Chapter One:

Summary:

Mazie, a six-year-old child, wakes up each day to the sound of the mine whistle. During the morning this is a call for all the miners to get up and go to work. If it rings during the day, Mazie is afraid because it means that one of the workers - possibly her father - has been killed.

On this particular morning she wakes up to hear her father, Jim, getting ready for work. Her mother, Anna, is in the kitchen. She offers to make Jim breakfast. He refuses as he has to go to work early in order to supervise a new, thirteen-year-old worker. The boy, Andy Kvaternick, is taking the place of his father who died recently in the mine. The boy's mother, Marie, is so broken by these events that she wants her daughters to become nuns. Jim is irritated by Anna's relation of Marie's desires and tells her to "quit your woman's blabbin."

Mazie goes back to sleep and Anna lies in bed thinking. She thinks of her four children, and of the terror of the mine whistle. She also worries about the new fire boss, who is apparently too lazy to check the levels of gas each night. Such carelessness, she knows, can lead to a massive explosion and the death of many miners. Suddenly the baby wakes up and Mazie stumbles out of bed, by instinct, to feed it. While Mazie is comforting the baby she asks her mother what an "edjication" is. Her mother claims that an "edjication" is what Mazie, and her brothers and sisters, are going to get.

Mazie lies in the sun, talking to herself. In an extended passage, she speaks about how the mine is the "bowels of the earth" and the coal makes people black inside. She also talks about a story her father told her, that the operators of the mine are ghosts, and contemplates that perhaps she is "black inside too."

Then follows a long passage about Andy Kvaternick, told from the perspective of a distant third-person narrator. It describes the futility and desperation of Andy's new job and new life, and the decline of dignity that he, like all miners, will suffer: "no more can you stand erect," the narrator intones. The passage ends with a depressing view of Andy's future (he will either be slain by "the fat bellies," the capitalists, or he will die from some miserable disease) and cautions that his only solace will be in alcohol.

The narration returns to Anna and Jim Holbrook. Their family life has been suffering. Jim has been hitting Anna and beating up on the children; he has also been drinking excessively. Anna has responded by lashing out at the children. One night Mazie gets up the nerve to follow him as he goes into town to drink, in order to ask him why the whole world seems to be "a-cryen." He is angry with her for following but reacts with kindness, taking her to buy a sucker and promising to protect her from the "ghosts" of the mine.

While Jim is inside the saloon, Mazie stands outside and looks at the sky. Life is pleasant for a few fleeting moments and then Sheen McEvoy stumbles outside of the saloon. McEvoy is a former miner whose face was ripped off during a mining accident. Now he spends all his days drinking, in a state of mental illness. He sees Mazie silhouetted against the sky and thinks she is a ghost escaped from the mine. Upon seeing she is a child, he is possessed with the idea to feed her to the mine. He grabs her and runs, determined to feed her to the mine as a sacrifice - "Men'll die - but they'll live if she gets the baby."

Fortunately, the night watchman sees McEvoy carrying the petrified Mazie and attacks him with a pickax. He catches up to them right before McEvoy throws Mazie down the mine's shaft. During the fray, Mazie rolls away and McEvoy falls down the shaft instead. Then the night watchman returns to the saloon and demands to know whose child Mazie is. Jim collects her and yells at her for leaving, then stops when he realizes she is sick. He takes her home, where she lies in a fever. Afterwards he goes to Anna, and tells her his plan to move the entire family to the farms and open spaces of the Dakotas in the spring. "It's good for the kids," he says. As Anna is agreeing, however, the delirious Mazie interrupts their discussion with a burst of demonic laughter.

Analysis

Mazie's alarm clock - the way she begins each day - is the mine whistle, the same whistle that signifies death to her if it is blown in the middle of the day. Each day, then, Mazie wakes up to face death and destruction, as do the other members of this mining community. The importance of the whistle in the first two chapters is extremely important - it is a disembodied symbol of death, seeming to come from a being higher than mortals, that determines the moves of all members of this community.

Olsen underlines this symbol of death by opening the book with the story of another death - that of Andy Kvaternick's father Chris. Chris met his death in the mine, and it is anticipated by both the Holbrooks and the distant narrator who speculates on Andy's future that Andy will meet the same fate. One thing that is interesting about this opening story is that Olsen recognizes a complicated web of blame and responsibility for the boy's impending death - it is Jim, after all, who will introduce Andy to the terrible world of the mine.

This opening story also introduces the reader to another vital theme of this book: the world of women's pain, and the ways in which women's suffering is silenced. Marie Kvaternick is so distraught by the effect that the mine has had on her family that she wishes her girls would become nuns. But when Anna tries to share this with Jim, he silences her. Throughout the book, these "silences," and the ways in which pain is encoded in them, appear again and again.

The abrupt switch in narration for Andy Kvaternick's story is an example of the "unfinished" quality of Yonnondio. With abrupt switches in style, tone, and narrative method, we are reminded that this is an unfinished novel that has been pieced together from many sources. Just as we are watching the evolution of the story, we are also watching the evolution of the writer's style.

The Sheen McEvoy tale is very important. It marks Mazie's introduction to the worlds of sex and death - sex, because there is clearly something sexually intimate about the notion of a virgin's sacrifice, and death, because McEvoy is trying to kill her. It also shows again how women are consistently victims of violence and misunderstanding. It is no accident that McEvoy interprets the mine as a woman who needs a child to be pacified - "All women want kids," he claims. Through such violence and such misunderstanding, the book points out yet again the different, but no less serious ways in which women's lives are oppressed by the very same conditions that damage and destroy their men.

