"And now your father lies beside her, stroking and kissing her hair, silently making old vows again, vows that life will never let him keep."
Tillie Olsen has never finished to write this book about a proletarian family stifling and starving in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. The quote above is about one major theme of the novel: the role of the father. Jim rapes his wife, Anna, which will miscarry after that and will become sick. All this moment is narrated from the point of view of Mazie, there eldest child. She will find her mother lying on the floor, full of blood.
"Dont, Jim, dont. It hurts too much. No, Jim, no."
"Cant screw my own wife. Expect me to go to a whore? Hold still."
The merciful blood pounding in Mazie's ears, battering away the sounds.When Anna comes back to life, Jim promises her a better life. He always does so throughout the novel. Poor guys are good at it. Critics say it proves that Jim could have been a better man if life would have let him the chance. I don't think so. Jim is an asshole. I mean... If you're raped by your own husband that can't be a "good" man. Whatever the situation was: he just has to keep his snake in his pants.
Right at the beginning of the novel, Mazie recognizes the sound of death: the whistle from the mine. Violence in this novel often occur in the form of unsafe working conditions. And what was struggling the most is that, some people are still living in these conditions today. How embarrassing it is that a novel written in the 1970s about life in the 30s is still talking about present-day issues?
On another panel, the mother and Mazie are so near from one another that the reader will passed from one point of view to the other in a stream of consciousness where their lives are completely determined by the decisions of Jim. In this true patriarchal world, Anna will quietly slip from the real world into another, where Mazie will be driven. Physical, emotional and psychological sufferings are integral parts of the novel and never really get away from the family.
Seriously, this book pissed me off. Sometimes, I cried of rage against impossible situations. Even my ideological belief in education was washed away. The family will travel from the mines to a farm, and from the farm to a dump house in the country. And, even if their story have no real ending, reading it will make you carry Mazie and Anna's sorrows in your heart.
