I Stand Here Ironing is set in a historical setting; the story weaves in reference to the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. The story is told in first person point of view through the mother of Emily. Its logic of being written as it was is governed by the narrator’s train of thought. As the audience, we get to experience directly what the narrator is thinking and we get a deeply personalized story. In this historical context, Olsen’s intimate story is actually a way of speaking truth to power, of representing the life and struggle of an ordinary person.
The purpose of the title is given right in the beginning of the story to us. We learn that the narrator is a mother with a large family. Emily’s mother gets interrupted in the course of her routine by a troubling question from her daughter’s teacher. The question “moves tormented back and forth with the iron” (Olsen, 1). The continuous movement of the iron gives the audience of the story a continuous stream of poverty and responsibilities that distract her from giving Emily her full attention and care. The iron is used as a symbol to represent forces that shape people lives. It shows that Emily can control her own life and she is her own person and more than an iron can shape her.
Through this story, we follow Emily, the narrator’s daughter, from birth to the end of adolescence. We unfortunately only get her life in fragments, from her mother’s perspective, but this perspective enables the story to reveal how the circumstances of Emily’s upbringing have a profound effect on her personal development. The story would have completely changed if written in any other form, such as third-person omniscient. For example, it may have given us a more detailed description...
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...o a close, the narrator’s daughter Emily asks her mother if she will ever stop ironing. At this point in the story we know this is a highly charged question. If “ironing” stands in for all of the material difficulties- poverty, single motherhood, illness, etc.- that made the narrator a “distracted mother,” Emily’s question is really about whether her mother will ever pay attention to her. The story ends with a response to the teacher that sounds like a prayer. “Let her be.” The narrator goes on, “Only help her to know- help make it so there is a cause for her to know- that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron” (Olsen, 56). Even though the mother is still not confident that her daughter will escape her fate, “helpless before the iron,” she has at least the fervent hope that she will realize the immense promise of her talent.
For years Miss Emily was rarely seen out of her house. She did not linger around town or participate in any communal activities. She was the definition of a home-body. Her father was a huge part of her life. She had never...
The stories “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen and “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, are different in many ways, but are also similar. “I Stand Here Ironing” and “Everyday Use” both focus on the relationships of the mother and daughter, and on the sibling’s relationships with each other. Emily from “I Stand Here Ironing” and Maggie from “Everyday Use” have different relationships with their mothers, but have similar relationships with their sisters. Although the stories are similar in that Emily and Maggie are both distant from their sisters, they differ in that the mother is distant from Emily in “I Stand Here Ironing,” while the mother is close to Maggie in “Everyday Use.”
In the short story "I Stand Here Ironing" by Tillie Olsen, the reader is introduced to a mother living in the midst of the Great Depression dealing with angst and anxiety towards her daughter Emily. Because this story looks back during the Great Depression when Emily was born the mother's trauma is coming between the both of them. The mother wants her daughter to live a beautiful life, however, poverty, depression and dislocation has built a wall between the two women.
Following Deborah’s journey to the mill, the narrator rhetorically asks “Deeper yet if one could look, was there nothing worth reading in this wet, faded thing, half-covered with ashes? no story of a soul filled with groping passionate love, heroic unselfishness, fierce jealousy?” (Davis 9). The curious intertwining of industrial capitalism and sexuality continues into this line, as the ashes again represent the waste and unused scraps of the factory process, and the “groping” suggests a degree of unwillingness or discomfort from our proxy for the labor force--Deborah. The ashes covering her are smothering her in the oppression of industrial capitalism, and barring her from leading a truly “passionate”
The narrator reflects and regrets on her daughter Emily’s past. The narrator feels guilty about leaving Emily at a neighbor’s house, sending her to nursery school and a convalescent facility. In her short story “I Stand Here Ironing”, Olsen describes the convalescent home as she insert “The parents stand below shrieking up to be heard and the children shriek down to be heard, and between them the invisible wall “Not To Be Contaminated by Parental Germs or Physical Affection” (226). When Emily is in the convalescent facility, she is cut off from outside world, including the communication with her mother. Besides the convalescent facility, the iron itself also has a symbolic meaning. In the beginning of the short story, Olsen writes “I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron” (223). The narrator is ironing during a phone conversation with an adult concerned about Emily 's well-being. Toward the end, the author express the Emily’s feeling when she says “Aren’t you ever going to finish the ironing, Mother” (229). The non-stop ironing annoys Emily because her own mother is willing to spend the time on ironing despite it would extend the distance between the two of them. The simple act of ironing not only symbolizes the duty as a mother but also represent the helplessness to change the circumstances. The absences of the narrator and the lack of communication weakens the bond
It was hard for her mother to have a baby at a young age herself and try to make ends meet was not easy. She needed to lean on others for help, which she thought at the time was right thing to do, but got caught up on her new family. This is why Emily had so much resentment towards her mother. This story is a great example of a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. The story does great job showing the mother’s anguish over her daughter, and a depressed teen that needed her mother and is struggling to overcome a very unhappy childhood.