Chapter Two:

Summary:

The Holbrooks are excited about their move in the spring, but for the rest of the winter they are forced to scrimp and save even more than before. Anna tries to inspire the children with the hope of a new life, but they are restless and find it difficult to accept the promised changes. Their father, forced to stop drinking to save money, tries to be gentle with them, but they find this to be strange and awkward. Meanwhile the town continues to fear that the new fire boss' carelessness will cost them their lives in the mines.

One day in November, everyone is restless and disturbed. The weather seems to inspire this behavior - the sky is gray and thick, like "an eyelid shut in death." Mazie takes the baby and her younger brother Will outside. Five-year-old Will asks Mazie lots of questions about the meaning of life and of other things that he is unable to understand. Mazie does her best to answer his questions. Neither one of them know what the sky is, for example, although they understand what it means to look out a window and not see anything because the window is so grimy.

Suddenly, Mazie jumps up in a terror. She imagines that the sky is full of ears and that the ears and the eyes of the earth are watching them hungrily. She runs with Will and as they run, they hear the whistle from the mine. They run in the direction of the mine and discover that, due to the gas explosion, many of the workers have been buried alive. Jim is missing.

A long, ironic passage from a distant, third-person narrator follows. The theme is how the sight of the devastated women at the mine is picturesque, how their tragedy is classic in the Greek or Roman mode, and how it would be perfect for an artist to carve their forms into a cameo. In a long parenthesis, the narrator describes the press release the mine will issue about the "unavoidable catastrophe" of the explosion.

Jim returns home after five days. He seems haunted and swears to move the family in the spring, no matter what. A brief passage, with no clear narrator, follows. The passage is a series of bits of dialogue from different family members regarding their struggle to save enough money to leave. Anna tries to get short-term jobs cooking and washing, Jim takes on dangerous jobs working under a loose roof, and the children are growing gaunt and thin without adequate food.

After many hardships, including a delay due to weather, the family is finally ready to go in April. Jim loads up their "decrepit" wagon and prepares their old horse. The family says good-bye to their neighbors, who watch them leave with "no envy," only "wistfulness."

Analysis:

This chapter serves primarily to examine how the hardships of poverty have created quiet rifts in the family life of the Holbrooks - rifts that will explode as the book goes on. The children, for example, are so used to a family life filled with violence and hostility that they cannot take their father's gentleness seriously. They continually wait for a drunken explosion or a beating, and believe that their father's attempts to reconcile with them are false. The fact that they are uninspired by their parents' plans to move show that they do not anticipate a positive change in their quality of life. Such disillusionment at such a young age is a by-product of the incredible poverty and difficulties these children have endured.

This destruction of childhood innocence is a theme throughout the book, and it is stressed in passages such as the exchange between Mazie and Will as they lie under a gray sky. It is important that although neither Mazie nor Will understand the meanings of potentially romantic words such as "sky" or "breath," they know what the flapping motion of rags sounds like, and how it is impossible to look out of a dirty window. These are their childhood memories, Olsen is saying, and they have been deprived of a romantic vision of childhood by their economic circumstances.

The explosion in the mine is a crucial turning point for the Holbrooks. It becomes obvious that if Jim continues working in the mine, he will die or have his spirit crushed completely. The entire family pitches in, and for a moment there seems to be a strange type of harmony in their combined exhaustion and hunger. Unfortunately, Olsen's use of foreshadowing at the end of the chapter - the lack of envy from their neighbors, and the echo of Mazie's demonic laughter - warns us that despite their efforts, the next move will not bring an answer to their problems.

The juxtaposition of many different narrative voices (there are three shifts in the narrative voice on page 30 alone) offers Olsen the opportunity to comment on the lives of her characters as their lives pass. Her use of the third-person narrator, particularly in the ironic passage following the mine explosion, offers a greater historical context to the struggles of the individuals of the story.

Chapter Three:

Summary:

For three days the Holbrooks ride across the plains of Wyoming and Nebraska. The fresh air and the dramatic colors of the sky and the earth put everyone in a good mood - Anna sings and feels "like a bride," and even Jim joins in. On the fourth day, they enter South Dakota, and their old horse Nellie refuses to move. Stubbornly, she refuses Jim's efforts until a farmer suggests that they use "the old grass-on-the-end-of-a-stick gag." This works brilliantly - Nellie runs without complaint for two hours. The gag also delights the entire family.

Suddenly a storm darkens the sky. Snow quickly follows, and Anna covers the children with blankets. Soon the snow is covering everything, including the road. The wagon gets stuck in a pool of freezing water. Jim gets off the wagon to push it out. Mazie jumps off the wagon to help. Her assistance by pushing a rock away is the crucial move that makes the wagon move. An hour later they come to a small town with a tiny hotel, where they spend the next two nights. A Swedish family runs the hotel; the wife is extremely kind to the children and Ben cries when he has to leave her.

Two days later they approach the farmlands that they will be working on. The scene is pastoral and beautiful; everyone's heart swells with hope and excitement. Anna and Jim sing as the children have happy thoughts of their own. Anna also has happy thoughts: of sending the children to school, of finally having nice things, and of working with the earth. Suddenly she remembers a twilight ritual her grandmother used to engage in, involving candles, bread, and wine. She breaks their duet to tell Jim about it.

At midnight, the Holbrooks approach their farm. They are awed by the beauty of the land and the gentle sloping hills. After some fumbling, they find their own home - a humble structure dwarfed by a large barn. They fall asleep dreaming of the future.

