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I Stand Here Ironing by Tillie Olsen is a fictional piece of literature written in the time of the Great Depression. This is a literary piece that a mother views her past and recognizes the mistakes that she had made and the choices that she felt and knew were wrong. The story seems at first to be a simple meditation of a mother reconstructing her daughters past in an attempt to explain present behavior. In its pretense of silent dialogue with the schools guidance counselor it creates the impression of literal transcription of a mothers thought processes in the isolation of performing household tasks: I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron (Olsen 584). Indeed, this surface level provides the narrative thread for our insights into both Emily and her mother. The mothers first person narrative moves chronologically through a personal past which is gauged and anchored by occasional intrusions of the present: I put the iron down (Olsen 585); Ronnie is calling.
He is wet and I change him; She is coming. She runs up the stairs two at a time with her light graceful step, and I know she is happy tonight. Whatever it was that occasioned your call did not happen today (Olsen 589). With the narrator, we construct an image of the mothers own development.
Her difficulties as a young mother alone with her daughter and barely surviving during the early years of the depression. Her painful months of enforced separation from her daughter; her gradual and partial relaxation in response to a new husband and a new family as more children follow. Her increasingly complex anxieties about her first child. And finally her sense of family equilibrium which surrounds but does not quite encompass the early memories of herself and Emily in the grips of survival needs. We also construct an image of the stressful growth of the daughter from infancy through a troubled, lonely childhood. A girl with an alienating relationship to schools and friends, and an unsettled adolescence.
And finally into the present nineteen-year-old, who needs help (Olsen 584), as the counselor insists, but who has also found a strong inner resource in her talent for mime and in her own sense of self. The story is very fundamentally structured through the mothers present selfhood. It is her reality with which we are centrally concerned, her perception of the process of individuation to which the story gives us access. Her concerns with sorting through Emily's past are her concerns with defining the patterns of her own motherhood and of the limitations on her capacity to care for and support the growth of another human being. As she rethinks the past, she frames her perceptions through such interjections as I did not know then what I know now (Olsen 586) and What in me demanded that goodness in her? (Olsen 587) Gauges taken from the present self to try to assess her own past behavior.
But throughout, she is assessing the larger pattern of interaction between her own needs and constraints and her daughters needs and constraints The metaphor of the iron and the rhythm of the ironing establish a tightly coherent framework for the narrative probing of a mother-daughter relationship. But the fuller metaphorical structure of the story lies in the expansion of the metaphorical power of that relationship itself. Without ever relinquishing the immediate reality of motherhood and the probing of parental responsibility, Tillie Olsen has taken that reality and developed its peculiar complexity into a powerful and complex statement on the experience of responsible selfhood in the modern world. In doing so she has neither trivialized nor romanticized the experience of motherhood. She has indicated the wealth of experience yet to be explored in the narrative possibilities of experiences, like motherhood, which have rarely been granted serious literary consideration.
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Research essay sample on Stand Here Ironing Construct An Image Olsen
