I Stand Here Ironing

views updated

I Stand Here Ironing

Tillie Olsen 1961

Author Biography

Tillie Olsen was born in 1913 in Omaha, Nebraska, to Russian Jewish immigrants whose political activities had forced them to leave their homeland in 1905. During her childhood, Olsen’s father was the state secretary of the Socialist Party, and she likewise became politically active at an early age by joining the Young Communist League. After high school, she worked menial jobs until she was jailed in Kansas City for attempting to organize packinghouse workers into a union.

By 1933, Olsen had moved to California where she resumed her union activities and began writing articles for left-wing publications. She had one daughter from her first marriage to a man who promptly abandoned his young family. In 1936 she married Jack Olsen and spent the next twenty years raising three daughters while working full time as a factory worker and a secretary. Most of her short fiction dates to the 1950s, when her youngest child entered school and she was awarded a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University.

Critical acclaim followed the publication of Tell Me a Riddle in 1961, the same year the title story won the O. Henry Award for best short story. The works in the collection revolve around a central theme: how external forces undermine the ambitions of individuals. For example, in “I Stand Here Ironing” a mother laments the fact that her young daughter’s creative talent will be squandered because of the family’s limited income. The award-winning title story, “Tell Me a Riddle,” concerns David and Eva, a Jewish immigrant couple married for forty-seven years, and the compromises and disappointments Eva has endured to satisfy her family. The book quickly became a favorite among participants in the fledgling women’s movement.

Olsen’s only novel, Yonnondio, was published in 1974, though it takes place in the 1930s. The novel is narrated by six-year-old Mazie Holbrook who tells of the harsh life of her impoverished family. The socialist concepts of the exploited proletariat and capitalism’s damaging effects on family life are prominent in the novel, echoing the author’s lifelong activism in leftist causes.

In 1978, Olsen published a book called Silences which contains two long essays; one on the silenced voices of women writers, the other concerning how writers confront periods of silence in their own lives. Though the book received less attention than

Olsen’s fiction, it augments the small body of work for which she has received much praise. Olsen has lectured at many universities, including the University of California at Los Angeles, and has served as writer-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition to receiving several honorary degrees, her stories, including “I Stand Here Ironing,” have appeared in more than one hundred anthologies.

Plot Summary

Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” is a monologue, a speech delivered by a narrator with whom the reader comes to identify. In the first few lines the narrator explains what she is doing—ironing—and what she is responding to—a request that she meet with a school official about her daughter, now nineteen years old. The occasion prompts her to recall her daughter’s childhood and the effect she had on the girl as her mother. All the while she continues to iron, drawing parallels for herself and the reader between telling the story and ironing the wrinkles from a dress.

At the outset the mother confesses her power-lessness over her daughter, asking “You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key?” She is worried that if she is asked to recall those early days of parenting she “will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.” Despite these fears, the mother begins at the beginning: “She was a beautiful baby.”

Gradually the mother reveals the details of her daughter Emily’s childhood, and a pattern of poverty and abandonment emerges. She was only nineteen herself when Emily was born. Her husband abandoned her, and she had no access to welfare or other services. Eventually she was forced to “bring her to [the father’s] family and leave her.” Emily was two years old before her mother could afford to come and pick her up. The little girl dutifully attended nursery school with “never a direct protest, never rebellion.” As she recollects these days, the mother wonders about the long term effects of that kind of obedience: “what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?”

The narrator recalls how different Emily was from her siblings; she did not smile or laugh easily. The narrator had loved her as much as the others but had not yet learned to show it. Even with a “new daddy” the somber child’s troubles were not over. She developed a terrible case of measles that isolated her from her mother and siblings and caused her to be sent to a convalescent home in the country. She did not get better; instead she became even thinner and sadder. The mother vividly recalls the scene during their brief visits: “The parents stand below shrieking up to be heard, and between them the invisible wall: ’Not to be Contaminated by Parental Germs or Physical Affection.’”

After eight months of convalescence, Emily returned home thin, frail, and resistant to physical affection. Her adolescence provided little relief. Her mother remembers her as “thin and dark and foreign-looking at a time when every girl was supposed to look or thought she should look like a chubby blonde replica of Shirley Temple.“ But one day in the midst of ”that terrible world of youthful competition, of preening and parading, of constant measuring of yourself against every other, of envy,” Emily called her mother from school, weeping with joy and fear. She had taken her mother’s advice and had entered the talent show and had won: “suddenly she was Somebody, and as imprisoned in her difference as she had been in anonymity.”

