SOURCE: "After Long Silence: Tillie Olsen's 'Requa'," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring, 1984, pp. 61-9.

In the following essay, Gelfant addresses the protagonist's need to find meaning and self-renewal during the Depression in Olson's short story "Requa."

No one has written so eloquently about silences as Tillie Olsen, or shown as poignantly that a writer can recover her voice. In her most recent fiction, a long story called "Requa," she reclaims once more a power of speech that has proved at times extremely difficult to exercise. Silence followed the publication, almost fifty years ago, of sections from her early and still unfinished novel Yonnondio. Then came Tell Me a Riddle, bringing Olsen fame but not the sustained power to write she needed, and for another long period her voice was stilled. In 1970 "Requa" appeared, an impressive work which received immediate recognition and was reprinted as one...