Catherine Owens

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According to Mara Faulkner, Olsen occasionally depicts the darker underside of motherhood, relationships between men and women, community, and of language in her writing (Felton, 1994). When the author gives the final quote in the story (Charters, 2015, p. 723), she is referring to the many qualities of her daughter that the war has inflicted on her. These qualities include her demure personality and her lack of true contentment or depression. Her mother wants the school social worker to let her be the person that she will be, flaws included and she feels that with the many bad things that have happened to her, her daughter’s life has been shaped into something that she regrets. But as she gets older, her daughter is finding out for herself all of the good qualities within her and is displaying them through her presence on stage. Her ability to make people laugh and truly enjoy her entertainment gives her the boost of confidence that her mother has been trying to gift her for so many years. All of the good and bad qualities about her daughter truly make her the person she is and may even make her stronger because of them. She only wants her daughter to know that she can do and be more than she became and that she must find the confidence within herself to make her life better. When her daughter asks her “Aren’t you ever going to finish the ironing, Mother?” (Charters, 2015) it seems to be symbolic of how her life has been lived with her constant struggle to just get through the days of being a mother and working so hard to keep her family together . As she continues to iron, she ponders the question and is in disbelief that someone would want to change someone so beautiful.

Charters, A. (2015). The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Felton, S. (1994). Protests and Possibilities in the Writing of Tillie Olsen. Studies in Short Fiction. Fall, 31 (4), p.728.

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In her short story, Tillie Olsen “I Stand Here Ironing” the final quote states that “Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom– but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know – help make it, so there is cause for her to know – that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron” (Olsen, 2015, p. 723). This aspect is imagery and although the mother refers to the daughter in the above quote the same applies to her life. She is lamenting at how the society creates a tragic end to the aspirations and talents of the many female people in the world who do not have the liberty to explore what they believe in because the society has some caveats that deny them the success.

The society according to the mother has a way of ‘ironing’ the talents into a helpless cloth and although the use of the iron metaphor creates a defeatist tone Emily has to stand firm and fight any dissenting voices and social expectations that try to quash her dreams of becoming a comedian. The same applies to the mother because although she does not approve of the fact that the society confines her to the house as a housewife, she is cognizant of the fact that her missing father and the social norms need some adherence. She too understands the need that she has a life and must always strive to make it despite the expectations of the society (Bao & Wei, 2016). There is the place of individuality that the community cannot control and that is what the mother and daughter need to capitalize on as per the above quote.

References

Bao, Z., & Wei, M. (2016). A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Mother-daughter Relationship in “I Stand Here Ironing”. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 7(2), 340. http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.0702.12

Olsen, T. (2015). I Stand Here Ironing. In Charters, A. (Ed.). The story and its writer: An introduction to short fiction. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's.

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