This memory returns the narrator to the beginning of her train of thought. What is she supposed to do with a talent like that, “the control, the command, the convulsing and deadly clowning, the spell, then the roaring, stamping audience, unwilling to let this rare and precious laughter out of their lives”? Emily herself interrupts her mother’s thoughts at this point, dismissing her mother’s anxieties with a quick kiss and teasing her for spending so much time ironing. Emily has no concern for the future, especially tomorrow’s exams. Her mother, however, has “been dredging the past, and all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful,” she “cannot endure it.”

Finally, Emily’s mother takes stock of Emily’s life and confesses “I will never total it all.” But she does total it all, reducing her rambling monologue to one terse paragraph. Finally she decides on a course of action: “let her be,” and adds only the hope that Emily will come to know “that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.” In other words, that she is more than the sum of her experiences.

Characters

Emily

Nineteen-year-old Emily is the eldest child of the narrator. Her mother regrets much about Emily’s upbringing, saying: “She was a child seldom smiled at.” Her father deserted the family less than a year after her birth, during the worst of the Depression. While her mother struggled to make ends meet, young Emily was handed over to a variety of temporary caretakers. As young girl, Emily was considered homely—“thin and dark and foreign-looking at a time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a chubby blonde replica of Shirley Temple”—and she became shy and passive. After her mother’s second marriage, Emily was eclipsed by her younger, more self-assured half-sister Susan. To her mother’s surprise, Emily has developed a talent for comedic acting—a “deadly clowning” —which wins her an audience, but she seems to lack motivation. At the end of the story, Emily chooses to sleep through her exams and quips that “in a couple of years when we’ll all be atom-dead they won’t matter a bit.” Though her mother is convinced that “all that is in her will not bloom,” she expresses hope that Emily may nevertheless know “that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.”

Narrator

The narrator in “I Stand Here Ironing” is never described physically nor referred to by name. Her identity is revealed through the explanation she gives of her relationship with her eldest daughter, Emily. The narrator has endured a great deal of hardship in her life. She was deserted at age nineteen by her first husband, less than a year after Emily’s birth, during the worst of the Depression. Money has always been short, and the necessity of working long hours made it impossible for her to be sufficiently attentive to her daughter. She remarried and had more children, to whom she feels she has been a better mother. She seems to regret much about how her first daughter was raised and feels that, as a result of her shortcomings as a mother, “all that is in [Emily] will not bloom.” Readers have had varying reactions to the narrator’s final resolution about her daughter—to “let her be.” While some see passive resignation in this statement, others see it in a more positive light as an acknowledgement of her daughter’s independence and ability to “find her own way.”

Susan

Susan is Emily’s younger half-sister. According to their mother, Susan is a better student than Emily, as well as better looking and more popular: Emily’s “younger sister seemed all that she was not.” Emily is competitive with Susan and feels slighted when their mother is more attentive to Susan. The mother feels that because Susan was raised in a more nurturing environment than Emily, it was inevitable that Susan would outshine her older half-sister.

Themes

In Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing,” an unnamed narrator reflects on her somewhat distant relationship with her eldest daughter. It is a story about the search—by both mother and daughter—for individual identity despite the limitations imposed by a history of poverty and other social constraints. While it examines the difficulties a mother and daughter have in finding identities separate from

Topics for Further Study

Olsen has a long history of political activism, and she was once jailed for trying to organize blue-collar workers to join a union. Explain how “I Stand Here Ironing” echoes Olsen’s leftist politics, even though it contains no overt political statements.
What do you think Olsen believes is a more important influence in a person’s life—the role of nature, or the role of nurture? Give some examples of Emily’s character traits that her mother thinks are due to nature and some she believes are due to nurture.
Many psychologists believe that birth order influences personality. Research this idea and find out what some studies have found to be common traits among firstborn children. How is Emily’s behavior representative of oldest children, and how is it different?

one another and independent from social expectations about women, it raises questions about the nature of intimacy itself.

The Search for Identity

The issue of the boundary between the individual identities of the mother and daughter is raised early in the story. The narrator seems disturbed by the idea of being asked to help someone understand her daughter: “You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me.” Yet, even as the narrator questions “what good” her insights into her daughter are, she also lays claim to a special knowledge of her daughter, more complete than that of any hypothetical questioner: “You did not know her all those years she was considered homely.”

The story presents the identities of both mother and daughter as incomplete, still in the process of “becoming.” The adolescent daughter is still struggling to find independence, and her guilt-ridden mother is still working through her assessment of her role. The shy daughter appears to have talent as an actress, much to the surprise of her mother who is prompted to wonder, “Was this Emily?” The daughter becomes “Somebody,” it seems, by pretending on stage to be someone else. Yet, even in the apparent freedom Emily achieves through acting, she is still “imprisoned” by the public nature of acting and by the people in her audience whose applause “wouldn’t let [her] go.” Her mother feels at a loss for how to nurture this talent in her daughter, and readers are left wondering whether Emily’s gift will end up being left unexpressed— “clogged and clotted” inside of her.

