In “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen, the narrator is absent for many important moments of her daughter Emily’s life. This absence causes many issues for the narrator in regards to knowing her daughter and to creating a bond with her. The narrator describes Emily’s growth throughout life in the story while also describing her own issues as a parent trying to provide for her family with relatively no help financially. There are many key times in the story where Emily is absent from the narrator’s life and an important moment happens. Emily misses these moments due to her absences that are decided by her mother. These absences have caused Emily great difficulty in finding herself as a person throughout life. By…
The story of Emily starts off with her death. The townspeople go through the story of her life the way they see it. They all know the story of her father’s death and how she reacted very negatively to it. She refused to acknowledge the fact that her father was dead at first. Her father has always been a very important figure in her life.…
Emily’s relationship with her father is all she had and knew. Her father controlled her life and at the same time Emily loved him dearly. For three days, Emily denied that fact her father was dead and allowed his body to decompose in her home. She tried to hold onto his love and presence even after his passing. The silhouette of her father with the horse whip implied the control he had on her life.…
In ‘And I Stand Here Ironing’, the mother is the narrator, without any given name during the whole work. In it we can see a working class mother that reflect about how being poor has affected the relationship with her daughter, Emily. It is especially pronounced and remarked the lack of attention that she paid on her and how that made her the person she is in that moment. She basically talks about her during the whole work, and that shows concern, but as said above, is a late concern, a concern full of repentance. She is oppressed by personal and environmental circumstances, he laments the decisions taken as a mother. She frankly reveals the dark side of parenting and anxiety is analyzed, lack of control, and hopelessness that often infiltrate the homes of low-income and lower middle class. Through her interior and personal…
In the story, Emily is cut off from social contact and courtship because her father has driven away any man trying to approach her. Therefore, when her father…
At the beginning of the story Emily is just an ordinary little girl, but as the story continues she begins to feel herself changing. By the end of the story, Emily has gained self-consciousness and thinks of herself not as an ordinary little girl but as "Emily".…
"I Stand Here Ironing", by Tillie Olsen is a short story portraying the life and regret of a young mother struggling to raise her oldest daughter. The mother- daughter relationship is the major part of the story and the attitude of the mother toward her daughter, Emily, and the actual character of the mother are two very important elements. The character of the mother can be said to be strong and persevering, and along with her age and experience came her wisdom. At first her attitude toward her daughter seemed more of resigned and regretful, but as Emily grew up and became a beautiful and talented young women, the mother knows to let her be and leave her to live her own life. The character of the mother is crucial to the entire story, for it is this that will determine…
For my paper, I chose to write about the short story, “I Stand Here Ironing,” by Tillie Olsen. In the story, a mother of a nineteen-year-old girl named Emily is ironing some clothes, as she is pondering a recent message she received from one of Emily’s counselors or teachers; a message of concerns with wanting to help her daughter. The mother begins to think back to the very beginning of Emily’s life. She starts stating all the various events that took place in Emily’s life that could have played a role in why Emily is the way she is now. These events had to do with Emily’s father walking out on them, Emily having to go to daycare in her early years, and also self esteem issues from not looking like the other girls in school.…
Though the narrator blames society and the world for the way Emily is she also blames herself. She takes responsibility for some of the things that had gone wrong in Emily’s life, but tells herself that she had no choice but to work late hours and lose her time with Emily. Through all this Emily grew up to be gloomy with a lack of popularity, and low self-esteem. The narrator though chooses to describe Emily as a sensitive, thoughtful, and selfless individual who has survived through a terrible…
Olsen uses the iron as a metaphor a number of times through out the story. In the first paragraph the mother says, ?and what you asked me moves back and forth with the iron?. I think that the mother is trying to sort out the good and the bad through out Emily?s life. She tells of what had to be done not what should have been done. The woman realizes that her daughter lacks meaning in life. The mother questions herself on the upbringing of her oldest daughter Emily compared to the other children. In the last sentence of the story it reads ?help make it so that there is cause for her to know that she she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron? What…
After the death of Emily’s father, the reader starts seeing how she cannot go through the stages of grief. Emily starts out with not showing grief over the death of her father. Then the reader sees Emily is unable to except that her father is dead. When the town people come to console Emily, “She told them her father was not dead. She did that for three days…Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly” (Faulkner, 2012, p. 86). The reader can see Emily’s coping skills are not age appropriate or situational appropriate.…
Miss Emily is first explained as a nice, sweet, and normal woman, though that all changed as her life went on. The death of her father was the flame that ignited all of this weirdness of Emily. After her father died, Miss Emily did not go out much probably because of grief over the loss of her father. “Because her father is the only man with whom she has had a close relationship, she denies his death and keeps his corpse in her house until she breaks down three days later when the doctors insist she let them take the body” (A1). This statement demonstrates her inability to let go of lost ones.…
She never really got over being under her father’s wing. Emily became a woman known throughout town as a mysterious and secretive old woman, who’s later is pity on by the town and others around her. But which before her father death he rejected men in her life that she loved. That drew the conclusion that she would never find a man beside her father .Over the…
This theme is first introduced in the story as the mother recalls her experience with the hardships of single parenting. The mother recalls her “fierce rigidity of first motherhood” filled with work and not much time left to spend with her young daughter (Olsen 292). She often struggles with balance and leaves her child to grapple with the “numbing loneliness of bad day care, foster homes, and latch key childhoods” (Pratt 132). Not only is single parenting a constant battle, but parenting multiple children also comes with a set of difficulties. The effects of cultural circumstances such as the depression, war, and employment eventually lead the inexperienced parent through “the pattern of parenthood” (Frye 288). Because she is the first of multiple children, Emily often has to act as “a mother, and housekeeper, and shopper” (Olsen 296). Not only does this put a tremendous amount of pressure on a young girl, but it also steals away her childhood and forces her to grow up quickly. A common thread seen in the story is the act of ironing. The story takes place with the mother ironing and recalling many moments of her life and the raising of her children as she performs the monotonous task. Later, it is revealed the mother identifies herself with the iron, moving back and forth day to day, nothing really changing (Hoffman 1845). Although the mother has had an unfulfilling life, she holds out hope that her daughter Emily can be more than “this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron” (Olsen 298). The theme of motherhood and, furthermore, the stress that it can impose on someone, is made an important message in the story through the use of examples such as single parenting, parenting multiple children, the first child having to grow up too quickly,…
Daughter and mother relationship is an endless topic for many writers. They are meant to share the bond of love and care for each other. In the real world, however, their relationship is not as successful as it ought to be. The stories "How to Talk to Your Mother" and "I Stand Here Ironing" are the examples of this conflict. Lorrie Moore is distinguished for the clever wordplay, irony and sardonic humor of her fiction. "How to Talk to Your mother" is a short story in her collection Self-Help. It is about a failed relationship of a daughter and her mother over time. Similarly, Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" portrays powerfully the economic and domestic burdens a poor woman faced, as well as the responsibility and powerlessness she feels over her child's life. Both stories have the same theme, but each has different technique, and the conflicts from the characters are opposite.…