SOURCE: "Balancing the Hurts and the Needs: Olsen's 'I Stand Here Here Ironing,'" in Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, Vol. 15, Nos. 1-2, March, 1994, pp. 78-86.

Few modern short stories move readers to feel as much compassion toward the inherent vulnerability of the human child as does Tillie Olson's "I Stand Here Ironing." In the mother's wrenching narration of simple fact in response to a school psychologist's inquiry about her troubled nineteen-year-old daughter, she reveals all her anguish, past and present. At the same time, she tries not to "… become engulfed with all I did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped."

Indeed, this tale does raise significant questions about what can and cannot be helped in the upbringing of a child, and discussions of the story usually center on emotional deprivation, personal responsibility, and the question of guilt. Linda Kirschner, in her brief consideration, phrases her inquiry this way: "Yet, how much guilt must the mother bear for Emily's sense of alienations? For how much is she truly responsible?"

Though the question is certainly paramount, at least three separate and separable definitions of responsible become conflated and confused in examinations of this tale. Two of them (the third will be cited shortly) raise the issue of guilt and, for many naive readers, blame: To be responsible can mean to be ethically accountable for the care or welfare of another, as are all parents of minors. It can also mean, on the other hand, to be the source or cause of something—in this instance, Emily's difficulties.

It is virtually impossible, however, to tease out once and for all the complexities of the emotional relationships in this story. Nor is it useful. Fixing blame on any one of the characters or events as the source of Emily's problems does not help. As Alexander Portnoy discovers while lying on his analyst's couch, "it alleviates nothing fixing the blame—blaming is still ailing."

What may be useful, though, is to understand why—specifically—Emily suffers as she does and, as well, observe how Olsen, with consummate artistry, creates an integral pattern of maternal-filial interaction that is more than a clinical case study to be filed by the psychologist whose question precipitates the narrative.

In the story, as Joanne Frye has observed, we get motherhood "stripped of romantic distortion." Frye would make of motherhood a metaphor of developing a responsible selfhood, concluding that "We must trust the power of each to 'find her way' even in the face of powerful external constraints on individual control." From the mother's point of view, this may indeed be true, as she attempts in extreme adversity to balance her own hurts and needs. But common sense tells us that this simply cannot be true for the child. Given her helplessness, what infant or toddler can possibly have it within her power or control to "find her own way," or, as Frye phrases it elsewhere, "can act only from the context of immediate personal limitations but must nevertheless act through a sense of individual responsibility?"

To maintain this is to project adult sensibilities and capabilities into an infant. While the mother can find reasonable and mature ways to satisfy her own needs and allay her hurts (e.g., a job, a new husband), Emily must somehow, first as infant, then child, cope with and defend against persistent, overwhelming fears and fantasies as best she can. As Nancy Chodorow, in her pioneering feminist re-examination of mothering, states it, "At first, the infant is absolutely dependent and, because it does not experience itself as separate, has no way of knowing about maternal care and can do nothing about it. It 'is only in a position to gain profit or to suffer disturbance.'"

To understand the story, then, from the inside out—that is, from Emily's point of view—the third definition of responsible can help: to be responsible is to be able to be trusted or depended upon. It is in this respect that the nurture of the child is significantly deficient, for whatever reason, and there are many; and it is this deficiency that so scars the child, making her a source of anguish to the mother and an object of concern to the psychologist. From Emily's vantage point, the world itself is simply not to be trusted—ever: nothing, no one is reliable, can be counted on to be there, consistently through time.

Olson demonstrates this lack of basic trust but has so skillfully structured the narrative with flashbacks, for instance, that she obscures the fact that by actual count, Emily suffers at least one dozen traumatic separations from significant people and objects before she is even seven years old.

A brief summary of these may be in order. The first comes when her mother nurses her not on demand but by book, separating the infant from her and her nurturance, both nutritional and emotional. The father has already abandoned them both—another separation—and when Emily is eight months old, she is placed with the woman downstairs so the mother can work to support them. When she finally gets a night job so she can be with the child days, she is then forced to leave her with her grandparents, a stay lengthened by chicken pox until the child is two years old. At that point, Emily is separated from her mother once more by being sent to nursery school. When a new father enters the picture, the parents leave the child alone nights (she is now five) when they go out.

Shortly afterward, Susan is born, and Emily, separated from the mother who goes to the hospital to give birth, contracts measles and is prevented from going near mother and baby when she returns, prolonging the separation. Emily never fully recovers and is sent to a convalescent home for eight months, an institution that separates her from close friends and from personal belongings like letters from home. When she returns, she pursues a potential boy friend who rejects her blandishments. We learn here that Emily has no friends at all because the family has "moved so much", and we discover as well that she has lost another significant object: World War II is being fought, and the new father is now in the service.