The mother’s desire to define herself also seems unfulfilled in the end. She concludes that the task of “dredging the past” and sifting through “all that compounds a human being” is too much for her. Convinced that she will never be able to “total it all,” she resolves not to heed the request that she “come in and talk” to the school official. Her thoughts about her daughter and about her own role as a mother remain private, communicated only to the reader.

Limitations and Opportunities

A deep sense of deprivation pervades “I Stand Here Ironing.” The mother describes numerous limitations she has had to confront: poverty, abandonment by her first husband, housework, and motherhood itself. The many hardships in her life seem to compound one another and even impair her ability to tell the story: “And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again.” The limited resources of the mother limit the daughter as well. The mother feels helpless to encourage her daughter’s budding talent as an actress. The mother seems to blame her own youth and distractedness for the fact that “little will come” of her daughter’s potential.

Apathy

Both daughter and mother appear to be apathetic at the end of the story: the daughter toward her future, the mother toward her own perceived failures. The daughter decides to sleep late despite having exams the next morning because “in a couple of years when we’ll all be atom-dead they won’t matter a bit.” The mother, exhausted from “dredging the past,” resolves to “[l]et her be.” Yet the story also presents evidence that there is at least a desire to overcome this apathy. The image of the mother’s iron, which frames the story, provides an interesting emblem of this desire. In the first sentence, the iron, along with the narrator’s thoughts, “moves tormented back and forth.” In the last sentence, she articulates her hope that her daughter will be able to break free and learn “that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.”

Style

Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” tells the story of a mother’s relationship with her eldest daughter in a stark and dramatic fashion that has impressed critics and fellow writers with its originality and accessibility. The story is told entirely in the voice of the mother, but nonetheless manages to convey a dynamic relationship between two believable characters without resorting to cliche and sentimentality.

Structure and Point of View

The story is told through the interior monologue of an unnamed mother as she irons her daughter Emily’s dress. The catalyst for the monologue appears to be a request from an unspecified source, perhaps a school guidance counselor, for help in understanding the narrator’s troubled daughter. The monologue consists of the narrator’s fantasies, presented in a stream-of-consciousness manner, about what she might say in response to such a request.

Such a narrative structure not only provides a dramatic context to draw the reader’s attention, but it also serves to quickly establish the story’s confrontational tone and introduce the narrator’s repressed, frustrated character. Olsen’s challenge is announced in the very first sentence, with the unusual appearance of the second person pronoun: “what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.” The narrator begins questioning the validity of her own perspective on her daughter’s psyche early in the story and wonders whether what she has to say “matters or. . . explains anything.”

In addition to the insights the narrator shares with readers directly, her character is also revealed indirectly through the occasional interruptions of her monologue, which are caused by pressing demands from her daily life: “Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him.” In the end, the central paradox in the character of the narrator is also illustrated through the story’s dramatic narrative “frame”: she in fact has many insights into herself and her daughter, but she chooses not to express them either to her daughter or to whomever asked her to “come in and talk.”

Language and Imagery

In “I Stand Here Ironing,” Olsen attempts to portray experiences and characters not typically given expression in literature. Perhaps her most admirable technical accomplishments lie in her ability to use language and imagery to believably portray the voice and thoughts of an intelligent but overburdened mother. Olsen intersperses the story with run-on sentences and expressive coinages, such as “I think of our others in their three- and four-year oldness.” These techniques evoke the difficulty the narrator has answering unanswerable questions and imposing order upon the chaos that has been her daily life.

Simple images from the world familiar to the narrator are used to express complex emotions. The most notable of these is the act of ironing referred to in the story’s title. Associated with the social role of women, ironing—a back-and-forth motion that results in the elimination of wrinkles—becomes a symbol for the imperfections and frustrated desires of the narrator. One passage suggests that this also represents a less sentimental and more realistic image of motherhood: Emily muses that if she were to paint her mother’s portrait, the pose Whistler had used in painting his mother’s portrait—seated in a chair—wouldn’t do. “I’d have to paint mine standing over an ironing board,” she says. The act of ironing epitomizes the endless tasks that have beset the narrator. She expresses the hope that her daughter can transcend such frustration, rise above her circumstances and learn “that she is more than the dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.”

Historical Context

The Great Depression

The narrator of “I Stand Here Ironing” describes her daughter as “a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear.” Though the story was published in 1961, it too has been seen as having ties to the Depression era and to the socially conscious literature of the thirties. Regardless of whether Olsen’s work in 1961 bears much resemblance to writings from the 1930s, the Great Depression remained very much a part of the American psyche long after the decade was over. Even during the more prosperous 1950s and 1960s, many people still remembered the severe deprivations caused by the country’s disastrous economic collapse in the 1930s and lived in fear of repeating the experience. Differences in values present in those old enough to remember the Depression years and values held by children too young to remember those years have been cited as a major cause of the “generation gap” that came to characterize America in the 1960s.

