Women's Ethical Coming-of-Age: Adolescent Female Characters in the Prose Fiction of Tillie Olsen

This work examines Tillie Olsen's four short stories in Tell Me A Riddle, and her novel fragment Yonnondio: From the Thirties in terms of the ethical development of the adolescent female characters. The study uses the ethics of responsibility and care as identified by Carol Gilligan to investigate each young female character's struggle to grow, to make her place in the world, and to remain in relationship with herself and others. The book contextualizes the exclusion of the ethics of care from the literary canon and argues for inclusion of multiple ethical modes.