SOURCE: "Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle: The Dialectics of Silence," in Frontiers, Vol. XV, No. 2, 1994, pp. 1-22.

In the following essay, Pfaelzer discusses the ways in which Olsen uses language and silence in Tell Me a Riddle to represent Eva's journey from alienation to engagement.

Logos, the expressed word, empowers. "God said, 'Let there be light,' And there was light" (Gen. 1:3). By the act of speech, God ascribed reality and assigned meaning to the object of his desire. Inevitably, man arrogated this divine power to himself: "Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast in the field and every bird in the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them: whatever the man called every living creature, that was his name" (Gen. 2:19). And the word reified.

But by what word shall woman call every living creature? For the...