Many people who lived through the Depression, including Olsen, were radicalized by their experience and joined communist and socialist movements. The United States government began massive efforts to provide relief to the poor through programs like the Work Projects Administration (WPA). Writers from the period such as John Steinbeck, Katherine Anne Porter, and Richard Wright hoped to inspire reform by creating literature that depicted the plight of the poor in a realistic manner.

The Eisenhower Era

The relatively prosperous 1950s were characterized by a growing conservatism and mistrust of radical intellectuals. Having won World War II after dropping an atomic bomb on Japan, the United States began its Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union. Many people felt it was important to root out radicals living in the United States and to neutralize the “threat” these people were believed to represent. Thus began the infamous House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings, a series of public “trials” of suspected American Communists conducted by members of the U.S. Congress, most notably Senator Joseph McCarthy. The HUAC hearings have since come to represent one of the darkest moments in American history. Before Senator McCarthy was exposed for falsifying evidence and otherwise violating the civil rights of those he accused, the lives and reputations of hundreds of innocent people were ruined.

The 1950s also saw a rapid expansion of the middle class and the rise to prominence of the suburban lifestyle. Some have seen it as an era of rigid conformism. For many of the women who had worked outside the home during World War II, the role of housewife into which they were recast seemed particularly oppressive. The repressed frustration and anger of suburban, middle-class housewives contributed much to the new “women’s liberation” and feminist movements of the 1960s, particularly

Compare & Contrast

1963: Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique, the first notable publication of the modern women’s movement, in which Friedan outlines the position of women as second-class citizens in contemporary life.
1994: Mary Pipher publishes Reviving Ophelia, in which she illustrates how adolescent girls are forced to conform to strict societal conventions that are often at odds with a girl’s true emerging identity.
1960: 39 percent of married American women work outside the home.
1995: 61 percent of married American women work outside the home.
1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson declares a “national war on poverty” and creates the Office of Economic Opportunity, which coordinates programs such as Job Corps and Head Start. Head Start provides low-income, at-risk children with early education and nurturing.
1994: A Republican-dominated Congress, led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, declares a national war on welfare and suggests a return to the use of orphanages.

following the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

Critical Overview

The four stories which Olsen wrote during the 1950s and then published as Tell Me a Riddle in 1961 are the only short stories she has published. Besides these stories, her published work totals one novel and a number of essays. Nonetheless, Olsen’s four short stories have had an impressive impact on the literary world since their first appearance. They have been reprinted in countless anthologies, and Olsen has been heralded as an early champion of a new feminist movement in literature. In The New York Times Book Review, prominent contemporary novelist Margaret Atwood describes the importance of Olsen and her work, particularly to women: “Few writers have gained such wide respect based on such a small body of published work. . . . Among women writers in the United States, ’respect’ is too pale a word: ’reverence’ is more like it.”

When Olsen published her volume of stories upon completion of her studies at the Stanford University Creative Writing Program, her work was immediately well-received by critics. Initially, her stories were often seen as beautifully crafted but bleak in outlook. In a 1961 review in The Commonweal, for example, Richard M. Elman describes “I Stand Here Ironing,” in his view the most excellent of Olsen’s stories, as “a catalogue of the failure of intimacy.” A 1963 essay by William Van O’Connor in Studies in Short Fiction also seems to find nothing but despair in a story which features a daughter who imagines that nothing matters because we will all soon be killed by atomic bombs and a mother who wants to believe that there is “still enough to live by,” but is unable to convince her daughter.

Subsequent critics, perhaps informed by more feminist sensibilities, have seen more optimistic elements in the story. For example, Elizabeth Fisher, editor of Aphra, The Feminist Literary Magazine, suggests in a 1972 essay in The Nation that “I Stand Here Ironing” is “also a hopeful story of how children survive, sometimes even making strength, or talent, out of the deprivations they’ve endured.” Joanne S. Frye, in a 1981 Studies in Short Fiction essay, argues that Emily, despite her quip about everyone being “atom-dead” soon, “does not, in fact, succumb to that despairing view; rather, she is asserting her own right to choice as she lightly claims her wish to sleep late in the morning.” Frye goes on to argue that the mother, despite her despair over being unable to “total it all,” does finally manage to “recenter her thoughts,” and ultimately triumphs as a parent in her acknowledgement of her daughter’s independence. Frye reads the mother’s final resolution—“Let her be” —as an indication that the mother “trust[s] the power of each to ’find her way’ even in the face of powerful external constraints on individual control.”

