it does justice to working-class women and the traditions they have built--literary and otherwise.

EDITORS' NOTE: We regret to inform our readers that we have learned of the death of Constance Coiner with her 12-year-old daughter, Ana Duarte-Coiner, in the crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island, New York, on 17 July 1996.