I Stand Here Ironing By Tillie Olsen

1. I Stand Here Ironing By Tillie Olsen “A mother who is really a mother is never free.” –Honore de Balzac

2. Theme In Tillie Olsen’s short story “I Stand Here Ironing”, she is characterizing a mother’s internal conflict between realizing the strained relationship with her daughter, and yet being able to step back and let her daughter live her own life.

3. Literary Elements • Simple Sentence • Repetition/Parallel • Juxtaposition • Point of View • Rhetorical Question • Asyndeton • Imagery

4. Simple sentences establish what the mother is completely certain about and they tend to be physical qualities • “She was a beautiful baby” (line 35) • “I nursed her” (line 27) • “She starts up the stairs to bed” (line 55)

5. Repetition works to emphasize the mother’s points and to demonstrate her efforts • “She was a beautiful baby” (lines 18, 35) • “She has lived for nineteen years” (line 10) • “I was nineteen” (line 45)

6. Juxtaposition is used to demonstrate the internal conflict that the mother has • “[The daughter] has much to her and probably little will come of it” (line 81) • “We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth” (line 73) • “Her younger sister seemed all that she was not” (line 77)

7. Point of view allows the reader to understand the mother’s perspective • “My wisdom came too late” (line 80) • “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 it tonight” (line 61) • “I would start running as soon as I got off the streetcar, running up the stairs, the place smelling sour…” (line 46)

8. The mother uses rhetorical questions to convince herself to let go of her daughter • “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?” (line 7) • “So all that is in her will not bloom-but in how many does it?” (line 84) • “Why do I put that first?” (line 33) • “Why were you concerned?” (line 53)

9. Asyndeton is used to compound on the mother’s thoughts and also dramatizes her point • “And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?” (line 12) • “She is a child of her age, of depression, or war, of fear.” (line 82)

10. The baby imagery in the piece reflects how the mother still thinks of her child as helpless and shows how she wants to be involved • “She was a beautiful baby” (line 18) • “I nursed her” (line 27) • “She would lie on the floor in her blue overalls patting the surface so hard in ecstasy her hands and feet would blur” (line 37)

11. Comparison • In Toni Morrison’s, The Bluest Eye, a mother overwhelmed with how the world views her does not make an effort to give her daughter, Pecola the affection she truly needs. Because Pecola was unable to find her security in her parents, she looked to the world around her. Having a different skin color, black hair, and brown eyes made her feel unwanted by the world. In “I Stand Here Ironing,” Emily, the mother’s daughter “was dark and think and foreign-looking in a world where the prestige went to blondeness and curly hair and dimples.” (Lines 69-72) Both Pecola and Emily grew up with a wall between them and their mothers causing the world to take hold of the way they saw themselves compared to everyone else around them.