Analysis

In this short chapter, almost a coda to the dreams of Chapter Two, we follow the Holbrooks on a peaceful, relaxing trip west. Olsen spends a great deal of this chapter describing the natural beauty of the land and the earth; it seems that the Holbrooks, with their appreciation of the beauty around them, will be able to work in harmony with the natural elements around them.

Sadly, it is not to be so, and the chapter has a few moments of foreshadowing to point this out. The Holbrooks will be working as tenant farmers - a large farmer owns all the land and rents homes and equipment to small farmers for the majority of their production. Although Olsen does not specify the particulars of such a situation, tenant farming - especially in the 1930s - was notoriously hard and rarely profitable. John Steinbeck would chronicle the struggles of tenant farming in The Grapes of Wrath, another book about this period. Like Grapes, Yonnondio shows that nature is a double-edged sword: although the earth is generous and abundant, it can also be spiteful. In Grapes, drought robs the Joads of their farm; in the third chapter of Yonnondio, a brutal storm makes it clear that nature's beauty can overwhelm the capacity of man.

But there was another element that made 1930s tenant farming so harsh, and that was the greed of people in power. Once again, Yonnondio will echo The Grapes of Wrath with its development of this theme - but not until Chapter Four. For now, it is foreshadowed with the humorous story of Nellie, the Holbrooks' tired horse. Just as Jim gets Nellie to move with the tantalizing prospect of grass on a stick, the Holbrooks will be fooled by the prospect of financial stability for their hard work on the farm. It is no accident that the storm follows the Nellie scene - it stands not just as a comedic moment in the novel but as the sign of things to come.

There has been some critical interest in Anna's memory during this chapter - is it a Jewish ritual? And what, if any, is the significance of Anna's Jewish ancestry as related to her struggles in this book? On this subject Olsen herself is silent, and it does not occupy an important part of the book, but it is something worth thinking about.

Chapter Four:

Summary:

At first, all goes well. Everyone enjoys the fresh air and the hard work to be done on a farm. Food is abundant, at least in comparison to how it was in the mining town. Everything seems to be going well, except for a warning from their neighbor, Benson. Benson claims that, with tenant farming, "you cant make a go of it."

They meet lots of decent, hard-working people. Their neighbors include Benson and Missis Ellis, who is the local midwife and lives with her once-rich father, Caldwell. It is traditional to hold a big mid-summer dance in the Holbrooks' barn, and many days are spent preparing for this event. All the women come to help Anna cook and set up. Anna is so joyful that she even buys new hair ribbons for herself and Mazie. The night of the dance is lovely, and the dance itself is a great success. We see this scene through the eyes of Mazie, who believes that Anna is the loveliest woman in the room.

The summer days go quickly. From Anna and Jim, there is a sense of apprehension and tension that the children, drunk with farm life, can barely perceive. One night Mazie runs out of the house to lay by the roadside. As she is looking up at the stars, a buggy pulls up next to her - Old Man Caldwell. He gets out of the buggy and lies down beside her. They have a long conversation about the origin of the stars, and Mazie is overwhelmed by his explanations. She feels, for the first time, the expanse of the universe and the smallness of her own existence in comparison. A few days later she sees him talking to Anna on the porch, while she makes tomato preserve. He is talking about politics, economics, and the inability of the small farmer to make a living. Anna asks him if he learned this in college; his response is that his education began after he left school.

Mazie and Will go to school for the first time in the fall. At first, they are both placed in the first grade, even though Mazie is eight years old. They both learn to read quickly and are promoted a grade. The work remains too easy for them and they spend a great deal of time listening to the older students talk about exotic subjects like geography. For the first time, Mazie is aware of her own poor clothing, and she feels social shame. When things get very bad, she recites a silly poem she learned from Old Man Caldwell, and "the sadness would ebb."

One night, she runs away from home. Things are starting to sour between her mother and father again, and she is afraid. She runs down the road and through the corn fields, cutting her feet. When she sees what must be Caldwell's house, she stops and knocks on the door. Missis Ellis opens the door. Caldwell is sick, she explains, but would like to see Mazie. When Mazie enters the room, Caldwell has withered. He is obviously very ill. He pulls Mazie close and tries to give her some deathbed wisdom: "Live, don't exist. Learn from your mother, who has had everything to grind out life and yet has kept life." But as he does so, the point of view shifts and our new narrator explains that he has failed. As Mazie leaves, Caldwell calls to Bess that Mazie must have some of his books.

As Mazie enters the kitchen, she hears her father explaining that "they" are taking everything. Caldwell dies a week later; but Mazie never gets the books. Her father sells them in town for fifty cents.

The winter comes on cold and harsh. School closes, and the entire family spends the day crouching around the wood stove in the kitchen. Anna, pregnant again, lets the housework pile up. The children grow thin and ill; Jim grows angry. Alternatively, he beats the children or tells them stories and makes them toys. Quarrels are frequent.

One day Jim and Mazie find a clutch of newborn chicks outside in the snow, and Jim piles them into Mazie's apron. He instructs her to warm them up in the oven, and then he leaves. She leaves them in oven, and "[n]obody noticed when the cheep became hysterical and finally ceased." Anna moves around as if in a dream. When Jim enters, he smells the dead chicks and gets very upset. He and Anna have a serious argument. For the first time in the text, we hear them hurling insults at each other. He hits Anna and the children begin to cry; Will beats Jim with his little fists. Finally, Jim runs out of the house. The worst storm "in years" starts that same night; there is no thaw for four days. When Jim returns, ten days after he left, there is no discussion of where he went or why he returned.

