I Stand Here Ironing By Tillie Olsen

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

This reality sends panic and fear through her because now she has nowhere to turn and no one to tell her what to do, no one to command her life. Not only is she stricken with the loss of her father but now she is cut off to the outside world, because her only link has passed on. Emily immediately goes into a state of denial; to her, her father could not be dead, he was all that she had and she would not let him go.

The plot of the story has the mother, the main character in the story explain the hardships she and her daughter endured while she worked including: sitters, daycares, illnesses, and travelling. She never doubted the love she had for her daughter but knew her experiences caused Emily to battle with depression. She explained her love for her daughter so passionately including how she despised leaving her with strangers for her to work. She expressed in detail how much her daughter missed her mother as well while she was away. It was an enormous transition for both of them. She continued to explain the difficulty of being without her daughter and having to send her daughter to stay with her abandoning husband’s family. How difficult to consistently relocate your baby to different places and strangers in order to assure she is safe and in the best care because you are working too much to

“When Your Mother is a Stranger” is an essay written by Heather O’Neill, where a nameless young woman runs into her long-forgotten mother who abandoned her young family in hopes of pursuing an independent lifestyle. Throughout the course of O’Neill’s writings, the narrator grieves over her bitter and motherless childhood as she recalls unfortunate memories. Heather O’Neill uses diverse literary devices such as tone and first person point of view to support the idea of ways in which poor parenting can negatively affect a child’s life.

From the beginning we hear about the mother’s self- inculpating thoughts of all she "did and did not do." To many people, the ideal mother- daughter relationship is not like the one we find in this short story. This is neither the fault of the mother or the daughter. Through her own relative thoughts, the mother illustrates the relationship that evolved with her daughter. Secondly, Emily, as a little girl wasn’t the epitome of what the ideal child should be Emily was "dark and foreign looking" when all the girls her age should be Shirley Temple look-alikes. Because she didn’t fit in she was awkward, therefore isolating herself from the rest of the kids her age. This attitude and feeling toward Emily has changed since then, and now she realizes that Emily is a talented young woman with the chance of a great future. As Emily grew older and the mother grew wiser, her attitude toward her daughter changed as well. When Emily grew out of her awkward stage, the mother realized what a beautiful and capable young women she had grown to become. The mother can clearly see this, and does not realize any problems with her daughter. When the social worker calls, she basically tells them to back off and let Emily be. Her main hope for her daughter is that she realizes what potential she has, and she won’t conform to society, but have

The last thing that played a major factor in determining the mood of this story was all the different stereotypes weaved into the story-line. One stereotype was that the mother was the typical “young mother”, always listening to exactly what the books say. “Though her cries battered me to trembling and my breast ached with swollenness, I waited till the clock decreed” (Olsen 210). When the mother was with the other children, she waited until she thought it was long enough, not just going by the book. She also let other people talk her into making bad decisions for Emily. “They persuaded me at the clinic to send her away to a convalescent home in the country” (Olsen 212). Also, as the family grew, Emily had to help more and more. “I was working, there were four smaller ones now, there was not time for her. She had to help be a mother, and housekeeper, and shopper” (Olsen 214). As the mother had more children, she grew wiser. “She kept too much in herself; her life has been such she had to keep too much in herself. My wisdom came too late” (Olsen 215). As for Emily, she was the complete opposite of the stereotype that all girls at that time should be “a chubby blonde replica of Shirley Temple” (Olsen 213). The mother never comforted her about this and wished that she had. This is how stereotypes influenced the mood of the story.

You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you can use me as a key'? (Olsen, 3). One can conclude that Emily and her mother didn't have a strong relationship, and by the way the mother responds to the person on the phone it feels as though she regrets not building that relationship with Emily. The mother’s depiction of Emily is how she stresses the differences between them. She feels as though Emily is to separate from her, based on how she dealt with Emily in her childhood.

Emily is still lacking the ability to establish a relationship with her mother. Due to her distant relationship with her mother she is not very cheerful and happy. Her face is described as, “closed and sombre (par. 18).” Emily seems to suffer with psychological problems.

Moms like Emily's, who were left to battle as a single parent with five children, was compelled to juggle all the passionate needs of her kids while keeping up monetary adjust. All the accuse really ought not be presented to her for Emily's childhood, but rather she could have attempted. Acknowledging of her past errors the storyteller expects to give Emily a superior future when she states, 'Let her be. So, all that is in her won't blossom, however

The opening to Tillie Olsen’s short story “ I Stand Here Ironing” we are introduced to an oppressed mother (our narrator for this story) about the age of thirty- eight standing at her ironing board. This woman is giving a heartfelt monologue about the way she neglected her child, Emily who is now nineteen, when she was growing up. Tillie Olsen wisely used the iron, which this oppressed mother uses throughout this entire story, as a main symbol that represented the chores that kept the mother from being in Emily’s life when she was a young child. Within in the opening line “I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron” we see that Tillie reveals the guilt about neglecting Emily with the attention

While the narrator acknowledges her inability to improve Emily’s life now, she attributes the blame of her role to being limited by outside pressures as Emily grew up. For her, motherhood was defined by the situation she gradually and unexpectedly got herself into. After losing her husband to an unforeseen event, the mother struggled to meet financial needs and still spend sufficient time with her

In “I Stand Here Ironing”, author Tillie Olsen offers a heart wrenching account of the many tribulations a single mother and her family have faced. Foremost, the story focuses on the negative influences in which the mother, who is also the narrator, has projected onto her then nineteen year old daughter, Emily. A call requesting guidance on how better to help Emily from the college in which she is attending exposes old wounds and guilt that the mother has been harboring for years. On page 706, Olsen reveals that Emily's father left when he "could no longer endure" as he explained in a goodbye note, leaving the mother to raise Emily alone. Through characterization, symbolism and imagery, Olsen explores

Institutional pressure can make people feel they are not up to their task when they do their best. The story “I Stand Here Ironing”, by Tillie Olsen, clearly develops this theme in many ways. First of all, all along the story, people, institutions, and the society in general are telling both Emily and her mother they are not good enough; the authorities and the social worker who take away Emily from her mother, Emily’s teachers who think she’s too slow, the people working at the convalescence home separating her from her friend. Moreover, the two main characters of that story feel incompetent or unfitting at many points of the story, usually because they don’t feel like they can do or be what is expected from them by society. Also, we understand

Once Miss Emily’s father died, she didn’t want to let go. She had no one to love and lover her back. The only love and compassion she knew was her fathers. With him leaving this world entirely, I think she didn’t want to believe he was dead. She wanted to hold on as much as she could. “She told them that 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.” Again, Miss Emily’s necessity for love made her unconscious of the real world, wanting to hold on to something that was not there.

Emily grew thin and sickly, and has always been uncomfortable of her dark hair and appearance. What mistake did Emily’s mother make to influence negatively in Emily’s life? Excavating the past, Emily’s mother realizes that she did not give the necessary attention to Emily during her childhood, affecting negatively in her behavior. Events as sending Emily to live with her father’s family, spending long periods in a convalescent home, adjusting to a new stepfather, and a new baby, influenced in Emily’s somber loner