Wikipedia

Draft:I Stand Here Ironing (short story)

"I Stand Here Ironing"
Short story by Tillie Olsen
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Publication
Published inPacific Spectator
Publication date1956

“I Stand Here Ironing” first appeared in Pacific Spectator and Stanford Short Stories in 1956 under the title “Help Her to Believe.” The story was republished in 1957 as “I Stand Here Ironing” in Best American Short Stories. The work was first collected in Tell Me a Riddle published by J. B. Lippincott & Co. in 1961.[1][2]

Along with “Tell Me a Riddle” (1960), “I Stand Here Ironing” is by far the most reprinted and anthologized of Olsen’s fictional work.[3]

Plot edit

The story is told in a first-person confessional narrative. Presented as an “interior monologue” or an “imagined dialogue,” the work incorporates autobiographical elements from Olsen’s early adulthood to her middle-age.[4][5][6]

The narrator is a working-class woman in her early forties who has four children, all daughters. At 19-year-of-age she had given birth to her first child, after which her husband abandoned them, coinciding with the onset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s. Her narrative concentrates on recollections of raising Emilyunder these harsh circumstances. The hardships the young single mother endured to find work necessitated frequent absences from her daughter during her infancy and throughout her childhood. Emily was sent to her father’s relatives for extended periods, as well as to a country convalescent home for children of indigent parents. These episodes are painful to the mother and particularly the daughter.

The mother fervently hopes that her daughter, now an adult, will surmount her difficult childhood and achieve a measure of happiness.[7][8]

Background edit

While attending a course taught by Arthur Foff at San Francisco State University in 1954, Olsen submitted an early draft of “I Stand Here Ironing.” Foff was so impressed by the story that he encouraged Olsen—who was often preoccupied with providing for her young children—to cease attending his class and begin writing independently.[9]

Biographers Mickey Pearlman and Abby H. P. Werlock describe Olsen’s circumstances while writing “I Stand Here Ironing”:

[Olsen] carried her writing with her on the bus, at work, at night, during and after housework: no wonder, she says, the “first work I considered publishable began: ‘I stand here ironing.’”[10]

Pearlman and Werlock add: “[D]espite the fact that she still had domestic responsibilities, she was able to spend three days a week writing - and then had to return to work where she took jobs at Kelly girl and Western Agency girl.”[11]

The story was first published in the Pacific Spectator and Stanford Short Stories in 1956 under the title “Help Her to Believe.” In 1957, the work appeared in Best American Short Stories as “I Stand Here Ironing.”[12]

Theme edit

“Part of what Olsen shows in her writing is that to varying degrees, women wield power even in patriarchal society and are, therefore, partially responsible for shaping and misshaping the lives within that society.”—Literary critic Mara Faulkner in Protest & Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen (1993)[13]

Biographers Mickey Pearlman and Abby H. P. Werlock declare the story to be “the most overtly autobiographical fiction Olsen has ever published…”[14]

Though “I Stand Here Ironing” comes the closest to autobiography of all her stories, the author-narrator is not a perfect equivalent to the character she presents. Literary critic Joanne S. Frye warns that such a parallel is “false and distracting…decidedly not the real issue.”[15]

The story was informed by Olsen’s inability to write fiction while a teen-age single mother during the Great Depression through the post war years. Olsen enumerated the factors influencing the composition of the story, while she was still raising her younger daughters: “T]he writing time available to me; what is happening in my work and family life, and in the larger environment, in society.”[16][17]

On the domestic task of ironing clothing as a metaphor, Olsen offered this comparison: “written and rewritten and rewritten on the ironing board late at night…The very timbre, rhythm of the piece, the back and forth movement as the iron itself moves.”[18] Indeed, Olsen once, in “a slip of the tongue” referred to her story as “I Stand Here Writing.”[19]

According to literary critic Joanne Frye, the composition of “I Stand Here Ironing” was in part prompted by the 1945 [[ Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and the subsequent Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation, from which Olsen grasped “the contrast between nurturing care and incomprehensible destruction,” a dilemma which Frye terms “the anguish of parental responsibility in an un-supportive society.”[20]

References edit

  1. ^ Frye, 1995 p. 217-218: Selected Bibliography
  2. ^ Pearlman and Werlock, 1991 p. 29-30
  3. ^ Pearlman and Werlock, 1991 p. 6: “...anthologized more than 90 times…”
  4. ^ Frye, 1995 p. 20
  5. ^ Pearlman and Werlock, 1991 p. 30
  6. ^ Mambrol,2020
  7. ^ Mambrol, 2020: Plot summary
  8. ^ Faulkner, 1993 pp. 116-119: Plot summary
  9. ^ Pearlman and Werlock, 1991 p. 28: Foff “had nothing more to teach her…” And: Olsen: “I loved [Foff], and am deeply indebted to him…”
  10. ^ Pearlman and Werlock, 1991 p. 121
  11. ^ Pearlman and Werlock, 1991 p. 121
  12. ^ Pearlman and Werlock, 1991 p. 29-30
  13. ^ Faulkner, 1993 p. 104
  14. ^ Pearlman and Werlock, 1991 p. 30
  15. ^ Frye, 1995 p. 20: minor ellipsis for brevity, meaning unaltered.
  16. ^ Frye, 1995 p. 21
  17. ^ Pearlman and Werlock, 1991 p. 38: On Olsen’s perennial theme of loss, of “[loss] of opportunity in ‘Ironing’...”
  18. ^ Frye, 1995 p. 21: Ellipsis in original by Frye, interview with Olsen And p. 32: See section on Metaphor and Metonymy
  19. ^ Frye, 1995 p. 23
  20. ^ Frye, 1995 p. 23 And p. 36: The story “as part of a larger understanding of the need for social change.”

Sources edit

  • Faulkner, Mara. 1993. Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen. University Press of Virginia, Charlotteville and London. ISBN 0-8139-1417-5
  • Frye, Joanne S.. 1995. Tillie Olsen: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers, New York. ISBN 0-8057-0863-4
  • Leonard, John. 1994. Introduction to Tell Me a Riddle in Tell Me Riddle, Delta Books published by Dell, New York. ISBN 0-385-29010-1
  • Mambrol, Nasrullah. 2020. “Analysis of Tillie Olsen’s Stories.” Literary Theory and Criticism, Literariness. https://literariness.org/2020/06/22/analysis-of-tillie-olsens-stories/ Retrieved 19 November, 2023.
  • Olsen, Tillie. 1961. Tell Me A Riddle. J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia. OCLC 748997729
  • Pearlman, Mickey and Werlick, Abby H. P.. 1991. Tillie Olsen. Twayne Publishers, Boston, Mass. ISBN 0-8057-7632-X
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