Early in March, Mazie and Will wander through the woods. The earth is no longer inviting. Everything is ugly, spotted with dirty snow, and damp. The trees remind Mazie of swollen bellies and she grows nauseous. She beats up on Will. That night Jim wakes her up. Anna is in labor, and Mazie must wait up with her until Jim gets back with Missis Ellis. The nausea returns and Mazie tries to think of other things. Meanwhile, Missis Ellis returns and the birthing process begins. Mazie awakens to find Jim carrying her into the house; she has fled outside during the labor. The child is fine, although Anna's breasts have cracked, so she will have difficulty nursing.

The last paragraph is an extended, dream-like meditation. Jim is trying to convince Anna to get up and leave - presumably the farm. Jim's last words are "But you cant take it lyin down - like a dawg. You cant, Anna."

Analysis:

In this long chapter, we see both the wonders of farm life and how rapidly its precarious happiness can spill over. The Holbrooks' fragile hopes are crushed yet again; the fact that they are pushed out by the greed of the farm supervisor shows that they are as helpless before the greed of man as they are before the brutalities of a winter storm.

A profit-loving, unseen capitalist force pushes the Holbrooks off their farm - just like the Joads in Steinbeck's great novel. But unlike The Grapes of Wrath, which focuses on the struggle for selfhood and subjectivity under the conditions of poverty and helplessness, Yonnondio focuses on the deterioration of the family as a whole.

Women's pain is particularly important, and Olsen does not shy from showing how poor men, despite their own oppression, use their gender advantage to exacerbate women's troubles. Therefore we see the mental and physical deterioration of Anna as she suffers through yet another unwanted pregnancy. Anna's fecundity is purposely contrasted with her family's barren chances for opportunity. Her pregnancy is a reminder that for poor women, multiple pregnancies, often unwanted, serve to degrade women and to make it difficult for them to serve as good mothers to the children they already have. (Note how the death of the chicks in the oven comes right before Anna's birth.) On a smaller level, in an example meant to show how Mazie is being prepared for a life like her mother's, we see how men seek to keep education out of the hands of women - this is why Jim sells Mazie's books without consulting her.

Caldwell serves as a wisdom figure in this book. He is the sole person in this book who has knowledge of the forces that work to keep poor people subjected; he is the sole person in this book with an advanced education. Unlike more sentimental books, however, Olsen does not allow Caldwell to share his knowledge in a productive way. Instead, during the deathbed scene, Caldwell is as helpless to impart his knowledge as Mazie is to save her family from poverty and pain. By showing us Caldwell's failure, Olsen's message is that simple knowledge of the problem is ineffective - one must act, rather than simply know. Wisdom without action is impotence, and passivity is deadly.

But Caldwell does serve one other important purpose: he opens Mazie's mind to worlds she had never considered. He also validates her existence, a rare thing for a poor child and an even rarer thing for a poor girl. Both of these things help Mazie excel in school and give her a sense of courage - strong enough for her to run through the fields in the middle of the night and knock on his door.

The winter scene, with the entire family huddled in the tiny kitchen, has a cramped, terrible energy. The spectacle of the entire family, hungry and benumbed by the weather, stuck in one tiny space is startling and torturous, even for the most detached reader. One comes to understand how the lack of open space can serve as oppressor - and also how the travails of hunger, pregnancy, and desperation can combine with an enclosed space to addle poor Anna's mind. It also serves to drive Jim away, but as a man he has the freedom to leave.

Chapter Five:

Summary:

The chapter opens with a cinematic journey through the Holbrooks' new environment: the slaughterhouses on the edge of a slum. In a series of quick cuts, Olsen shows us the particulars of their new home: the "skeleton children," the poorly constructed homes, and, especially, the smell: "fog of stinkŠvast unmoving stench." They move into an "ancient battered house" near the river. The stench is overpowering and makes the children ill.

Will and Mazie return to school with a fierce warning from Anna: "I catch you not doin good and I'll knock the livin daylights out of you, you hear?" They are immediately set apart from the rest of the class by the fact of being new students, and being from the country at that. Mazie shuts her eyes and tries to imagine that she is still on the farm, but she is rudely awakened at recess. Another student, Smoky, attacks Mazie on the playground. She chases him but fails to catch him; instead she settles for shoving two girls who stand by, laughing. The teacher blames her for the incident. Standing in front of the class, Mazie begins to cry. Will claims that she is not his sister, and she cries harder.

That night the family visits the Bedners, old friends of Jim and Anna. The Bedners have prospered and live in a nice home in a better part of town. The visit is strained, but Jim gets information about a possible job with the road and sewer works. The visit ends on a happy but awkward note, with Mrs. Bedner playing the piano and the whole house singing.

Anna feels paralyzed by weariness and deprivation. Ben is sick in bed from the smell, and her attempts to beautify the house are useless. The house "resisted her." Her mind moves frantically over her family's needs. In her brief spurts of consciousness (this portion of the chapter is told from her perspective), we see the frightening psychological states of the children. Mazie believes that the family is still on the farm. Will is morose, surly, and defiant and beats his sick younger brother. Ben is frightened and confused. Bess, the baby, "shrank and yellowed." Anna feels herself falling into complete detachment and emotional distance from her family, her life, and her troubles.