Olsen’s work has also inspired a great deal of critical analysis which takes a biographical approach, perhaps because the author has been so candid about how circumstances in her life have affected her writing. Olsen, an acclaimed critic and lecturer in her own right, has acknowledged that the demands of her marriage and four children have distracted her from writing and limited her literary output. Many of Olsen’s fellow writers and critics have expressed admiration for her ability to overcome these obstacles. Women writers, in particular, have seen her as a role model.

Many critics have pointed to the obvious parallels between Olsen’s life and that of the narrator in “I Stand Here Ironing.” Olsen, too, was abandoned by her first husband during the Depression after giving birth to one child and later had more children with a second husband. Critics have found metaphors in Olsen’s story for her own literary career and for the process of writing in general. Just as Olsen’s literary career has been interrupted by the heavy demands placed on a working mother, so the narrator has been distracted from providing the kind of nurturing she would have liked to for her eldest child. The narrator is also interrupted from telling her story and from finding its “total.” Critics have suggested that the mother-narrator and her account of the special challenges she has faced through motherhood parallel the unique challenges faced by women writers.

Criticism

Elisabeth Piedmont-Morton

Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton is the coordinator of the Undergraduate Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In the following essay, she explores the autobiographical elements in ’I Stand Here Ironing,” and discusses Olsen’s inclusion of poor and underrepresented people and their situations in her work.

“I Stand Here Ironing” is the first story in Tillie Olsen’s awarding-winning collection, Tell Me a Riddle, which was first published in 1961 when Olsen was in her late forties. In this story, which is considered her most autobiographical, Olsen breaks new literary ground in creating the voice of the mother-narrator and in crafting a narrative structure that mirrors as well as describes female experience. Like the four other stories in the collection, “I Stand Here Ironing” portrays the “aching hardships of poverty and the themes of exile or exclusion.” This story, according to critics Mickey Pearlman and Abby Werlock in Tillie Olsen,“presents us with the inexorable riddle of human existence: it paradoxically comprises not merely the endurance of poverty, bigotry, illness, and pain but the ultimate ability to transcend these.”

Olsen is one of those authors whose life is so integral to her writing that any reading of her fiction is greatly enriched by comparisons between her life experiences and the fictional lives she creates. Olsen’s critics, and Olsen herself in numerous speeches and interviews, have identified the three consuming passions of her life: politics, writing, and mothering. Her remarkable contribution to literature and to the advancement of women’s causes, is her insistence that all three of these are connected: that motherhood always has a political dimension, and that politics cannot be separated from families, for example. What she also recognizes, however, is that the material conditions of women’s lives prevent them from engaging in all three of these issues simultaneously; that political activism may disqualify one from motherhood; or that motherhood may consume the time and energy needed for writing. Twenty years separated Olsen’s initial convictions that “she must write,” and her first publications. In a 1971 speech, she explained that she “raised four children without household help. . . [and] worked outside the home in everyday jobs as well.” She further stated that during “the years when I should have been writing, my hands and being were at other (inescapable) tasks.”

Alice Walker once praised Olsen for rescuing the lives of forgotten and invisible people, and other critics have agreed that Olsen’s work has preserved the histories of people who have traditionally been

What Do I Read Next?

“Tell Me a Riddle” (1961) is Tillie Olsen’s award-winning story about the sacrifices a Jewish immigrant couple has had to make in order for their marriage to survive.
The Second Sex(1949) by French writer Simone de Beauvoir. A landmark book that outlines the biological, historical, and social origins of women’s oppression. Recognized as one of the books that helped launch the feminist movement.
The Dollmaker(1954) by Harriette Arnow. A novel about a poor, Southern, working-class family that moves to Detroit during World War II. Chronicles the mother’s growing disillusionment with modern society as she struggles to raise her children against the backdrop of the city’s dangerous steel mills.
“Blues Ain’t No Mocking Bird” (1972) a short story published in Toni Cade Bambara’s collection Gorilla, My Love. An impoverished African-American family attracts the attention of a film crew gathering footage for a project on the county food-stamp program. Despite the protests of a grandmother and her husband, the men trespass on the family’s property and refuse to stop filming the family’s humble living quarters.

underrepresented in literature. Olsen’s career proves her conviction that “literature can be made out of the lives of despised people.” Walker also gave Olsen credit for her pioneering efforts to portray the lives of the poor, the working class, females, and non-whites well before these subjects received widespread attention. Critics have lauded “I Stand Here Ironing” for articulating a strong female voice, especially in the mother-narrator’s reflections on her life as a mother and a worker. The story is one of the best examples in literature—and certainly one of the first—to offer readers a glimpse into the lives of working-class women and families from a woman’s perspective. The dedication to her book of essays, Silences, reads in part: “For our silenced people, century after century after their being consumed in the hard everyday essential work of maintaining human life. Their art, which still they made— as their other contributions—anonymous; refused respect, recognition; lost.”

