"All the world a-cryen and I don't know for why"

Analyzing chapter 1 of Yonnondio and getting into this week's next set of chapters

Welcome to the Closely Reading book club: a space where we closely read classic literature together and discuss assigned chapters each week.

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Featuring a slice of Harry Sternberg’s 1939 mural “the family, industry and agriculture”

As a reminder, here’s our reading schedule for Yonnondio:

Week 1: April 14-April 20 (you should have this first chapter read before reading today’s post!)
Read chapter 1

Week 2: April 21-April 27 (read these chapters this week!)
Read chapters 2, 3, and 4

Week 3: April 28-May 4
Read chapters 5 and 6

Week 4: May 5-May 11
Read chapters 7 and 8 (end of the novella)

Please note a content warning: Yonnondio deals with themes of child abuse, spousal abuse, alcoholism, and other forms of violence. The style of the story sometimes obscures, and in many ways amplifies, these themes. Please take care of yourself, as needed, while engaging with this text.

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Let’s talk chapter 1

Last week, I shared the three different ways the novella opens: a poetry reference, a setting statement, and our first sentence.

Today, let’s talk about the literary background that inspired Olsen to write this story.

In her notes in The Feminist Press edition of Rebecca Harding Davis’s stories, Tillie Olsen writes:

“I first read Life in the Iron Mills in one of three water-stained, coverless volumes of bound Atlantic Monthlys bought for ten cents each in an Omaha junkshop. Contributions to those old Atlantics were published anonymously, and I was ignorant of any process whereby I might find the name of the author of this work which meant increasingly more to me over the years, saying “Literature can be made out of the lives of despised people,” and “You, too, must write.”

As we get into chapter one Yonnondio, I believe we can see Olsen writing a story “out of the lives of despised people.”

Mazie is the 6-and-a-half-year-old daughter of Anna and Jim — a working class family with four children. Jim works in the coal mines and is reminiscent of the laborers we met in Harding Davis’s short story. Anna is a depressed and grieving mother, reckoning with the limited existence available to her children in their class status. She hopes she can secure, for them, an “edjication” that will help them avoid their parents’ fate.

“What’s an edication?”

“An edjication?” Mrs. Holbrook arose from amidst the shifting vapors of the washtub and, with the suds dripping from her red hands, walked over and stood impressively over Mazie, “An edjication is what you kids are going to get. It means your hands stay white and you read books and work in an office. Now, get the kids and scat.”

Mazie, at the tender age of six, plays in the garbage outside.

She, like Hugh in Life in the Iron-Mills, must reside in the waste of the working-class labor. Mazie wonders about how the world works; the mines are like a gnawing stomach that eat men and announces their death with the whistle that haunts Mazie’s sleep.

Chapter 1 brings us a portrait of the Holbrook family—and it is an unhappy one. There is fear, there are ghosts. The children are “tear-stained” and routinely abused by their parents. The mother, Anna, is in a state of permanent-seeming shock from the harshness of their reality. The father, Jim, is an angry and exhausted man who drinks to escape that reality.

At the center of the story is Mazie, whose age becomes a uniquely tinted filter through which we learn about the realities of being “despised” in America.

In chapter 1, on this backdrop of a broken and unhappy family, we see bright moments of beautiful color and unexpected connection. When Jim takes Mazie with him to town, to get her a candy, he wanders into a saloon—and while he’s drinking whiskey, Mazie is attacked by Sheen McEvoy, an crazed man who attempts to throw her down the mineshaft to “feed” the mines and save the men who die in its depths every day.

Mazie escapes; Sheen himself falls into the mine and dies. Jim takes Mazie home and he and Anna wonder about the extent of what has happened to her while Sheen hurt her. This horrific incident prompts Jim to make a change for the family; he vows to move them all to a farm in the spring. No more coal mines; no more pain.

Mazie laughs in a sad and crazed way.

And that’s where chapter 1 ends.

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What makes it modernist?

Yonnondio is a modernist novella.

What does that mean?

Well, it means a few things. Modernism is a time period in literary history, roughly 1865 (post-Civil War) to 1945 (World War II). Of course, there are many time periods within that general period — Industrialization, World War I literature, and other genres and types of literature that emerge during this time (like “Realist” and “Naturalist” fiction).

Modernist texts are those which follow general genre characteristics that include things like:

• A collage-style of writing — a very imagistic approach to storytelling that relies on washes of color, broad sweeps of description, and an almost list-like approach to sharing setting details or characterization.

  • Think of how Mazie describes herself as a classic “collage” approach in tone, style, and voice. This is a hallmark modernist moment:

    • “I am Maze Holbrook…I am a-knowen things. I can diaper a baby. I can tell ghost stories. I know words and words. Tipple. Edjication. Bug dust. Supertendent. My poppa can lick any many in this here town.”

• Stream of consciousness — that famous approach best known from Virginia Woolf is often on display in modernist novels. She was not necessarily the first to do it, but was among the first to really center it at the heart of her craft and make it a true modernist signpost.

  • Both the characters in Yonnondio experience their own streams of consciousness and the narrator themselves work across these streams. Think of the entry into Andy Kvaternick’s experience:

    • “Chop, chop goes the black sea of his mind. How wild and stormy side, how the ship-wrecked thoughts plunge and whirl. Andy lifts his face to the stars and breathes frantic, like an almost drowned man. But it is useless, Andy. The coal dust lies too far inside; it will lie there forever…”

• Experimental form — you’ll see this on multiple levels, from fragmented and imperfect sentences to nonlinear storytelling (like braiding flashbacks into the present day) and other breaks in traditional storytelling. Things are not in perfect order; the idea was not to capture a tidy narrative arc but instead to mimic the chaos of the human mind and it’s untidy organization of impressions, memories, fears, anxieties, and feelings.

  • Notice how the novel jumps across perspectives, vantage points, and experiences. Think of how it plays with point of view, as when Jim’s mood changes the household and it’s unclear whether he’s harming or calming his children.

    • “It was cold and damp. Mazie shivered a little, but the shiver was pleasant. The wind came from the north, flinging fine bits of the coal dust from the culm against her face. They stung. Somehow it reminded her of the rough hand of her father when he caressed her, hurting her, but not knowing it, hurting with a pleasant hurt.”

There are many other characteristics of modernist literature we’ll get into as we continue to read this novella together.

As you read, watch for breaks in tradition—of which, you have a fantastic example in Pride & Prejudice, as well as Life in the Iron-Mills.

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Themes to notice

There’s much to notice in this short book. Here are few things to stay on the lookout for as we keep reading:

• Who is the narrator?

• When does the narrative shift perspectives? How does it do so?

• Who is “despised” in this novel? By whom? For what reasons?

• Where does abuse appear in the novel? Who perpetuates it? Who is hurt by it?

• What, or who, are the ghosts in the story?

• What are the markers of high class status? (Think of Mazie and Jim’s discussion of indoor plumbing and silken rugs and white tablecloths)

• What are the images associated with the mines?

  • Think of Sheen McEvoy’s wild attack on Mazie and his desire to throw her down the mineshaft to sate the mine’s appetite for children

  • What do children represent in this world? To their parents? To others? To themselves?

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The art of the Great Depression

A look at the art of Harry Sternberg // The Met on art from the Great Depression // Public art from the Great Depression // Social Realism and Art during the Great Depression //

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‘Til next time, happy reading!