I Stand Here Ironing

“I Stand Here Ironing” uses stream of consciousness to examine the inherent difficulties of being a mother in the 1930s through 1950s. The piece begins with the narrator recalling a request someone has made of her: “I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. I’m sure you can help me understand her. She’s a youngster who needs help and whom I’m deeply interested in helping” (749). This is a well-meaning offer made by someone seeking to help Emily. However, the narrator’s response begins a chain of associative recollections revolving around the question, “Even if I came what good would it do? You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key?” (749). The narrator knows that she doesn’t have the answers that this person is seeking. Nevertheless, she herself wants to understand how Emily has gotten to the point where someone could see her as “a youngster who needs help” beyond what her mother can give.

As the narrator wrestles with the questions of what caused Emily’s plight and whether she can be helped, she considers several memories, but not necessarily in chronological order. After the narrator remarries, for example, Emily is sometimes left alone at night, which she responds to with dismay:

The time we came back, the front door open, the clock on the floor in the hall. She rigid awake. ‘It wasn’t just a little while. I didn’t cry. […] The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.’ She said the clock talked loud again that night I went to the hospital to have Susan (750).

This episode highlights Emily’s intelligence, loneliness, and desperation. She is trying to be a good little girl and patiently await her parents’ return, but her anxiety manifests in her destruction of the loud clock. The way she describes this—“the clock talked loud”—then becomes an associative moment for the narrator, who moves from a moment of her daughter’s anguish to a similar moment through the connection of the clock’s noise. Clearly, the two nights don’t occur sequentially. However, the association establishes the psychological and thematic links between the mother’s regret about leaving her child alone and an instance that proves even more troubling to Emily—the birth of Susan.

In this way, stream-of-consciousness narration allows Olsen to dramatize one of the story’s key themes: The Gendering of Guilt. Self-blame saturates the narrator’s perspective. To a large degree, it is what holds together her various recollections, suggesting that any attempt to assess where Emily’s childhood might have gone “wrong” leads back to the narrator herself. The story makes clear that this self-recrimination is unfounded; even the narrator realizes that she often couldn’t have done otherwise. However, Olsen suggests that it is the nature of a patriarchal society to shift responsibility for its failings onto the backs of individual women, demanding impossibilities of them and then castigating them when they fail to deliver.

“I Stand Here Ironing” focuses particularly on two sources of guilt: The Competing Pressures of Motherhood and The Cost of Economic Scarcity. Some of the parenting struggles the narrator faces are, if not inherent or universal, at least commonplace. When her second daughter is born, she finds it difficult to balance Susan’s needs against Emily’s, and as the girls grow older, she must try to mediate between their very different personalities. However, society frequently makes the job of mothering harder rather than easier, with many official recommendations—e.g., about when to breastfeed—clashing with what Olsen implies are the narrator’s healthy maternal instincts. What’s more, financial hardship repeatedly pries the narrator away from Emily during the latter’s formative years. Later, the same pressure forces Emily into a quasi-parental role when she herself is still a child, further limiting her development.

Despite all of this, the story ends on a hopeful note. The Emily who interrupts her mother’s ironing does not resemble the sad, sickly child her mother describes (again suggesting how much guilt has affected the narrator’s perceptions). Although the narrator is realistic about her daughter’s prospects, she makes peace with them: If Emily will not live up to her full potential, it nevertheless seems likely that her life will be better than her mother’s.