Characters

• Emily — A shy nineteen-year-old girl.
• Emily’s father — deserted the family so as to not “share poverty with them” less than one year after Emily’s birth.
• Emily’s mother — A mother who is filled with regrets and worries about her daughter.
• Emily’s stepfather — called away to fight in World War II.

Susan The narrator’s

Based on the information that Tillie Olsen provides, a case can be made to consider the narrator of “I Stand Here Ironing” reliable or unreliable. Because the mother is a first-person narrator, there is a greater possibility that she is unreliable.

“I Stand Here Ironing” contains both, but the main conflict is internal. The narrator is struggling with herself. She is trying to come to grips with what she sees as her failure as a mother. Struggling to make ends meet during the Great Depression, the narrator works long hours and is unable to care for her daughter.

In the short story by Olsen, “I Stand Here Ironing,” one of the themes is a mother’s regret. As the mother stands at her ironing board pressing a dress, she recounts the childhood of her eldest daughter, Emily. The major theme of the story is a search for understanding.

After changing her son Ronnie’s diaper, the narrator goes back to her ironing and continues her musings. During World War II, Emily helps her mother care for a growing household and has trouble keeping up with her studies. Emily’s life changes when she puts on a comedy act for a high school talent show.

The opening line of Tillie Olsen’s short story, “I Stand Here Ironing,” is a metaphor for the ambivalence of the mother about her skills as a parent and about the future of her oldest daughter when asked about Emily’s recent behavior.

As the story draws to a close, the narrator’s daughter Emily pops in and asks her mother if she will ever stop ironing. – that made the narrator a “distracted mother,” Emily’s question is really about whether her mother will ever pay attention to her. The end of the story suggests that Emily has gotten her wish.

She is prompted to think about her daughter by someone’s request (presumably a teacher’s) to discuss ways to help her. The narrator goes back nineteen years, to the time when her daughter was born. The narrator herself was nineteen at the time, trying to get by during the Great Depression.

The repetitive back and forth motion of ironing represents the monotony of the narrator’s emotions, desires and dreams which will never come to pass no matter how much work she puts into them, and the endless cycle of helplessness she feels.

Meanwhile, the dress being ironed represents her child. In the last paragraph of the story, when Emily is an adult, the mother thinks to herself that “she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless for the iron,” meaning that her daughter is not just a helpless and fragile figure anymore.

“I Stand Here Ironing” is part of a collection of four short stories entitled Tell Me a Riddle, whose title story won the O. As one motivation behind the story, Olsen has remarked that “after Hiroshima […] I had in some way to try to write again and to write on the side of life against death” (cited Frye).

Tillie Olsen

1950s

Jan

Wahoo, Nebraska, United States

The American feminist author Tillie Olsen, who has died aged 93, came of age in the 1930s and did her best work in the deradicalised 1950s, but became famous only in the 1970s. Olsen wrote two short stories, Tell Me a Riddle and I Stand Here Ironing, which were reprinted in nearly 200 anthologies.

What does the title of Tillie Olsen’s story, “I Stand Here Ironing,” tell us about its point of view? that it’s in first-person that it’s in second-person that it’s in third-person that it’s in omniscient third-person.

She seems to regret much about how her first daughter was raised and feels that, as a result of her shortcomings as a mother, “all that is in [Emily] will not bloom.” Readers have had varying reactions to the narrator’s final resolution about her daughter—to “let her be.” While some see passive resignation in this …

Emily is the central character of “I Stand Here Ironing,” the subject of a fractured portrait that emerges from the narrator’s memories of the past. Emily seems to be a forgotten child, a muted presence in the family.