The first question I´ve thought the most important to start with is WHAT'S THE TYPE OF NARRATOR, does he or she know everything in the story? This question has to possible answers, as the narrator does not know everythin about Miss Emily, he doesn´t know what is her thinking or what are her fellings. On the other hand, the narrator seems to know everything from the point of view of the community, he knows what women think about Emily he knows that people in the community are going to ask her to pay her taxes, etc. but the things is that he doesn't know what each member of the community thinks, or what each member of the community does, speaks, feels, etc.
Although, a mother’s determination in the short story “I Stand Here Ironing” mother face with an intense internal conflict involving her oldest daughter Emily. As a single mother struggle, narrator need to work long hours every day in order to support her family. Despite these criticisms, narrator leaves Emily frequently in daycare close to her neighbor, where Emily missing the lack of a family support and loves. According to the neighbor states, “You should smile at Emily more when you look at her” (Olsen 225). On the other hand, neighbor gives the reader a sense that the narrator didn’t show much affection toward Emily as a child. The narrator even comments, “I loved her. There were all the acts of love” (Olsen 225). At the same time, narrator expresses her feeling that she love her daughter. Until, she was not be able to give Emily as much care as she desire and that gives her a sense of guilt, because she ends up remarrying again. Meanwhile narrator having another child named Susan, and life gets more compli...
Up to the very end of Miss Emily’s life, her father was in the foreground watching and controlling, and Miss Emily unrelentingly held on to the past. She went as far as keeping a loved one’s body locked upstairs in her home for years. While admiring her loved one’s body from up close and afar, she managed to maintain a death grip on the past.
As time went on pieces from Emily started to drift away and also the home that she confined herself to. The town grew a great deal of sympathy towards Emily, although she never hears it. She was slightly aware of the faint whispers that began when her presence was near. Gossip and whispers may have been the cause of her hideous behavior. The town couldn’t wait to pity Ms. Emily because of the way she looked down on people because she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth and she never thought she would be alone the way her father left her.
Emily’s isolation is evident because after the men that cared about her deserted her, either by death or simply leaving her, she hid from society and didn’t allow anyone to get close to her. Miss Emily is afraid to confront reality. She seems to live in a sort of fantasy world where death has no meaning. Emily refuses to accept or recognize the death of her father, and the fact that the world around her is changing.
Social pressure to raise pleasant, good mannered children who become grounded and productive adults has been a driving influence for many generations. If our children do not fit into this mold then we’re considered failures are parents. Emily’s mother is tormented by the phone call which sets off a wave of maternal guilt. Emily’s mother was young and abandoned by her husband while Emily was still an infant so she had to rely on only herself and the advice of others while she raised her daughter. After Emily was born her mother, “with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, (I) did like the books said. Though her cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with swollenness, I waited till the clock decreed.” (Olsen 174). Then when Emily was two she went against her own instincts about sending Emily to a nursery school while she worked which she considered merely “parking places for children.” (Olsen 174). Emily’s mother was also persuaded against her motherly instincts to send her off to a hospital when she did not get well from the measles and her mother had a new baby to tend to. Her mother even felt guilt for her second child, Susan, being everything society deemed worthy of attention. Emily was “thin and dark and foreign-looking at a time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a chubby blond replica of Shirley Temple.” (Olsen, 177) she was also neither “glib or quick in a world where glibness and quickness were easily confused with ability to learn.” (Olsen 177), which her sister Susan had in
At the beginning of the story Emily is just an ordinary little girl, but as the story continues she begins to feel herself changing. By the end of the story, Emily has gained self-consciousness and thinks of herself not as an ordinary little girl but as “Emily”.
Growing up Emily’s father, Mr. Gierson, made her stay in the house and not socialize with others. He taught her that he was only trying to protect her from the outside world. Mr.Gierson was a rude man who felt that things should go his way; therefore, his daughter hopelessly fell for him because she did not know any oth...
The young girl ironing her family’s clothes is how she’s able to show her love for them. Alvarez goes to explain exactly how the girl imagines affection by her ironing. When the girl irons her dad’s shirt, she explains how she, “Ironed out my father’s back, cramped / and worried with work” (lines 2-3). In this quote