TILLIE OLSEN

"I STAND HERE IRONING"

Ols 1. Bauer, Helen Pike. "'A child of anxious, not proud, love': Mother and Daughter in Tillie Olsen's 'I Stand Here Ironing.'"

Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American

Literature. Ed. Mickey Pearlman. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. 35-39.
An examination of the relationship between the narrator of "I Stand Here Ironing" and her daughter Emily suggests that the mother's monologue, occasioned by the school counselor's request for a meeting to discuss Emily, is her attempt to understand her daughter and to explain her daughter's behavior. While she reflects on the nineteen years of Emily's life, years filled with "displacement and deprivation" (35), she examines her own life as well and the choices that she made, accepting responsibility for the difficulties that Emily faced as a child (36). But her reflection is not overburdened with guilt. As a young mother whose husband abandoned her and eight-month-old Emily, she managed as best as she could (36). Since "time is the first casualty of poverty" (36), the narrator, during Emily's infancy and childhood, suffered from time constraints and restrictions. She breast fed Emily according to a time schedule set by authorities rather than responding to Emily's and her own natural requirements (36). Her need to work reduced the time she had for Emily, time that was later available for her other children. In addition, the narrator's poverty contributed to her powerlessness (36): "The story is filled with expressions of compulsion and lack of choice" (36). Emily also faced the same difficult conditions as her mother, and she, out of necessity, helped with the younger children, often to the detriment of her school work. But both Emily and her mother, unlike the absent father, did not give up (37). The mother possesses "strength of character" (37) and intelligence, qualities that Emily shares and that have enabled both of them to survive. In addition, Emily's talent for comedy encourages a feeling of hope for her future (38). Still, the world that Olsen depicts is one of "poverty, monotonous labor, estrangement, and sickness" (38). But opposed to that harsh world are the mother's love and desires for Emily, which do not include a hope of marriage

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and children for Emily but a wish that she be a secure individual with a strong identity (39). THEM Ols 2. Fisher, Elizabeth. "The Passion of Tillie Olsen." Review of Tell Me a Riddle, by Tillie Olsen. The Nation, April 10, 1972: 472, 474. This review of Tell Me a Riddle, a collection of four stories, discusses Olsen's "masterpiece" (472), the title story, and then briefly mentions the others in the collection. "I Stand Here Ironing" is a tale that every parent will recognize, a tale of "wanting to do the best for her daughter ... [but of being] often forced to do the worst" (474). Even though the story presents a picture of poverty and abandonment, it incorporates a note of hope because the characters endure. THEM, EORM Ols 3. Frye, Joanne S. "'I Stand Here Ironing': Motherhood as Experience and Metaphor." Studies in Short Fiction 18 (1981): 28792. Depiction or representation of motherhood in literature except as a metaphor for the creative process or as an obstacle in a male development pattern is rarely found (287). Olsen presents a realistic portrayal of motherhood in "I Stand Here Ironing" and simultaneously uses motherhood to explore the concept of selfhood (287). The story, ostensibly a reflection on the daughter's life, is also an examination of the mother's own (287). As the mother traces her daughter's development, she considers the options she had in satisfying her and her daughter's needs (288), and she does so without unnecessarily blaming herself (290). But the story moves beyond the narrator and her daughter and "becomes a mediation on human existence, on the interplay among external contingencies, individual needs, and individual responsibilities" (288). The story argues for the necessary separateness of all individuals (288). The mother is not to be defined solely in her role as mother nor is Emily to be considered solely her mother's creation (289). Emily is ultimately responsible for her actions and for the establishment of a viable selfhood (289). However, societal pressures exert a force on individuals. In the case of the narrator and her daughter, the depression and the ensuing poverty, war and the absence of fathers and husbands, and inadequate child care had an influence (290). Still the narrator accepts responsibility for her actions even though her options were limited by circumstances, just as Emily must (290). Emily makes choices, asserting herself as an individual (291). The mother and her daughter's story provide a comment on the establishment of a selfhood, suggesting that each individual must be responsible for creating a trustworthy life out of limited choices (291-92). EEM, THEM