Jim, meanwhile, works hard at his sewer job. The contractor wants them to lay down twelve feet a day, "when ten's all anything on two legs can manage." At the end of a long day, the men strip off their work clothes and complain. They are interrupted by the appearance of the contractor, who announces a new plan: they will lay ten feet a day, but with two men rather than four. The arrogance of the contractor and the seeming impossibility of the task provoke Tracy, a young, hotheaded worker, into quitting. Jim, frustrated by the work and angry that Tracy doesn't have "a woman and kids hangin round [his] neck," goes to a bar to drink off his anger.

In a long, didactic passage, Olsen switches narration to tell the story of Tracy after he leaves the sewering job. Unable to find another job, he travels from place to place, getting hungrier and hungrier, and at last he ends up on a chain gang in Florida. It is his own fault, this passage claims, for "not yet knowing a job was God."

The Holbrook family continues to deteriorate. The children run afoul of the perils of street life, confronting hostility and violence from strangers. In a particularly terrifying passage, we walk with Mazie through the streets as she goes to fetch a bucket of lard. She is surrounded by prostitutes, hustlers, and bums; she is spat on and witnesses at least three acts of violence. Anna, pregnant again, is too tired and ill to pay attention to the children's emotional demands.

Anna's incoherence and neglect of the children creates more tension between Anna and Jim, especially when it affects Anna's ability to prepare dinner. Their neighbors, a kindly Polish couple named the Kryckskis, silently emerge to help, sensing the Holbrooks' despair.

One night, Mazie hears her father come in drunk. She hides underneath the bedclothes while he lurches through the house. She hears an exchange between Jim and Anna in bed - Anna protesting, while Jim ranting "Cant screw my own wife. Expect me to go to a whore? Hold still." Then Mazie finds Anna on the floor, with blood everywhere. She manages to rouse her father, who calls a doctor while Mazie looks after Bess.

The doctor announces that Anna has miscarried and is very ill. The baby, Bess, is also suffering from numerous problems - rickets, thrush, and dehydration. Disgusted with the "pigsty," the doctor prescribes a number of things to help Anna and Bess get well. Mazie has run away, but Jim finds her and takes her home, and tries to comfort her. The chapter ends with the two of them sitting together in a chair, while Jim's mind is full of things that are "terrible and bitter."

Analysis

Olsen opens this chapter with a rapid tour through that industrial inferno, a workers' slum. This is a terrifying world where violence erupts constantly and without warning - on the job, in the streets, and in the home.

The most pervasive symbol of this world is the smell of the nearby packinghouse. Olsen tries to describe it, and although she cannot fully grasp it in words, it pervades the rest of the book. The stench serves as a physical reminder - for little is more oppressive than constant stink--of the economic, social, and psychological oppression the Holbrooks and all other workers suffer. It makes Ben ill and pitches the rest of the family into a long, horrifying, dreamlike state of apathy and immobility.

The slum's new and terrible codes are aptly showcased in Mazie's return to school. Unlike the school in the country, where she was given an opportunity to learn and quickly proved herself brighter than the work she was allowed to do, here Mazie is degraded and dehumanized. The first degradation comes at the hands of the teacher, whose supercilious introduction of Mazie and Will to the rest of the class practically begs a contemptuous response from the other students. When Smoky responds in kind, Mazie is blamed. The teacher's reaction is both unfair and revealing of the types of psychological oppression poor people are often forced to face. The teacher blames Mazie for violence which her own words about Mazie's life provoked. This incident symbolizes how Mazie will be forced to fight for her own visibility and her own existence for the rest of her life.

The didactic passage about Tracy is interesting, if somewhat overdone. In its narration and storyline it mirrors the passage about Andy Kvaternick in Chapter One. Although these passages disrupt the flow of the greater storyline and are often jolting, with their switches in narration, they are intriguing side stories about minor players in the text. They represent a forum for Olsen to air her political views with less concern for narration, and they are intriguing "alternate" stories running alongside the main story. By their inclusion in the text, Olsen creates a tapestry of stories about the poor and an alternative vision of poor life. Men, women, married, unmarried, young, old - these vignettes all have one thing in common: the inability of their characters to rise above the overwhelming obstacles of a capitalist society.

The majority of the chapter, however, is devoted to Mazie and Anna. Readers may feel confused by Olsen's style during this chapter: sentences are fragmented, scenes begin and end with no visible delineation, and both narrators and speakers go unidentified. This style is a deliberate move on Olsen's part to portray the confusion and growing mental illness of Anna and her children, particularly Mazie. We are meant to feel disoriented throughout much of this chapter, much the way Anna and Mazie do.

Anna is lost. Even her previous passion for education is exhausted: Will brings home a failure report from school, and she issues a halfhearted threat to an empty room. Her rape by Jim and subsequent miscarriage leave her empty on the floor; even Mazie's description of her is less than alive: "lifeless," "corpse." The doctor is a jolting, if self-righteous, reminder of the outside world. It is he who brings awareness of Anna's condition to the rest of the family. It takes a stranger because the rest of the family is too beleaguered by their own struggles to notice the seriousness of Anna's pain.

Chapter Six:

Summary:

For two days, Anna lies unmoving in bed. Else Kryckski is the surrogate mother and caretaker while Anna is ill. Despite her sickness, Anna feels the need to get up and take care of the house, but Else keeps her in bed.

The children run wild with the first days of summer. School is out and the whole slum is their playground. With the exception of Ben, they ignore Else's pleadings and their mother's illness in order to run around outside. But they always come back in the evenings when Else is gone, to watch their mother, take care of baby Bess, and cook dinner. When he gets home from work, Jim takes over Bess's care and tries to figure out budgeting and food himself.

