Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio
In contrast to many other Depression-era novels, in which the teamwork of the common man is seen as society's glue, Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio looks with great admiration at one family's struggle to keep above water. Through the travails of a coal-mining/farming family, Anna Holbrook becomes the one constant in a society that turns man against himself, and where fortune is evanescent.
The thirst for something stable is evident as the children show their awe of the physical world. As an adult explains the stars to Mazie, Olsen writes: "As his words misted into the night and disappeared, she scarcely listened‹only the aura over them of timelessness, of vastness, of eternal things that had been before her and would be after her, remained and entered into her with a great hurt and wanting." (33) The present, the words describing the stars, hold no intrigue for Mazie; the idea of a permanence stronger than the Depression does. Two pages later, Olsen writes of Mazie stripping corn silk: "Šshe would dream of weaving it into garments incredible. But the tassells withered, grew brown and smelly, and she had to throw them away." (35) Her actual life results only in death, and she must again call up something enduring, "a poem learned from Old Man Caldwell." (35)
Olsen views the Holbrook's struggle as heroic. Says Caldwell, "'Mazie. Live, don't existŠBetter to be a cripple and alive than dead, not able to feel anything. No, there is more‹to rebel against what will not let life be.'" (37) It is this very nobility that allows the Holbrook family to survive past expectations. Life is filled with hurdles, most coming from other people. After learning about different natio...
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... emotional resource for the split family. The last passage reveals Mazie's mixture of compassion and strength necessary for survival in the dusty, cold world: "Her hand on the arm around him was open and tender, but the other lay fisted and terrible like her father's that night in the kitchen. Till the dayŠ" (152) Olsen has faith in the family; they have waded through hardship after hardship, encountered abandonment and death, and still they will wake the next day. Survival here is not accomplished by reliance upon others, but on one's own reserve of will. This is a stark departure from Steinbeck's and others' views on the Depression; nonetheless, both schools of thought hold tremendous sympathy for the lives full of misery about which they wrote.
Work Cited
Olsen, Tillie. Yonnondio: From the Thirties, Delacorte, 1974, reprinted, Dell, 1989.
Steinbeck strikes at the fear in every man’s soul, with his portrayal of the poverty stricken life of the Joads as they travel from one stage of abandonment and what would seem like a helpless state to a journey of enduring perseverance. The Joads, Steinbeck’s creation in the Novel Grapes of Wrath is a large close-knit family living in Oklahoma during the “Dust Bowl” era. Steinbeck documents their journey beginning with their homelessness due to the crop failures to them surviving in a box car at the end of their journey. I think Steinbeck’ intention is to illustrate to the reader that being poor doesn’t always equate with being helpless. The Joads demonstrate this by their resilience to overcome homelessness, death, and prejudice.
Imagine being discriminated against because of your ethnicity; or being the only woman on a ranch, stuck in a loveless marriage, when all you really want is someone to talk to. What about having to kill that friend, and bury all chances of breaking free from the life of the average migrant worker? How would you feel? These scenarios in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men illustrate the need and desire for companionship in life. There's Crooks, the negro stable buck; Curley's wife, whose marriage to Curley hasn't exactly been lively; and George and Lennie, whose friendship is strong enough to get them to a better life and out of the negetive cycle that the average migrant worker became trapped in during the Great Depression.
Tillie Olsen's novel “Yonnondio: From the Thirties” portrays complex layers of physical and psychological conflict and the result is a haunting work of social criticism. Yonnondio is, among many things a protest novel and is representations of poverty, violence, and exploitation convey its protest. Social criticism, in literary context, means seeing literature as a reflection of the environment. Examples of social criticism include: struggles of the poor, oppression of the working class, and even civil rights struggles. Social criticism is not historical criticism. Social criticism examines literature in the cultural, economic, and political context in which it is written or received. There are several themes, symbols, and instances in the story that add to the social criticism displayed in the story. Olsen uses the theme poverty, which contributes to the idea of social criticism in the story
Physiological Basis of disease: DMD is the commonest and most serious form of the dystrophies. The gene responsible for dystrophin which, when absent, causes DMD. Amount of dystrophin correlates with the severity of the disease (i.e., the less dystrophin present, the more severe the phenotype). Since the gene is on the X chromosome, it primarily affects males, and females who are carriers have milder symptoms ( www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000705.htm).
John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath is one of the most influential books in American History, and is considered to be his best work by many. It tells the story of one family’s hardship during the Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s. The Joads were a hard-working family with a strong sense of togetherness and morals; they farmed their land and went about their business without bothering anyone. When the big drought came it forced them to sell the land they had lived on since before anyone can remember. Their oldest son, Tom, has been in jail the past four years and returns to find his childhood home abandoned. He learns his family has moved in with his uncle John and decides to travel a short distance to see them. He arrives only to learn they are packing up their belongings and moving to California, someplace where there is a promise of work and food. This sets the Joad family off on a long and arduous journey with one goal: to survive.
Even though there is tragedy there-what Steinbeck seems to be saying is that the human spirit can and will endure despite immense privations. The will to live and endure will always overcome defeated hopes.
John Steinbeck's Compassion for the Loneliness and Isolation Suffered by Ordinary People in Of Mice and Men
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