26 pages • 52 minutes read
Tillie OlsenI Stand Here Ironing
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1961A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Iron
The iron symbolizes the impossible pressures women face. As a domestic task, ironing is closely associated with female gender roles, and from the start, the story couches it in negative emotions; the narrator describes the inquiry about her daughter as “mov[ing] tormented back and forth with the iron” (749), linking the task to The Gendering of Guilt and The Competing Pressures of Motherhood. This association is not surprising, given the nature of ironing. It is a repetitive and monotonous chore that is undone the moment someone puts the ironed clothes on. It therefore evokes both the drudgery of domestic work and the impossibility of completing it in a satisfying way.
Ironing features periodically throughout the rest of the story, both in the frame and in the narrator’s memories. Significantly, it is the closing image: The narrator wishes, “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” (754). The symbolism here is multilayered, suggesting frustration both with the emphasis on women’s appearances and with the stifling nature of women’s housework: The narrator does not want Emily to be a mere “dress,” smoothed out and pretty, but she also does not want Emily’s existence to be endless ironing.
Color and Physical Appearance
Changes in Emily’s physical appearance are a motif that illustrates how her childhood is going. When her mother can devote herself to Emily, “she [is] a beautiful baby” (749). However, Emily’s sicknesses and deprivations soon rob her of that beauty. Olsen uses color to describe this. When Emily returns from her father’s family, “[her mother] hardly knew her, walking quick and nervous like her father, looking like her father, thin, and dressed in a shoddy red that yellowed her skin and glared at the pockmarks. All the baby loveliness gone” (750). The unappealing description of “yellowed […] skin” and “shoddy red” highlights the consequences of this decision, which, though motivated by economic scarcity, heightens the narrator’s sense of guilt. Similar uses of color appear throughout the story, such as the “the giant red bows and ravaged looks” at the care facility (751).
Institutions
The mother turns to several institutions that fail her and Emily. When she is working, the narrator turns to a nursery school that is “only a parking place for children” (750). She also records the physical and emotional abuse used as “discipline” at this institution, as well as Emily’s desire to avoid it. Despite the absence of other options, the mother still feels guilt about leaving Emily with people who don’t treat her well.
These feelings of guilt are echoed in the narrator’s description of the care facility. The narrator says, “It took us eight months to get her released home, and only the fact that she gained back so little of her seven lost pounds convinced the social worker” (751). Social programs, the story implies, should support struggling parents, alleviating The Costs of Economic Scarcity. Instead, the care facility treats Emily’s parents as unwelcome intruders (and probably incompetent caregivers), not involving them in their daughter’s treatment. The experience proves detrimental and perhaps even traumatic. This motif of failing institutions shows that responsibility for Emily’s bleak childhood rests with people beyond the mother.
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By Tillie Olsen