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Ols 4. Frye, Joanne S. Tillie Olsen: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1995. Pp. 19-36,143-49.
Although the story seems (and is) autobiographical, it is also well crafted and deals with themes that are more than merely personal (2021), including the ways larger circumstances inhibit and restrict individual lives (22). It is perhaps the first significant work of literature to emphasize a mother's perspective and voice, and it explores the problem of "how to communicate inchoate life comprehensions, how to shape human circumstances into narrative forms that evoke the complexity of people's lives and elude the available cultural constructions of those lives" (23). The narrative depends on an audience willing to listen (25), and the whole tale achieves a dialogical structure, highlighting not only a "projected dialogue with the external voice [of the counselor] but also the sense of the mother's internal dialogue" (26). Moreover, "the story asserts from the outset that narrative construction of past experience is necessarily tentative and arbitrarily shaped by present circumstance" (26). An important narrative pattern centers around constant interruptions, and "each interruption operates ... to create a shift of emphasis or an alternative interpretation, reminding us that the narrative is only an interpretation of events, never a total rendering of them. In this way the story never becomes 'fixed'" (28). The work therefore implies that "the narrative is a hypothesis, one possible answer, not an actual transcribing of life events" (29). In this non-linear organization, "two thematic concernsthe mother's anguish about societal harms and the daughter's increasingly independent existenceemerge as far more crucial guides for narrative selection than any concern with plot or narrative chronology" (30). "Resisting both the impositions of traditional coherence and the simple renderings of a monological voice, the narrative becomes an internal dialogue capable of rendering vividly the interactions between human hopes and possibilities and the constraints set by circumstances" (31). Such a dialogical structure "enables the mother to look back at the controlling power of what could not be helped, and yet to discover what can still be changed" (31). Emphasis on eye imagery is "a part of the story's other metaphorical patterns that invoke change, process, flexibility, and resistance to fixity: growth, nourishment, and interaction rather than rigidity, hunger, and separation" (34). The story emphasizes experiences not often treated in literature and makes those experiences available to various interpretations (35). In an interview about the story, Olsen stresses its rhythm, its "'back and forth movement as the iron itself moves'" (143). She notes that because the story was written in the aftermath of the dropping of the first atom bomb, it emphasizes "'how precious young life, all life, is'" (144). Olsen questions conventional critical focus on the mother's "guilt," arguing that one "'is guilty only for what one oneself is responsible for. But if the situation is that it's the terrible schools; the poor

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child care; the competitive putdown world; if it's exhaustion; if you can't be there when needed and there's nobody else to care, then the anguish, anger, even powerlessness is a reality reaction. And to a situation common with others. About which something can be done'" (146). For these reasons, to stress the mother's "guilt" is to deny society's responsibilities. At the time she wrote the story, Olsen "'did not realize ... that this was the first time the direct voice of the mother herself appeared in literature'" (147). FORM, FEM, DIAL, MARX, THEM Ols 5. Kamel, Rose. "Literary Foremothers and Writers' Silences: Tillie Olsen's Autobiographical Fiction." MELUS: Society for the

Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 12 (1985):

55-72.
The life experiences of Olsenher lack of a college education, her marriage to a laborer, her raising of her four daughters, her low-paying jobs, and her postponement of writing until the demands of a family lessenedare translated into her fiction (55-56). Her stories explore the difficulty of life in the working class and the frustration of a woman who is shunted into a domestic life with no creative outlet (56-57). In Olsen's fiction one finds "The tyranny of class struggle eroding the bodies and minds of workers and the children of workers; household drudgery and child care undermining a woman writer's creativity" (58). "I Stand Here Ironing," published when Olsen was fifty (59), shows that the years when the narrator's daughter Emily was young were years of hardship caused by low paying jobs and abandonment by the narrator's husband (60). But the loneliness and emptiness of that period continue even after her economic condition improves with her second marriage (60). The reason is that "Her entire adult life has been interrupted by child care" (60). The narrator's language indicates her loss, an atrophying of an inherent talent (60). Her daughter Emily also suffers from the lack of opportunity to express herself, even though she has won through her acting "some attention and affection and to a limited extent a control of life's randomness" (61). She, resembling the dress that her mother is ironing, is flattened and oppressed by circumstances (61). Examination of Olsen's "O Yes" and "Tell Me a Riddle" supports the claim that Olsen is a writer who has broken the silence imposed by her working class background and gender, thus empowering others to do the same (71). MARX, HIST, FEM, THEM Ols 6. Kloss, Robert J. "Balancing the Hurts and Needs: Olsen's 'I

Stand Here Ironing.'" Journal of Evolutionary Fsychology (March 1994): 78-86.

