Olsen, Tillie (Vol. 114) - Helen Pike Bauer (essay date 1989)
Helen Pike Bauer (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "'A Child of Anxious, Not Proud, Love': Mother and Daughter in Tillie Olsen's 'I Stand Here Ironing,'" in Mother Puzzles: Daughter and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature, edited by Mickey Pearlman, Greenwood Press, 1989, pp. 35-9.
[In the following essay, Bauer remarks on the themes of hope and despair within the mother-daughter relationship in "I Stand Here Ironing."]
"I stand here ironing" begins the narrator in Tillie Olsen's short story that takes its title from that opening line. These are words that would never introduce a male narrator, and the facts of her woman's life, its emotional as well as economic exigencies and constraints, provide the context for this unnamed mother's meditation on her daughter Emily. A school counselor has asked to meet with her to discuss Emily, a child the counselor finds troubled and in need of help. The mother's unspoken response, "what good would it...
[The entire page is 2482 words long]
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