I Stand Here Ironing

“Why do I put that [the story about nursing Emily] first? I do not even know if it matters, or if it explains anything. She was a beautiful baby.”

Olsen uses stream of consciousness to interrogate the mother’s feelings. In this quote, the mother thinks about where to begin her ruminations as she stands at the iron in the present and tells stories about the past. The first memory that occurs to her involves nursing Emily and highlights The Competing Pressures of Motherhood: The narrator worries that the way she nursed Emily harmed her, even though she was heeding the era’s recommendations and (as her remark about Emily’s beauty demonstrates) doing so had no discernible ill effects.

“She was a miracle to me, but when she was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all.”

One of The Costs of Economic Scarcity is that the mother must leave her child to be looked after by someone who does not see her or love her as the mother does. This conflict is central to the plot of “I Stand Here Ironing,” as the narrator is often forced to choose between caring for Emily physically (by earning a living or sending her to a care facility) or emotionally (by staying with her and nurturing her).

“I was nineteen. It was the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression.”

This quote provides important context regarding the story’s setting. “WPA” stands for “Works Progress Administration” and was a part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. During the Great Depression, it provided income to millions of Americans by employing them to build railroads, beautify national parks, and otherwise contribute to public works projects. The narrator’s mention of “the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression” thus alerts her audience that she had few means of addressing and/or mitigating the poverty she faced. This is key to understanding the plight of this young family and Emily’s father’s departure from it.

“The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.”

Emily personifies the clock by giving it the human characteristic of talking. Olsen uses this personification in two ways. First, this imaginative way of expressing her feelings suggests Emily’s young age, as it’s the kind of creative thing a child just discovering the world would do (her incorrect use of the adjective “loud” rather than the adverb “loudly” likewise evokes her youth). Second, it illustrates the depth of the anxiety Emily feels, as the clock’s noise scared her enough to dispose of it. This is a key moment where Emily is trying to fight against the poverty and neglect that defines her childhood.

“But never a direct protest, never rebellion. I think of our others in their three-, four-year-oldness—the explosions, the tempers, the denunciations, the demands—and I feel suddenly ill. I put the iron down. What in me demanded that goodness in her? And what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?”

Olsen makes several distinct style choices in this passage. She begins with a coordinating conjunction, which is not grammatically correct. She includes an invented noun, “three-, four-year-oldness,” to capture a particular period of life. She repeats “the cost, the cost” for emphasis. All of these choices deviate from standard English, but together they create a moment of rumination that mimics a mother’s thoughts. 

“The old man living in the back once said in his gentle way: ‘You should smile at Emily more when you look at her.’ What was in my face when I looked at her? I loved her. There were all the acts of love.”

As a second-wave feminist theorist, Olsen wrote persuasive essays as well as short stories. The literary voice she cultivated had to transcend both genres, so she favors short, powerful sentences and clear prose, as seen in this example.

“Susan, the second, child, Susan, golden- and curly-haired and chubby, quick and articulate and assured, everything in appearance and manner Emily was not.”

Susan acts as a foil to Emily. Not only is Susan blond, well-fed, and healthy-looking (in contrast to Emily’s dark, thin, and sallow appearance), but she is outgoing and engaging, whereas Emily is retiring, small, and invisible. Susan embodies the 1950s’ childhood ideal, which contributes to the hardships of Emily’s childhood and elicits the narrator’s guilt by illustrating what she failed to provide Emily.

“She was not glib or quick in a world where glibness and quickness were easily confused with ability to learn.”

Olsen uses anadiplosis (the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of a clause at the beginning of a new clause) to emphasize how the educational system fails Emily. The repetition of the words “glib” and “quick” so early in the second half of the sentence points to the impossibility of succeeding in a system that doesn’t value the character traits one happens to have. The anadiplosis reinforces the nature of bureaucratic systems that allow people like Emily and her mother to slip through the cracks.

“She fretted about her appearance, thin and dark and foreign-looking at a time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a chubby blonde replica of Shirley Temple.”

This passage contains a use of polysyndeton—a series of unnecessary coordinating conjunctions used in a row. Emily is “thin and dark and foreign-looking.” The first “and” is unnecessary, but Olsen uses polysyndeton to emphasize each of these attributes and how short they fall of the ideal.

“The first one we went to, I only recognized her that first moment when thin, shy, she almost drowned herself into the curtains. Then: Was this Emily? The control, the command, the convulsing and deadly clowning, the spell, then the roaring, stamping audience unwilling to let this rare and precious laughter out of their lives.”

As Olsen describes the audience’s reaction to Emily, she relies mostly on auditory imagery, such as “roaring,” “stamping,” and “rare and precious laughter.” Since Emily has endured so much silence and isolation, the emphasis on sound has particular resonance as a response to her acting talents.

“Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him. It is rare there is such a cry now. That time of motherhood is almost behind me when the ear is not one’s own but must always be racked and listening for the child cry, the child call.”

Olsen experiments with language to communicate a common experience in a unique way. The description of an infant’s crying as a “cry” or “call” associates the sound with the noises of animals. It makes the action primal and therefore impossible to ignore.

“Now suddenly she was Somebody, and as imprisoned in her difference as she had been in anonymity.”

Olsen deepens the tension of the story. The story has primed readers to want Emily to gain some recognition, which she now does. However, that recognition forces Emily to play a specific role, just like her anonymity did. Instead of resolving the tension, getting what she wanted has created more tension for Emily and therefore furthered the plot.

“Aren’t you ever going to finish the ironing, Mother? Whistler painted his mother in a rocker. I’d have to paint mine standing over an ironing board.”

This quotation contains an allusion to a famous painting called “Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1” by James Abbott McNeil Whistler. It is generally known as “Whistler’s Mother” and is an iconic painting of American life in the late-19th century. Emily’s comparison of her mother to this painting elevates a simple household chore to the level of art, much like the story itself.