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

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