Reading Feminist Readings: Recuperative Reading and the Silent Heroine of Feminist Criticism

Abstract Thirty years ago, Tillie Olsen presented a passionate case for feminist criticism as a corrective to cultural silencing. Delineating the “unnatural” silences characteristic of all creative endeavor but particularly definitive of women’s writing, Olsen described the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot ... hidden silences; work aborted, deferred, denied-hidden by the work which does come to fruition . . . censorship silences . . . the silences where the lives never came to writing. Among these, the mute inglorious Miltons: those whose waking hours are all struggle for existence; the barely educated; the illiterate; women. Their silence the silence of centuries as to how life was, is, for most of humanity.