On the third day Anna shows signs of life. She begins tossing in bed and asking about Bess. Jim tries to hush her, but she refuses to look at him. Else takes her to the clinic, where she panics about bringing baby Bess into the site of so many germs. Later on she wanders downstairs, where Jim and Else sit talking, and babbles incoherently about disease and her fears for baby Bess. With effort, they force her back into bed.

For the next several pages, the reader is directly in Anna's head. Even in illness she is preoccupied with money and fears for her children and the state of the house. Although she is supposed to stay in bed, she gets up to go to the bathroom, and in doing so she catches a glimpse of the disordered state of her house. Disease and germs are new obsessions; she fears she has exposed Bess to horrible illness by bringing her to the clinic. This obsession seems to have been provoked by a poster in the clinic, one that trumpeted "Flies Spread Germs. Germs Breed Disease. Protect your children." These lines run through Anna's head as she lurches through the house, trying vainly to clean it. Ben, eager for a hug, rushes up to her, but the sight of him - covered with rashes and scabs - only makes her more upset.

As she cleans, Else Kryckski walks in. Furious, she tries to make Anna go back to bed, but her attempt is unsuccessful. Anna insists on staying up, and Else agrees on the condition that Else is constantly on hand in case Anna feels weak. Mazie comes in, and Anna tries to make her help, but she is sullen and unwilling, wishing to go play with a friend named Annamae. At last Mazie agrees to help, and the women begin going through the house. The house is in a state of complete disrepair, as are the children's clothes and shoes. The task proves beyond Anna's powers and she begins to swoon. It is not the fact that everything is a mess, but something else: "It was that she felt so worn, so helpless; that it loomed gigantic beyond her, impossible ever to achieve, beyond any effort or doing of hers: that task of making a better life for her children to which her being was bound."

Jim comes home to find Anna out of bed. He is surprised and concerned, then tender with her. She lashes out at him, claiming that if she doesn't get up and clean the house no one will. Her words crumble into a plea for the well-being of their children; she collapses in Jim's arms. He takes her upstairs and soothes her with "vows that life will never let him keep."

Analysis:

The household stumbles on despite Anna's illness. Jim's devotion and tenderness to his family in the face of adversity speak highly of him - if not for the poverty and exhaustion that he faces every day, he might have been a wonderful father and husband. Unfortunately, due to his economic circumstances, this is not to be. The quiet tragedy of what Jim could have been is a sad "what if" that hangs over this book.

But the centerpiece of this chapter is Anna. As she recovers from her illness, we are met with her fears, her sacrifices, and, above all, her dogged determination. She is not completely clear-headed yet, nor will she ever be completely healed. Once again, Olsen makes this clear through her narrative style. The text remains muddled, though the jumps and jolts are not nearly as frequent or serious as the ones in Chapter Five. Anna is healing from her illness, to be sure - but her greater sickness is the one that will not go away from a few days' rest.

Olsen's portrayal of the house's disorder and Anna's desperate cleaning have earned her much praise from feminist critics. Olsen was one of the first Communist writers and one of the first writers in general, to portray the overwhelming physical labor that stay-at-home mothers performed. Anna's vision of the household after three days of her absence is a worker's nightmare - the furnishings are falling apart, the children's clothes are filthy, dishes have piled up in the sink, the floor is muddy, and the yard is an overgrown mess. Olsen portrays household cleaning with the same style as writers like Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway portray whaling and fording rivers, respectively. She does not merely say that Anna cleans the house, but she lists Anna's tasks and then explains how they are done. This gives Anna's work the same gravity as the men's work in Moby Dick and A Farewell to Arms; it also creates a place in that masculine canon for a writer like Olsen herself.

Chapter Seven:

Summary:

Jim takes safety shortcuts at work in order to save money. All day while he works, he feels the weight of Anna's questions about the well-being of their children. Anna is up and about, but her mental health has not quite caught up to her physical strength: her moods vacillate frequently, and she snaps at Jim when he offers to help in the house. The children are rowdy and Anna neglects the house to work in the garden.

Anna begins doing laundry for other people. Jim is annoyed that she took on an extra job while the house goes untended and while she is still recovering from her illness. She also wants to pay a dollar a week for an installment educational plan for the children; he vetoes her desire. Anna and Ben have a close relationship; as she goes about her laundry tasks she delights him with stories about exotic lands. When he asks if he can see them, she responds that perhaps he can: "Boys get to do thatŠnot girls."

During rent week, there is no food in the house besides potatoes and flour. Anna hankers after greens. She leaves Bess with Else Kryckski and takes Mazie, Will, and Ben on a hunt through the streets for dandelions. The lots near their homes are weedy and rarely do they come upon young, healthy plants. As they wander the streets, Mazie grows aware of a feeling from Anna: "the strangenessŠnot like the sickness strange, something else." Anna blows dandelions, makes dandelion chains, laughs, and pops one of their paper bags. The other children are delighted by their mother's mood, but Mazie watches with skepticism.

They wander out of their neighborhood and into a different one - "[l]awns, flower beds and borders, children on bikes." Mazie tries to keep her brothers from playing with the other children or wandering off; she feels instinctively that they are in the wrong place. She tries to tell Anna, but Anna is oblivious. The inhabitants of the neighborhood view them with amusement that Mazie resents.

