Exploring Motherhood: A Study of 'I Stand Here Ironing'

Tiffaney Bunch

Professor Fylan

English 1220

09 November 2015

I Stand Here Ironing

The short story “I Stand Here Ironing”, by Tillie Olsen, is a first person narrative that includes the protagonist’s memory flashbacks, which give context to the current dialogue. The story reads like a journalistic interview of the Mother, or a one-sided telephone conversation, using a cadence reminiscent of an Irish Mother, both self deprecating and desperately defensive. A back and forth exchange, between a forced explanation of her daughter’s awkwardness and an attempt to justify her own responsibility for contributing to those character flaws. She vacillates between short bursts of intense regret and frustrated pleading.

The narrator is a Mother talking while she is ironing laundry on the ironing board, saying in the first line, “I stand here ironing and what you ask me moves tormented back and forth with the iron”. (270). A metaphoric statement which is symbolic both for the good intentions she had at the beginning and to demonstrate what she hoped her daughter would come to understand. Hard times in life -the iron- have the ability to press someone down flat -the ironed

dress- , and that her daughter is “more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron”. (275). Responding to an inquiry requesting insight into her daughter Emily, the Mother counters with her own query as to what gave anyone the belief that she would have an explanation just because she was Emily’s mother. She sounds exasperated and impatient in an effort to make the inquirer leave off. An experienced tactic used to extricate herself from her thoughts, when they unintentionally linger on her daughter’s childhood.
The dress she is ironing, gives her something to do with her hands as she, reluctantly, attempts to illuminate the dark parts of her heart, paralyzing thoughts best kept in shadow, where all mothers try to hide their fears. The same thoughts occupy every Mother’s head. Here is her internal rationalization, recrimination, and examination of events that may have been the catalyst for her oldest daughter, Emily, turning out “different”.
Specific descriptions like, “pre-relief, pre-war, and world of depression”, (271), and the mention of streetcars, combined with her “running up the stairs” (271) after work and the “woman downstairs” (271) are all clear indications of urban life. These are the images used during the flashbacks and support the depression era backdrop where her story begins. The city setting is at a time before anyone had any social services or government resources. Being a mother during this time of extreme poverty was challenging under the best circumstances, but nearly impossible for a very young single Mother. Her husband had abandoned her and their eight-month-old daughter, Emily. He left a note about how he could “no longer endure” “sharing want” (272) and she was left to look for work, look for him, look after herself and raise Emily alone. Before this critical event initiates the timeline of the desperate choices made by a mother trying to survive, and her own frustrations at the unintended consequences, the love and devotion to Emily is clear. The mother speaks about breast-feeding Emily by a strict clock dictated by the books even though it caused her grief when hearing her baby cry and pain from the breast swelling she endured. She tolerated the pain because she believed it was better for Emily. She vividly recalls the active, happy, confident baby who “loved motion, loved light, loved color and music and texture”, (271) “blew shining bubbles of sound”, (271) and was a “miracle to me” (271). All of these observations are the kind of indicators used by all mothers to identify the unique details specific to each child. Life’s unforeseeable circumstances restricted her ability to parent and create lasting reassurance for Emily. The mother had limited influence and control over everyday hardships. She recalls having to leave Emily with a sitter while she worked all day and the, “clogged weeping that could not be comforted,” (271) response Emily had upon her return from work. The Mother recalls sending Emily to live with the Father’s family until age two and then describes the nightmare of a nursery school where she left Emily because she had no other option. The second time sending Emily to live with family, only returning after the Mother remarried. The narrator indicates how Emily was very often, left alone. The frustration is clear in her detailed memory of Emily’s tearful reactions to or attempted manipulation of these events of separation from the mother. The depressed nature of separation gets worse when the mother goes to the hospital to give birth to a new baby, Emily constricts measles, which leave her thin, frail, and prone to nightmares. There was another separation when Emily had tuberculosis was forced to recover in a convalescent home where visits from her mother were only distant waving since there was no physical contact allowed. The Mother describes Emily’s frozen responses at any attempts to provide physical comfort or assistance once returned home permanently.
From all this pathology, the story continues as the mother lists all of Emily’s insecurities, such as skin ruined from pox, low self-esteem because she fears she is not pretty. Emily’s illnesses took a toll not just physically, but her academics were scattered to the point that she had teachers who labeled her a poor student. The mother has other children in their current situation. Times are clearly easier, however, she feels as if the damage may already be irreversible.
She compares the differences between Emily and the younger sister, Susan, who is blonde and extroverted.

Susan is the opposite of Emily. The mother is secretly relieved that the level of pressure and anxiety in the top spot of social competitions was never available for Emily because it would have destroyed her. As it stands, the mother sees the things in her daughter through the eyes of someone who observed Emily enduring throughout her life. She does not appear the same way to the mother as she might appear to others who do not know her. For example, there is a point in the story where the Mother recalls how helpful Emily was while the second husband was away in the war, she describes a made up word, “shoogily”, which the younger children use to mean comfort. That word came from Emily. The mother in

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