Analysis Of Tillie Olsen's ' I Stand Here Ironing '

Suffering from tuberculosis, Emily was sent away from her mother again to a convalescent home, where she could be better cared for. While Emily is at the recovery center, she is cut off from almost all communication especially relationship with her own mother. Even the letters the narrator writes to her are read to her once and then thrown away. Parents are allowed to visit only every other Sunday, when the children line up on the balconies of their cottages and conduct shouted conversations with the parents who stand below. Emily’s balcony in particular represents the emotional distance between the narrator and her daughter.

In addition to the impact of her family on her mental state, it is also through the relationship Miss Emily has with her community, that helps to foreshadow the fateful ending. It is through the words and actions of the community that this relationship is shown, such as how they even distance themselves from her. In the beginning of the story in Act I, Faulkner describes Miss Emily’s position in the town as “a sort of hereditary obligation”. Since the death of her father, the town is aware of the struggle she is having while being alone, so that is why they see her

Miss Emily's relationship with her father is a key factor in the development of her isolation. As she is growing up, he will not let anybody around his daughter,

Emily was kept confined from all that surrounded her. Her father had given the town folks a large amount of money which caused Emily and her father to feel superior to others. “Grierson’s held themselves a little too high for what they really were” (Faulkner). Emily’s attitude had developed as a stuck-up and stubborn girl and her father was to blame for this attitude. Emily was a normal

In spite of her suffering, it is almost shocking how Emily behaves extraordinary well even in stressful situations. When she is left at nursery school, she acts unexpectedly contrary to most kids her age. “‘She did not clutch and implore “don’t go Mommy” like the other children’” (Olsen 291). She prefers to stay at home but even while trying to convince her mother to let her stay, she does it subtly, “‘Never a direct protest, never rebellion’” (Olsen 292). Does Emily behave well by choice? Her mother is worried and wonders, “What in me demanded that goodness in her? And what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?” (Olsen 292).

When Emily was ill, her mother believed that the best place to get care for her child was in a special home. This contradicted the real needs Emily had. Soon after the last child was born, Emily became very ill with red measles, and once again the mother had to send her away to a convalescent home in the country where she could be cared for until she was well enough to return home. The mother thought to herself, "She can have the kind of food and care you can't manage for her, and you'll be free to concentrate on the new baby" (602). For the first six weeks, Emily was not allowed any visitors. The child sat in this strange home for six weeks not knowing anyone at all until her mother could visit her every other Sunday. When her mother did visit, there was an invisible wall "not To Be Contaminated by Parental Germs or Physical Affection" (602). The wall represents the distance between Emily and her mother, which has always been and continues. Emily had told her mother one day "They don't like you to love anybody here" (602). She wanted to love and to be loved so badly. It didn't seem that there was anywhere she could go to

Emily comes from a family with high expectations of her a sort of “hereditary obligation” (30). Emily has been mentally manipulated by her as so indicated in the line of the story “we did not say she was crazy then we believed she had to do that we remember all the young men her father had driven away” (32). There is already proof of mental illness in the family “remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great aunt, had gone completely crazy last” (32).

Although the mother may have been trying to help Emily, the mother should have tried to take care of Emily better instead of sending her off as the only solution. One of the other effects of her mother’s unavoidable neglect is Emily’s failure to be on the same pace as her peers in class. She is at a state of illiteracy that is uncommon for her age at the time which may be a result from staying at home instead of going to class to take care of the household. In addition to the mother’s neglect, having a sister who was the ideal poster child may have caused self confidence problems as she grew older being the odd one out in the family. Emily’s mother should have made sure she was able to take care of Emily first before deciding to give birth to another child. What the mother thought would be the best option for Emily had a more clear negative effect on Emily after she grew older still not having any clear direction in her life.

Emily's father suppressed all of her inner desires. He kept her down to the point that she was not allowed to grow and change with the things around her. When “garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated…only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps” (Rose 217). Even when he died, she was still unable to get accustom to the changes around her. The traditions that her and her father continued to participate in even when others stopped, were also a way that her father kept her under his thumb. The people of the town helped in

The very beinning of the story is extraordinary. It begins with the burial of Emily, the residents around her coffin did not feel anything, most of them were curious. There were neither friends nor relatives, nobody who was in mouring for her, only inquirers. The readers can ask, what kind of person was Miss Emily? Why the others did not feel sadness? Perhaps there is a bigger question: what was the reason that nobody went to her house more than ten years (except her slave, Tobe).

     Emily’s mother felt like she was forced to neglect Emily. Her excuse was that the time was hard, it was the age “of depression, of war, of fear” (Olsen 262). Although things were not under Emily’s mother’s control, she takes responsibility anyway. In society, parents are thought to provide physical and emotional support so that their children can advance through life with prosperity. This paper is the property of Virtual Essays .com Copyright ©

The townspeople felt bad for Emily and thought the reason for her craziness was because her family had a history of it. Emily also waits three days before revealing the death of her father. Emily allows the dead body of her father to lie in her home rotting away. Another crazy action that Emily does is when she goes to the pharmacy to purchase “rat poison”. When Emily goes to buy the arsenic she doesn’t tell the druggist what exactly she is going to use it for, but stares him down making him feel uncomfortable. “Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up” (213). One of the most extreme actions Emily performs is being responsible for Homer Barron’s death. But, after fully reading the story the reader understands that Emily not only kills Homer but sleeps with his corpse. “What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay… Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair” (215) There the reader’s thought of Emily sleeping with the dead body and her psychotic tendencies is confirmed.

Emily is very vulnerable mostly because of her appearance. "She tormented herself enough about not looking like the others, there was enough of the unsureness, the having to be conscious of works before you speak, the constant caring-what are they thinking of me? Without having it all magnified by the merciless physical drivers" (Olson 603). Emily is a skinny, fragile, and sick child, and in the outer world, other kids without values would point her out. Emily is always insecure about what she says, or does in front of others. The insecurity of not being able to be her own person is always on her mind.

The narrator was not a very maternally loving mother to Emily. "The old man living in the back once said in his gentle way: `You should smile at Emily more when you look at her'" (200). Unlike the mom's portrayed in the 1950's, the narrator could not

Tillie Olsen was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1913, the child of political refugees from Russia. Olsen dropped out of school at the age of sixteen to help support her family during the depression. She became politically active in the Young Communist League and was involved in the Warehouse Union’s labor disputes in Kansas City. Her first novel, Yonnondio, about a poor, working-class family, was begun when she was nineteen. While writing the novel over the next four years, she gave birth to her first child and was left to raise the baby alone after her husband abandoned her. She married Jack Olsen in 1936 and had three more children. She remained politically active and held down various jobs while