At the end of a street they come upon a lot near the river that is overgrown with flowers and dandelions. They set to collecting the dandelions, while Mazie stays as far away as she possibly can. Periodically, she tries to tell her mother that they are in the wrong place and ought to leave. Anna chats easily, ignoring Mazie's urgent demands. Mazie grows afraid when she notes " a remote, shining look" on Anna's face, "as if she had forgotten them." But Anna keeps picking flowers, and she begins to sing. When she sees Mazie, Anna draws her close, and Mazie, "[feeling] the strange happiness in her mother's body," relaxes with happiness of her own.

Suddenly, the wind shifts, and a packinghouse smell overwhelms the area. The whole family tenses. Mazie's happiness disappears and Anna looks up as if waking from a dream. Abruptly she is aware of the time, and quickly hustles up the children to go home.

Analysis

This short, strange chapter mirrors Chapter Three - both serve as brief respites from the terrible conditions of the Holbrooks' lives. The difference in this chapter is that Mazie, hardened by all that she has suffered, is now able to understand that a respite is just that - a brief interlude of peace, and one that will not suffice to erase the realities of class struggle. This time the struggle takes place on a social level - Mazie's realization that they are in the "wrong" neighborhood. She knows that her family is vulnerable to humiliation from the wealthier people of the neighborhood and seeks to protect them by returning to the slum.

Olsen captures Mazie's resentment, humiliation, and fear quickly and skillfully with just a few sentences and phrases: "'Just you keep your face to yourself, lady,' Mazie muttered furiously in her head." Mazie feels "[a] vague shame" and "a weedy sense of not belonging." Her repeated insistence, "Ma, this isn't the way" shows both Mazie's concern for the psychological well-being of her family and her unspoken acceptance of the message that poor people like her family cannot find the way into the middle class.

This chapter also develops the theme of space, and its role in keeping women trapped in a patriarchal order. As Anna tells Ben, "boys" get to explore the world, while girls must remain at home. As if to signal his approval of this sorry state of affairs, Ben urges Anna to go inside the house: " ŒWe got to go in. It's suppertime. Mommas always goes in.' "

And it is no accident that Anna's strange joy comes when she is outside of her house, wandering free through the streets in search of flowers. Although the children are present, Anna has little awareness of them. " ŒI don't remember since when I been out just walkin like this,'" Anna says, as her face fills with joy. Freed from the confines of the house, her spirit comes alive again. She even manages to turn the skeptical Mazie around, at the very end of the chapter. But then, the symbol of her poverty and entrapment ensnares her - that packinghouse smell. The smell shatters the peace of this bucolic scene and reminds Anna that freedom is not to be hers. She must return to the confines of her house and her place as a woman in a patriarchal order.

Chapter Eight:

Summary:

July comes, and with it a series of strange rites - "the children of packingtown turnŠ.to deeper, more ancient play. On the dump, territory is established, shifted, abandoned, fought over, combinedŠstrange structures riseŠ.On the streets, strange vehicles moveŠ"

Jim gets a new job as a feeder and utility man at the packinghouse. The new job will mean a bigger paycheck and chances for advancement. Jim is ecstatic and visualizes a better future for his family - soon. To celebrate, he buys fireworks for the Fourth of July. Although Anna is concerned about the money he spent, the children are rowdily approving. Their neighbors come to celebrate, and the scene is one of merriment and excitement. Only Mazie, left out of the celebrations because of her gender - "Girls don't get firecrackers, do they, Poppa" - watches the lights and noises with a mixture of fear and sullenness.

Things improve for a little while: for the first time, Jim makes insurance payments and begins looking for a secondhand sewing machine for Anna. Anna takes the children to the slum's dilapidated library and gets each of them a library card. Unfortunately the children, except for Ben, get little out of their books. They get more out of their scavenging trips to the dump and their petty burglaries from the ice truck. Mazie participates in the ice-truck runs until the boys tease her; then she discovers friendship with Ginella, an older girl. Ginella has her own tent on the dump, a "pagan island" elaborately decorated with "[a]nything that dangles, jangles, bangles, spangles." Ginella introduces Mazie to a world of feminine consumer fantasy: movies like The Sheik of Araby and exotic romance stories.

On the steps outside their home, the children sing and make up rhymes. Meanwhile, a heat wave hits the slum. For six days the temperature does not dip below one hundred degrees. At the packinghouse, the workers toil under the brutal heat and unsafe conditions. At home, the children alternate between sweaty sleeplessness and terrible nightmares. Mazie has a nightmare about Erina, a crippled epileptic girl who lives in the neighborhood.

At seven a.m., Jim is at work in the packinghouse - it is 104 degrees outside and 112 degrees in the casings section. The workers suffer with the heat and the "Beedo" system - a "speed-up" system introduced in the 1920s to squeeze the most out of each worker each day. Only women work in casings; even men will not work there. Olsen describes the work and the conditions in great detail.

Mazie wakes up "feeling charred and smoldering." Anna needs her help canning apples and peaches, but Mazie wheedles her into letting her go play. Anna consents, on the condition that Mazie returns before noon. Mazie runs into her friend Annamae; the two girls play listlessly until Will runs by with one of his friends. Mazie asks to join Will, he sneers at "tattletale girls" and runs off. Along with other young girls, they visit Ginella in her tent, but the older girl is cruel to them. Suddenly Erina appears. She asks the girls for pennies, so that she may buy an ice cream. When they refuse, she terrifies them with predictions about God's vengeance. She also weeps and slobbers about her own twisted body: "God made me like this." The other girls run away and Mazie is left to listen to Erina's tales of fire, brimstone, and woe. When Erina finally leaves, Mazie feels nauseous and upset.