“I Stand Here Ironing” appears to be straightforward and simple on the first reading, but a closer study reveals a sophisticated narrative structure and a rich pattern of imagery. Olsen frequently mentioned in interviews that she was especially proud of the story’s first sentence, and wished she could duplicate its directness and economy: “I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.” The apparent simplicity of this sentence belies the complexity of the narrative situation. Readers are introduced to a woman who appears to be addressing them directly. While it quickly becomes clear that the “you” of the first sentence is in fact some school official, readers are drawn into the narrative and soon come to occupy the position of sympathetic listener. The mother revisits the nineteen years of her daughters life, but the narrative remains anchored in the present because of the act of ironing. Like most women with children, her story is constantly interrupted by other demands and she is accustomed to “engaging in her private thoughts while simultaneously carrying on with household tasks and family interactions.” In fact, as her story reveals, her life has been interrupted by childbirth, desertion, poverty, numerous jobs, childcare, remarriage, frequent relocations, and five children. The pace and shape of this narrative is as familiar to the mother-narrator as is the act of ironing.

The mother’s ironing not only keeps us attuned to the immediacy of her experiences, it provides the central metaphor for the story. Like Alice Walker’s use of quilting in “Everyday Use,” Olsen’s ironing metaphor resonates both inside and outside the fictional boundaries of the story. On one level, the ironing metaphor is significant because it belongs almost exclusively to the domestic world of women. Not only is ironing women’s work, but more often than not women iron for other people. On a more figurative level, mothering is also an act of ironing, of smoothing out problems, of making things right and ordered. But as the story of her first child’s difficult upbringing unfolds, the iron begins to take on another, more sinister array of qualities. It is helpful here to recall another aspect of the author’s personal life that bears on the story. Olsen spent many of her working years in factories, and as a young girl worked as a tie presser, laboring long hours with hot and dangerous equipment under deplorable working conditions. She has dedicated her life to fighting for social change and the rights of the oppressed, especially workers. She also was an active socialist in the 1930s and even spent time in jail for her role in a factory strike. With these things in mind, the attentive reader listens to the mother struggling with “dredging the past,” knowing she will “never total it all.” The iron comes to represent, then, the pressures of outside forces and the accidents of history into which we are born, such as poverty, divorce, illness, and prejudice.

After she asks a total of thirteen questions, critics have noted, ranging from “how could I have known?” to “what was the cost?” the narrator suddenly pauses (we can imagine her lifting the iron from the board). She concludes that “all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I cannot endure it tonight.” The adjective heavy focuses our attention on the iron, which has not literally grown heavier, though the narrator may be fatigued. But on a figurative level, it has become heavier, taken on weight and significance as it has come to represent the pressures of outside forces on individuals in general and on Emily in particular. The mother’s conclusion to “let her be” is not an abdication of her parental rights; rather it is a recognition that her powers as a mother cannot control the oppressive forces of the outside world. She ends her monologue with a prayer-like hope that her daughter will come to know “that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.”

This ending suggests that the narrator comes to this resolution not despite the fact that her life allows her time for introspection only while working, but because of the work. The twin process of ironing and thinking out loud about the past do not

“Olsen’s critics, and Olsen herself in numerous speeches and interviews, have identified the three consuming passions of her life: politics, writing, and mothering.”

simply move “tormented back and forth,” but progress, from questions to answers, from unknown to known. Olsen’s narrator learns something in the act of ironing, and the iron itself has been a crucial part of that process, leading her to a fuller understanding of her motherhood through its insistent metaphorical meanings.

Source: Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Rose Kamel

In the following excerpted essay, Kamel discusses “I Stand Here Ironing” and its theme of women whose potential for creativity, growth, and opportunity has been denied them due to their race, sex, religion, and socio-economic status.

In 1954. . . Olsen published the brilliant short story ’I Stand Here Ironing,” having served a prolonged apprenticeship during which “there was a conscious storing, snatched reading, beginnings of writing” and always “the secret rootlets of reconnaissance.” This reconnaissance involved not only obsessive reading but internalizing the lives of women writers, especially writers who were also mothers.

Their emergence is evidence of changing circumstances making possible for them what (with rarest exception) was not possible in the generations of women before. I hope and I fear for what will result. I hope (and believe) that complex new richness will come into literature; I fear because almost certainly their work will be impeded, lessened, partial. For the fundamental situation remains unchanged. Unlike men writers who marry, most will not have the societal equivalent of a wife—nor (in a society hostile to growing life) anyone but themselves to mother their children. . . .

“The mother has remarried, but material comforts, an emotionally secure middle-class existence, cannot assuage her loneliness.”

