I Stand Here Ironing, By Tillie Olsen

Last but not least, Mama and Ruth have the aspiration of living in a new home. The apartment in which they currently reside is small, dark, and handled with care: "the furnishings of this room were actually selected with care and love and hope [. . .]" (988). It is evident that the home is a very important to the Younger family and it is a critical

In Li’s commune, the housing was not up to today’s standard. They lived in abject poverty. There was barely any available space in the house to accommodate everyone.

Smith-Yackel’s essay illustrates the grieving process while on a phone call with the Social Security Office to collect potential benefits from her mother's passing. While placed on hold, she reflects the life her mother had lived. During this period of reflection, this is when Smith-Yackel exemplifies the use of imagery within a narrative. She creates vivid images about the hardships her mother once faced. For instance, when her mother and father first got married, they began farming. Farming created a wide variety of new tasks, “She carried water nearly a quarter of a mile from the well to fill her wash boilers in order to do her laundry on a scrub board” (Smith-Yackel 115). Her mother had to not only become physically fit but mentally fit in order to take on the challenges their farm created. Her mother was relentless in making sure her children were well taken care of. In another section of the narrative, imagery is used once again to show the sacrifices her mother made. Smith-Yackel states, “In the winter, she sewed night after night, endlessly, begging cast-off clothing from relatives, ripping apart coats, dresses, blouses, and trousers to remake them to fit her four daughters son” (Smith-Yackel 116). On top of all the other chores their mother did during the day, she also worked through the night to ensure her family’s comfort. Also, another rhetorical strategy within

Billie Jo Kelby is not a boy. She’s a girl; a wiry, thin, redheaded girl that looks more like her father than her mother. She lives on the Great Plains in 1935, during the great drought known as the Dust Bowl. She lives with her pregnant mother and her father, and life seems good, or as good as it will get in her dusty world.

Although the daughter’s shame in her mother is evident, she is also prideful of her as well. The strong love that the mother and daughter share is pervasive throughout the story. The story is being told by the daughter after she is all grown up. The fact that Jones uses such vivid detail on the mother’s preparation for her daughters first day of school shows that the daughter loved her mom and all that she did for her. The daughter recalls that her mother spent a lot of time preparing her when she says, “My mother has uncharacteristically spent nearly an hour on my hair that morning, plaiting and replaiting so that now my scalp tingles.” (Jones) She also remembers that her “pale green slip and underwear are new, the underwear having come three to a plastic package with a little girl on the front who appears to be dancing.” (Jones) The daughter having remembered details like these illustrate that she has an immense love and takes pride

The short story “I Stand Here Ironing” (1961) by Tillie Olsen is a touching narration of a mother trying to understand and at the same time justifying her daughter’s conduct. Frye interprets the story as a “meditation of a mother reconstructing her daughter’s past in an attempt to express present behavior” (Frye 287). An unnamed person has brought attention and concern to her mother expressing, “‘She’s a youngster who needs help and whom I’m deeply interested in helping’” (Olsen 290). Emily is a nineteen-year-old complex girl who is atypical, both physically and in personality.

In this essay I will be comparing the two short stories “The Story of an Hour” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”. “The Story of an Hour”, written by Kate Chopin, is centered around a woman by the name Louise Mallard and her reaction after being informed of her husbands “death”, On the other hand “The Yellow Wallpaper” Written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is about Jane, A young, newly married mother who at the time is undergoing care because of her depression. Although both essays have their similarities and differences I will be focusing mainly on the themes of Freedom, Isolation and Oppression. I will also be focusing on how the themes appear within both short stories and do a compare and contrast about the way the themes appear in the two short stories.

While James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” depicts the connection between two brothers, Tillie Olsen’s short story “I Stand Here Ironing” represents the bond between a mother and her daughter. Both Baldwin and Olsen focus on family relationships and how emotional support vs neglect have an effect on family members. Also, each author conveys a message of finding self-identity even amidst adversity, while including the symbolism of everyday objects. Furthermore, Baldwin compares light and darkness throughout his story, and Olsen has the mother scrutinize her actions in an interior monologue.

“Undressing Aunt Frieda,” is a poem about the narrator’s remembrance of his Aunts life while visiting her on a death bed. The narrative is in first person, and takes place as the narrator and his daughter are about to leave the relative. The first half of the poem explores Frieda and her past. The second half is about how the narrator and daughter have grown and learned from the aunt. While undressing her aunt, the narrator feels emotions and remembers his past with Frieda. The poem describes these emotions and memories in a metaphor explaining unique characteristics of how Aunt Frieda undressed, and how she impacted the relatives.

The line between being an acceptable and unacceptable parent is often blurry and is seen on different perspectives when it comes to class, culture, and generation differences. Based on the two stories of Amy Tan’s, “Two Kinds” and Tillie Olsen’s, “I Stand here Ironing” we see these two perspectives that derive from different maternal upbringings of the children in the stories. What is found between them is the conflict of being too little or heavily involved in a child’s life has had more negative outcomes during their childhood than positive.

After the week she spended with her coworkers, she had gained information on how each one of them lives, “Gail is sharing a room in a well-known downtown flophouse for $250 a week, Claude…two room apartment he shares with his girlfriend and two other and unknown person, Annette…lives with her mother, a postal clerk, Marianne, … , and her boyfriend are paying $170 a week for a one-person trailer, Billy, … , lives in a trailer he owns, paying only $400-a-month lot free, Andy, lives on his dry-docked boat, Tina, … , and her husband are paying $60 a night for a room in the Days Inn, Joan, … , lives in a van parked behind a shopping center at night and showers in Tina’s motel room.”(pg. 20-21). The survey that was conducted by the author through her personal experience demonstrated that her coworkers try to split rent in order to pay less and try to save money for the next payment for rent.

I Stand Here Ironing lies in its fusion of motherhood as both metaphor and experience: it shows us motherhood bared, stripped of romantic distortion, and reins fused with the power of genuine metaphorical insight into the problems of selfhood in the modern world. ironing is a metaphor for "the ups and downs, back and forth of pressing pressures to make ends meet and a determination to pass through life's horrors and difficulties by keeping the mind intact and focusing on the beauty and blessings that [lie amidst] the dark times"? So the ironing is like a drug, to keep the mother calm and sedated. The story seems at first to be a simple meditation of a mother reconstructing her daughter's past in an attempt to

“I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen is a depiction of a mother-daughter relationship that lacks involvement and warmth. The whole story composed of the mother’s memory of her relationship with her daughter, Emily. The memory was a painful one comprised mostly of the way the mother was much less able to care for Emily. The forsaken of Emily demonstrates the importance of physical and emotional support.

The short story by Tillie Olsen, I Stand Here Ironing, tells the story of a single mother and her daily struggles. From what I understand, the young mother struggled daily being able to provide all the necessities in life for herself as well as her daughter Emily. The mother had to work long hours to be able to support them so this caused her to rely upon other friends and family members to look after Emily varied between short to long term situations. These situations unfortunately caused a lot of distant feeling between Emily and her mother to the point of no affection. The mother loved her daughter very much, however, she was not able to provide for her child as she needed to.

The mother-daughter relationship is often scrutinized, publicized, and capitalized on. Whether from tell-all biographies, to humorous sit-coms, or private therapy sessions, this particular relationship dynamic gives some of the most emotion-activating memories. When female authors reflect and write about their relationships with their mothers, they have a tendency to taint their reflections with the opinions they have as an adult, reviewing the actions of their mother when they were young. These opinions set the tone of the story independently and in conjunction with the relationship itself and manifest in creative literary styles that weave an even more intricate story. Case in point, when reviewing the two literary works “I Stand Here