The research of Nancy Chodorow and other psychologists helps explain the effect the narrator's actions have upon the development of her daughter Emily. Because of the twelve separations Emily undergoes.

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she learns that the world is not to be trusted (79). She suffers the desertion of her father and the absences of her mother (sometimes due to a job or to the birth of a sibling). Her own illness occasions her being placed in a convalescent home (79). All of these actual or emotional abandonments result in Emily exhibiting the symptoms of separation anxiety disorder, including sleeping and eating problems and depression (80). Emily's eating disorders, manifested in her not eating in her early childhood years and then eating ravenously later, can be linked to the traumatic separations (82). Her lack of physical growth can be the result of "emotional deprivation" but can also indicate a desire to avoid adulthood and the responsibilities that accompany it, responsibilities that Emily faced at too early an age (82). Her nightmares, another symptom of separation anxiety disorder, begin with the birth of her sister Susan, but her mother, either because of exhaustion or because of hostility towards Emily occasioned by her physical resemblance to her father, rarely comforts her (83). The mother's behaviornursing Emily according to a book's schedule, not smiling at her (80), leaving her alone at five so that she and her new husband can go out at night (81), and not comforting her (83)contribute to Emily's fear of separation. But these events also result in Emily's not having a clear sense of her own identity (84). Lacking the contact that normally occurs with smiling, nursing, and holding, Emily does not receive the mirroring that is necessary to establish herself as an individual and thus validate her existence (84). The importance of Emily's discovering her talent as a comedian lies in the fact that she realizes that she is somebody (84). Even so, the ending does not bode well for Emily; after all, she sees the world as being destroyed by a nuclear bomb (85). PSY, THEM Ols 7. O'Connor, William Van. "The Short Stories of Tillie Olsen."

Studies in Short Fiction 1 (1963): 21-25.

Placing "I Stand Here Ironing" in the context of other stories by Olsen reveals that often "Olsen writes about anguish" (21). The daughter in "I Stand Here Ironing" is without hope and the mother cannot alleviate her daughter's despair (22). Characteristics of Olsen's stories include the following: the universal is presented rather than particular details about specific environments and individuals (24), chronology is ordered by the character's thoughts, and the character is revealed through his or her thoughts and actions rather than through exposition (24-25).
THEM, FORM

Ols 8. Orr, Elaine Neil. Tillie Olsen and a Feminist Spiritual Vision. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1987. Pp. 77-85.
This "is a story, in religious terms, that cries for redemption (of the mother's and child's loss) and for reconciliation, for coming back together in terms of original promises" (77). "In the representation of a

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life in story, in interpreting history, Olsen seems to suggest that we actually redeem individual and communal loss" (79). The story's tension derives from its twin focus on past loss and the possibility of future transformation (79). The work is constructed through the mother's "sifting moral consciousness" (79): everything is seen from her perspective and told in her voice (80). Contrasting images of the material and the human help organize the work (80), and many passages link Emily with machines (81). The three separations of the mother and daughter provide the main plot developments (81) and are linked to the mother's loss of time (82). "The story, then, concentrates on the time the mother and daughter did not have; that is, it calls to attention the mother's absence and the daughter's alienation" (83). Because the work "presents struggle rather than resolution, cutting off in ambiguity rather than triumph," it implies "Olsen's historic perspective and her sense of reality as evolving through human relationships" (84-85). Readers come to share in the mother's loss, hope, values, struggle, and transcendence
(85). THEM, FORM, READ-R B.W.