“I Stand Here Ironing” depicts a nameless mother-narrator, who, having received a phone call from her daughter Emily’s high-school guidance counselor that Emily is an underachiever, pushes an iron to and fro across the board on which Emily’s dress lies shapeless and wrinkled. The narrator begins “dredging the past and all that compounds a human being.” Her thoughts flow with the rhythm of the iron as she attempts to grasp the “rootlet of reconnaissance” to explain why it was that her oldest child was one “seldom smiled at.” What would appear as understandable reasons—the Depression, the nineteen-year old mother, who at her daughter’s present age worked at menial jobs during the day and at household chores at night, the iron necessity that made her place Emily in a series of foster homes, the desertion of her first husband, bearing and rearing four other children of a second marriage, all clamoring for attention—should account for Emily’s chronic sorrow; but somehow they do not. Necessity dominating the mother’s life could have tempered Emily, but the reader soon perceives that there may be another reason why Emily and the mother-narrator are silenced counterparts. The mother has remarried, but material comforts, an emotionally secure middle-class existence, cannot assuage her loneliness. Never having experienced the celebratory rituals of working-class communality, middle-class anomie distances her from other women. Her entire adult life has been interrupted by child care described by Olsen quoting [Sally Bingham in Silences]:

My work “writing” is reduced to five or six hours a week, always subject to interruptions and cancellations. . . I don’t believe there is a solution to the problem, or at least I don’t believe there is one which recognizes the emotional complexities involved. A life without children is, I believe, an impoverished life for most women; yet life with children imposes demands that consume energy and imagination at the same time, cannot be delegated—even supposing there were a delegate available.

In “I Stand Here Ironing,” characteristic stylistic clues embedded in the occasionally inverted syntax, run-on sentences interspersed with fragments, repetitions, alliterative parallels, an incantatory rhythm evoke the narrator’s longing not only for a lost child but for a lost language whereby she can order the chaotic dailiness of a working mother’s experience.

She was a beautiful baby. The first and only one of our five that was beautiful at birth. You do not guess how new and uneasy her tenancy in her now-loveliness. You did not know her all those years she was thought homely, or see her pouring over her baby pictures, making me tell her over and over how beautiful she had been—and would be, I would tell her—and was now to the seeing eye. But the seeing eyes were few or non-existent. Including mine. . . .

Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him. It is rare there is such a cry now. That time of motherhood is almost behind me when the ear is not one’s own but must always be racked and listening for the child to cry, the child call. We sit for awhile and I hold him, looking out over the city spread in charcoal with its soft aisles of light. “Shoogily,” he breathes and curls closer. I carry him back to bed, asleep. Shoogily. A funny word, a family word, inherited from Emily, invented by her to say: comfort.

Emily’s word play appears rooted in Yiddish (shoogily— meshugah) and there is something archetypically talmudic in her fascination with riddles (for which a younger sibling gets recognition) “that was my riddle, Mother, I told it to Susan. . .,” foreshadowing the leitmotif Olsen will orchestrate in “Tell Me a Riddle.” When language inventiveness fails to mitigate against Emily’s lack of achievement at school, when she tries and fails to authenticate herself, she escapes into another’s role. Desperate for attention, identity, she responds to the mother’s suggestion that she try out for a high school play— [Olsen notes in Silences that] “not to have an audience is a kind of death” — and becomes a comic crowd pleaser to the sound of thunderous applause. Thus, Emily finally commands some attention and affection and to a limited extent a control of life’s randomness. Nonetheless, only articulation through language can free her from oppression. Silenced at home she lacks and will probably continue to lack centrality.

The story ends with the mother still ironing out the wrinkles in Emily’s dress; like Emily she is “helpless before the iron,” aware that this Sisyphus-like ritual cannot atone for the past, nor can she ultimately answer the riddle Emily poses within and without the family constellation. Certainly the chains of necessity should have justified the mother’s past relationship with her eldest child.

We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother. I was a distracted mother. There were the other children pushing up, demanding. Her younger sister seemed all that she was not. There were many years that she did not want me to touch her. She kept too much to herself,. . . My wisdom came too late. She has much to her and probably nothing will come of it. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear.

Source: Rose Kamel, “Literary Foremothers and Writers’ Silences: Tillie Olsen’s Autobiographical Fiction,” in MELUS, Vol. 12, no. 3, Fall, 1985, pp. 55-72.

Joanne S. Frye

In the following essay, Frye asserts that motherhood is presented in Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” as a metaphor for the individual’s search for selfhood and as a literary experience.

Motherhood as literary metaphor has long been a cliche for the creative process: the artist gives birth to a work of art which takes on a life of its own. Motherhood as literary experience has only rarely existed at all, except as perceived by a resentful or adoring son who is working through his own identity in separation from the power of a nurturant and/or threatening past. The uniqueness of Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” lies in its fusion of motherhood as both metaphor and experience: it shows us motherhood bared, stripped of romantic distortion, and reinfused with the power of genuine metaphorical insight into the problems of selfhood in the modern world.