Still feeling sick, Mazie picks on her younger brothers Ben and Jimmie. Jimmie runs wailing into the house, and Mazie follows him with her own protestations of anger and fury. She lashes out at Anna for constantly making her work in the house; then she discovers that Anna has thrown away her precious, handmade "perfume" and demands to know why she has "no place." Finally, Mazie runs away again, despite Anna's efforts. The other children continue to shriek and wail and pose complaints. It is noon, and 106 degrees.

Back at the packinghouse, the workers are suffering. Workers who had attempted to relieve themselves of the heat by slipping into cooler areas for a moment, or hosing themselves down, are ratted on and punished. Some workers faint, others vomit because of the stench. They all help each other as much as they can. One worker suffers a heart attack. He is borne away, docked, and charged for the company ambulance. When one of the workers tries to slow the pace of the assembly line, the foreman screams at them and threatens to dock their pay.

People suffer all over the neighborhood. An older woman dies in the heat. Erina, trudging home to a beating, has a brief moment of delight in watching a bird bathe itself. Ginella, ill, goes home to her poor Polish parents and bemoans the fact that she cannot be "classy" because of her family circumstances. In the Holbrooks' kitchen, Anna works alone. All the children except for Will are in the house, bathed in sweat, trying to sleep. In between her canning work, Anna sponges them off.

Mazie does not wake until after five in the evening. Anna shakes her awake, afraid that she has been asleep too long. The other children are all awake, and feeling better, if listless. Jim enters the house and goes straight for the water bucket without a word of greeting. He douses himself and the entire house while Anna shouts to know what is wrong.

Jim falls into an exhausted sleep. Anna, holding Ben, sings and tells him stories. Bess grabs ahold of a fruit-jar lid and begins slamming it down, over and over again. Anna and all the children, startled by this noise, laugh uproariously: "Heat misery, rash misery transcended."

Will runs into the house with a homemade radio and a borrowed crystal set. For the first time, the family hears a radio. Mazie, "floating on her pain," is entranced. Anna looks outside and sees a dust storm rising; she goes outside to wake Jim. He is too dazed at first to move, but then Anna helps him. She insists that she sees an end to the bad weather and urges him to come inside.

Analysis:

The final chapter of Yonnondio contrasts a foray into the life of work at a packinghouse with the terror of life at home. Olsen jumps back and forth between these two scenes, heightening both the tension and the contrast, and making it clear how they are meant to stand in direct relation to each other. Jim toils under physical danger and is forced to watch as his fellow workers and friends fall prey to the conditions in the workhouse. Mazie is safe physically, but she is in acute psychological danger and suffers from a greater knowledge of her debased role in the economic system and the social structure.

The chapter's action is pushed to a new level of drama by the heat. Suddenly, all of the other elements of life in a slum: the cramped conditions, the lack of sanitation, and most especially the stench become that much more unbearable. The slum truly becomes an inferno; Erina's predictions of apocalypse have real relevance.

Regarding the packinghouse, Olsen describes the activity going on much as the way a worker would see it, coming down an assembly line: "the kill room: knockers, shackles, pritcher-uppers, stickers, headers, rippers, leg breakersŠ." She adds small details that describe what makes conditions so dangerous: "[s]lippery uncertain footing on the slimy platform. Treacherous sudden torrents swirlingŠ" Everything is written in a quick, breathless fashion that mirrors the speed at which the workers are moving. The speed of the prose, combined with knowledge of the heat and the boss' brutal demands evoke great concern and sympathy from the reader: will Jim be all right? Will anyone die? With her portrayal of Marsalek, the worker who suffers a heart attack, Olsen does not shy away from the subject of death. What truly makes his heart attack a tragedy is the greed and insensitivity of the company regarding treatment of the workers.

Mazie's friend Ginella introduces Mazie to female consumer fantasy: a world of exotic places and gigolos and romance. These fantasies, which were extremely popular during the Depression in particular, were particularly dangerous for young, impoverished women, who became easily entranced by worlds that were so different from their harsh realities. Olsen deliberately contrasts the imagined luxury of Ginella's worlds with the world of young women at the packinghouse in order to show how far apart the two worlds were. Even before Mazie and Ginella are old enough to work, the worlds of Araby and Rudolph Valentino are far from their realities: as Olsen demonstrates, Mazie's life is closer to Erina's fire and brimstone tales, and Ginella's home life is shoddy and demoralizing.

The ending of Yonnondio is the subject of much critical debate and conjecture. Bess, the baby, learns to slam the fruit-jar lid on the table, making a loud noise. While she slams it, the narrator describes Bess's achievement as thus: "I can doŠI achieve, I use my powers; I! I!" Some critics read this as Olsen's final remark about the triumph of the human spirit over adversity; a relief, after so much misery, to a happy belief in the individual will. It is important to resist this belief. Yonnondio is an unfinished text, and if we are to believe Olsen, there were to be scenes of even greater misery following this chapter. It is impossible to comment on parts of the text that do not exist, but it is possible to say that the reader must not take the ending of the story at face value. Instead, the reader must remember that the story of the Holbrooks is only partially complete.

• Biography of Tillie Olsen
• About Yonnondio: From the Thirties
• Character List
• Major Themes
• Short Summary
• Full Summary and Analysis
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 1-2
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 3-4
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 5-6
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 7-8
• Related Links on Yonnondio: From the Thirties
• Author of ClassicNote and Sources
• Purchase Yonnondio: From the Thirties and Other Works
• Test Yourself! Quiz 1
• Test Yourself! Quiz 2
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