The uniqueness of Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" lies in its fusion of motherhood as both metaphor and experience: it shows us motherhood bared, stripped of romantic distortion, and rein fused with the power of genuine metaphorical insight into the problems of selfhood in the modern world. Can you make a strong case that the ironing is really a metaphor for "the ups and downs, back and forth of pressing pressures to make ends meet and a determination to pass through life's horrors and difficulties by keeping the mind intact and focusing on the beauty and blessings that [lie amidst] the dark times"? So the ironing is like a drug, to keep the mother calm and sedated?

The story seems at first to be a simple meditation of a mother reconstructing her daughter's past in an attempt to explain present behavior. In its pretense of silent dialogue in the beginning of the story, a mental occupation to accompany the physical occupation of ironing, it creates the impression of literal transcription of a mother's thought processes in the isolation of performing household tasks: "I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron." I

One of the central defining premises for the working out of separate personal identity for both mother and daughter is the power of cultural circumstances. The story is laced with references to the depression, the war, the survival needs which dictate unsatisfactory work circumstances. Even the dictates of pediatric treatises on breast-feeding by the decree of the clock become a part of the general cultural pressure which operates to define and limit the power of individual choice. Over and over, we are told of the limitations on choice--"it was the only way"; "They persuaded me" and verbs of necessity recur for descriptions of both the mother's and Emily's behavior. In the attempt at summing up, the mother concludes: "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." In such statements as "my wisdom !

The narrator sets the context for this general concern by first defining the separateness of mother and daughter: "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." Almost defensively, she cites the difficulties of finding time and being always, as mothers are, susceptible to interruption. But in identifying an even greater difficulty in the focus of her parental responsibility: "Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped." She is, in other words, setting out to assess her own responsibility, her own failure, and finally her need to reaffirm her own independence as a separate human being who cannot be defined solely through her parental role.

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The metaphor of the iron and the rhythm of the ironing establish a tightly coherent framework for the narrative probing of a mother-daughter relationship. But the fuller symbolical structure of the story lies in the expansion of the metaphorical power of that relationship itself. Without ever relinquishing the immediate reality of motherhood and the probing of parental responsibility, Tillie Olsen has taken that reality and developed its peculiar complexity into a powerful and

Some common words found in the essay are:
Stand Ironing, Consequently Emily's, Tillie Olsen, stand ironing, mother daughter, Experience Metaphor, selfhood modern world, powerful cultural, parental responsibility, seeing eyes, modern world, selfhood modern, wisdom late, experience motherhood, construct image,
Approximate Word count = 1616
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)