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.
Themes
The Competing Pressures of Motherhood
As the narrator considers her experience with motherhood, she tackles struggles both inherent in the condition and imposed by society. In the third paragraph she states, “You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me” (749). The quote expresses a paradox of motherhood: Something that was once a part of the mother’s body is supposed to become its own entity. In a literal sense, that happens at birth; however, a newborn is still entirely reliant on the mother for care, nourishment, etc. This dependency continues through childhood, diminishing as the child ages until at some point the child is entirely independent, at least in theory. Here, however, the narrator suggests that all of her oldest daughter’s life has been “beyond” her—a commentary on how much of the narrator’s own life has been “beyond” her, as external circumstances frequently kept her from deeper involvement in her daughter’s life.
The rest of the text shows how thoroughly the narrator nevertheless worked to care for her daughter, with the next mention of motherhood demonstrating her willingness to sacrifice for her child. However, the form the sacrifice takes exacerbates the alienation the narrator has previously expressed. The text reads, “I nursed all the children, but with her, with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, I did like the books then said. Though her cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with swollenness, I waited till the clock decreed” (749). Clearly, the moment is a sacrifice for the narrator, cutting against both her physical and emotional impulses. Its pathos arises from the fact that the sacrifice is misguided: The narrator is ignoring the “natural” course of motherhood, as expressed by her body’s instincts, in favor of what the latest advancements in parenthood dictate. She is determined to be a good mother as defined by societal norms, which has the ironic effect of pushing her child away from her at a moment when she could be fostering closeness.
This pattern repeats throughout the text. Although it is often economic necessity that drives a wedge between the narrator and Emily, so too do society’s ideas about how the narrator ought to care for her children. This is clearest in the episode involving the measles care facility, where the narrator accedes to external pressure to send Emily away: “They persuaded me at the clinic to send her away to a care facility in the country where ‘she can have the kind of food and care you can’t manage for her, and you’ll be free to concentrate on the new baby […]” (751). There is a hint of classism in this doubt about the narrator’s parenting abilities, particularly as it soon becomes obvious that the care facility itself misunderstands basic childcare. The staff carefully controls parental visits, and Emily remarks, “They don’t like you to love anybody here” (751), which suggests that they don’t grasp children’s need for affection. Nevertheless, the narrator complies with their dictates for some time, only challenging their wisdom when Emily fails to get better (in another nod to her class status, the narrator must fight to convince the social worker to release Emily back into her custody despite Emily’s obviously poor condition).
Ultimately, the text demonstrates the impossibility of “succeeding” at motherhood. There are tensions common to mothering (e.g., the need to care for more than one child at a time), and far from alleviating these pressures, society often exacerbates them. The narrator herself seems to accept this when she reflects:
I will never total it all. I will never come to say: […] She kept too much in herself, her life was such she had to keep too much in herself. My wisdom came too late. She has much to her and probably little will come of it. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear (754).
Here, the narrator recognizes the many forces that have shaped Emily beyond her own perceived failures; it’s doubtful whether any amount of devoted parenting could counteract such sweeping societal problems as war and economic recession, making society’s high expectations of mothers doubly unfair.
The Gendering of Guilt
The idea of female guilt is key to much of Olsen’s work. Editors and seminal feminist scholars Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar included Olsen’s “One out of Twelve” (an exploration of why women in the mid-20th century didn’t write or publish as much as men) in the 2007 anthology Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader. In this text, Olsen writes, “For twentieth-century women: roles, discontinuities, part-self, part-time; conflict; imposed ‘guilt’; ‘a man can give full energy to his profession, a woman cannot’” (173). The implication is that gender norms render guilt all but inevitable for the 20th-century woman (and perhaps women throughout time). Because women are so often expected to be all things to all people, they end up feeling they have failed one person in attending to another. Even if they were to succeed in their many social roles, this would likely entail sacrificing their personal dreams and ambitions, which can carry guilt of a different kind.
This gendered form of guilt is pervasive in the story. Within the first few paragraphs, the narrator says, “I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again. Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped” (749). Though technically about her efforts to recall her daughter’s life, the reference to “interruptions” implicitly critiques the nature of housework/women’s work, which is often completed in fits and starts due to competing demands for attention. Through no fault of her own, the narrator may therefore complete her tasks imperfectly, resulting in harsh self-criticism that she likens to being “engulfed.” Notably, this criticism encompasses both action and inaction (“all I did or did not do”), heightening the sense of futility; regardless of the choices she makes, the narrator will feel guilty.
As if that weren’t enough to wrestle with, she anticipates facing “what should have been and what cannot be helped” (749). In other words, the narrator recognizes that her daughter deserved more than she had to offer and experiences this as a failure. The failure is in reality societal and systemic (even the narrator recognizes that it “cannot be helped”), but it is displaced onto individual women, creating a particularly heavy emotional burden. Toward the end of the piece, the narrator says, “But because I have been dredging the past, and all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I cannot endure [my daughter’s dark humor] tonight” (754). This demonstrates the toll of facing not only her own shortcomings but those of the systems that should have supported her and her daughter. Ironically, this guilt leaves the narrator even less equipped to handle her various roles and responsibilities, creating a vicious cycle of failure and self-recrimination.
The Costs of Economic Scarcity
Economic scarcity creates much of the conflict in “I Stand Here Ironing,” as the pressures of working-class life shape Emily’s childhood and the narrator’s ability to care for her. The narrator gives birth to Emily during an era of particular hardship—the Great Depression—and the first named consequence of this hardship is to break up the family unit. The narrator’s first husband leaves because he “could no longer endure […] sharing want with them” (749). His departure has a ripple effect, forcing the narrator to support herself and her daughter by working outside the home, which further fractures bonds within the family.
Although the national economy began to improve with the advent of World War II, the financial circumstances of the narrator’s family remain precarious. Emily’s stepfather is off fighting, and the narrator takes a job to keep the family afloat. This time it is Emily who must manage the private sphere:
[T]here were four smaller ones now, there was not time for her. She had to help be a mother, and a housekeeper, and shopper. She had to get her seal. Mornings of crisis and near hysteria trying to get lunches packed, hair combed, coats and shoes found, everyone to school or Child Care on time, the baby ready for transportation (753).
As economic scarcity forces the narrator to return to the public sphere, Emily is similarly forced into a position of working for her younger siblings—a common task, historically, for elder sisters in lower-income families. She ends up neglecting her studies and interests as she runs the household, a position she would not be in if the family finances would allow her mother to stay home or at least hire household help.
Economic scarcity continues to dominate Emily’s life into young adulthood. For example, after seeing Emily perform, the narrator ruminates, “You ought to do something about her with a gift like that—but without money or knowing how, what does one do?” (753). This occurs in the 1950s—theoretically, a time of prosperity, ideal families, and white-picket fences, when young Americans had no problems realizing their dreams. However, this is not what happens in the story (nor for many in history). Emily’s mother does not know what to do for her daughter and has no economic means of finding out. She knows that “all that is within [Emily] will not bloom” (754). No matter how hard either of them works, the economic realities of the situation will limit the possibilities of Emily’s future as surely as the Great Depression and wartime scarcity have limited the past.
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