The story seems at first to be a simple meditation of a mother reconstructing her daughter’s past in an attempt to explain present behavior. In its pretense of silent dialogue with the school’s guidance counselor—a mental occupation to accompany the physical occupation of ironing—it creates the impression of literal transcription of a mother’s 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.” Indeed, this surface level provides the narrative thread for our insights into both Emily and her mother. The mother’s first person narrative

“The narrative structure creates a powerful sense of immediacy and an unfamiliar literary experience.”

moves chronologically through a personal past which is gauged and anchored by occasional intrusions of the present: “I put the iron down”; “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.”. . .

The story is very fundamentally structured through the mother’s 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” and “What in me demanded that goodness in her?“—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 daughter’s needs and constraints. When she defines the hostilities between Emily and her sister Susan—“that terrible balancing of hurts and needs” —she asserts her own recognition not only of an extreme sibling rivalry but also of the inevitable conflict in the separate self-definitions of parent and child. Gauging the hurts and needs of one human being against the hurts and needs of another: this is the pattern of parenthood. But more, it is the pattern of a responsible self living in relationship.

The story’s immediate reality continually opens onto such larger patterns of human awareness. Ostensibly an answer to the school counselor, the mother’s interior monologue becomes a meditation on human existence, on the interplay among external contingencies, individual needs, and individual responsibilities. The narrative structure creates a powerful sense of immediacy and an unfamiliar literary experience. But it also generates a unique capacity for metaphorical insight into the knowledge that each individual—like both the mother and the daughter—can act only from the context of immediate personal limitations but must nonetheless act through a sense of individual responsibility.

The narrator sets the context for this general concern by first defining the separateness of mother and daughter:“You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me.” Almost defensively, she cites too the difficulties of finding time and being always—as mothers are—susceptible to interruption. But in identifying an even greater difficulty in the focus of her parental responsibility, she highlights the thematic concern with guilt and responsibility: “Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.” She is, in other words, setting out to assess her own responsibility, her own failure, and finally her need to reaffirm her own autonomy as a separate human being who cannot be defined solely through her parental role.

When she identifies the patterns of isolation and alienation between herself and her daughter, she is further probing the awareness of her own separateness and the implicit separation between any two selfhoods. The convalescent home to which she sent Emily as a child is premised on establishing an “invisible wall” between visiting parents and their children on the balconies above. But, in fact, that wall is only an extreme instance of an inevitable separateness, of all the life that is lived “outside of me, beyond me.” Even in her memory of deeply caring conversations with her daughter, the mother can only claim to provide an occasional external eye, a person who can begin to narrate for the daughter the continuity of the daughter’s own past and emergent selfhood but who must stand outside that selfhood separated by her own experiences and her own needs. . . .

The tension in Emily’s personality—which has continually been defined as light and glimmering yet rigid and withheld—comes to a final focus in die self-mocking humor of her allusion to the most powerful cultural constraint on human behavior: nothing individual matters because “in a couple years we’ll all be atom-dead.” But Emily does not, in fact, succumb to that despairing view; rather she is asserting her own right to choice as she lightly claims her wish to sleep late in the morning. Though the mother feels more heavily the horror of this judgment, she feels its weight most clearly in relation to the complexity of individual personhood and responsibility: “because I have been dredging the past, and all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I cannot endure it tonight.” And when she goes on from her despairing inability to “total it all” to the story’s conclusion, she recenters her thoughts on the tenuous balance between the powerful cultural constraints and the need to affirm the autonomy of the self in the face of those constraints: “Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom—but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know—help make it so there is cause for her to know—that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.”

Her efforts, then,“to gather together, to try and make coherent” are both inevitably doomed to failure and finally successful. There cannot be— either for parent or for story-teller—a final coherence, a final access to defined personality, or a full sense of individual control. There is only the enriched understanding of the separateness of all people—even parents from children—and the necessity to perceive and foster the value of each person’s autonomous selfhood. Though that selfhood is always limited by the forces of external constraints, it is nonetheless defined and activated by the recognition of the “seal” each person sets on surrounding people and the acceptance of responsibility for one’s own actions and capacities. At best, we can share in the efforts to resist the fatalism of life lived helplessly “before the iron”—never denying the power of the iron but never yielding to the iron in final helplessness either. We must trust the power of each to “find her way” even in the face of powerful external constraints on individual control.

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. . . .

Source: Joanne S. Frye, ’“I Stand Here Ironing’: Motherhood as Experience and Metaphor,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 18, no. 3, Summer, 1981, pp. 287-92.