Caring figures thus come and go—the woman downstairs, the grandparents, the mother, the nurses. As the child is moved from house to house to institution to yet another house, even the environment itself does not remain stable. From the child's vantage point then, it seems clear that nothing or no one can be depended on. That these separations are traumatic to Emily can readily be inferred from the fact that they eventuate in significant symptoms. At one time or another throughout her childhood Emily suffers from nightmares, eating disorders (either overeating or undereating), failure to thrive, and at the end of the tale, depression. She exhibits, in fact, the classic symptoms of the syndrome known as separation anxiety disorder.

In his discussion of this problem, Richard Gardner notes that DSM-III [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: Mental Diseases] enumerates its manifestations as follow unrealistic fears that the mother will be harmed or that she will leave and not return, unrealistic fears that a calamitous event will separate the child and the mother, persistent reluctance or refusal to go to school in order to remain home with the mother, persistent reluctance or refusal to go to sleep without the mother, complaints of physical symptoms on school days, signs of excessive distress upon separation or in anticipation of separation, social withdrawal, apathy, and sadness.

A glance at these reveals that they appear to virtually catalog Emily's conflicted behavior throughout the story, especially in infancy and early childhood. Emily's problems indeed begin when the mother, in the ignorance and innocence of youth herself—she is but nineteen—chooses to nurse the newborn Emily as she does "… With the fierce rigidity of first motherhood. I did like the books then said Though her cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with swollenness. I waited till the clock decreed. Why do I put that first? I do not even know if it matters or if it explains anything." Intuitively, however, she appears vaguely aware of the enduring significance of her not supplying food to the infant when she needed it and that it does provide a partial explanation for Emily's conflicts. We hear, as well, in her choice of "battered" and "ached" the emotional pain she suffered, and the infant as well, in abiding by the authorities instead of her own maternal sense.

More frequent breast feeding, for instance, would have offered to both mother and infant the opportunity to gaze into each other's even, smiling in mutual satisfaction. Emily's mother, however, dissuaded by experts, does otherwise, and the old man in back reminds her one day. "You should smile at Emily more when you look at her" By the end of her tale the mother, while attempting to deny it, finally does admit that "She was a child seldom smiled at." She wonders that Emily did see in her face and tries to smile more often at her successive children, but admits that Emily herself, as a consequence, "does not smile easily." her face being "closed and sober."

Saunder has observed that any infant needs its mother's attempt to induce a smiling response as an appropriate social stimulus to interaction with others. "The degree to which mutuality will be established," he says, "seems to depend, in part at least, on the balance the mother can maintain between her empathy with what she feels are the child's needs and her objectivity in viewing [her] as an individual apart from her own projections and displacements." We see, then, the initial instance of the mother's difficulty in balancing hurts and needs, of moving beyond the "fierce rigidity," her own anger at being abandoned, toward concern for her newborn. Yet, given her poverty and arduous struggle, can we really blame the mother for not smiling enough, however much that might have been?

The mother's own needs to escape, to enjoy the outside world again with her husband, prompt her to leave the five-year-old Emily alone nights, a fearful time for any child that age. Emily's separation anxiety manifests itself here in several ways. She remains awake, "rigid," until the parents return, and she defends against her fears by denial: "I didn't cry. Three times I called you, just three times…." As well, she engages in typical magical behavior in order to constrain the mother to return sooner: "I ran downstairs to open the door so you could come faster. The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked." Had mother been psychologically sophisticated, she would have known that the clock's message (actually, of course, Emily's internal fear projected) was "Your mother is never coming back!"

It is this fear, never allayed, that manifests itself as the school phobia from which the child suffers. At the age of two, again because authorities say it is appropriate for the child and because she desperately needs to hold a job, the mother places Emily in a nursery school which she eventually realizes is just a "parking place for children." From the start, though, she admits that "Even without knowing, I knew. I knew that the teacher was evil" because of the way she treated the other children. The mother acknowledges that Emily hates leaving her, yet "she did not clutch and implore 'don't go Mommy' like the other children, mornings." She wonders why there was "never a direct protest, never rebellion…. What in me demanded that goodness in her? And what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?"

The cost to Emily, of course, is depression, and we see here its evidence in submissiveness masking and defending against powerful emotions. Mackinnon and Michels explain the relationship between the intense separation anxiety and such passive posture by noting that "perhaps the simplest psychodynamic basis for this is the patient's anger at the lost love object for abandoning him." But "… Any outward expression of hostility is dangerous—he might destroy what he most needs. He therefore turns it against himself in the form of self-accusation and condemnation, a cardinal feature of depression." This self-accusation will appear later, in Emily's adolescence.

As Emily grows older, she does indeed refuse to go to school. This behavior is consistent with Gardner's finding that "Generally, the younger the child the greater is the fear element. And the older the child, the greater is the refusal element." We learn, too, that the mother is frequently complicitous in Emily's manipulations, rationalizing that "We had a new baby, I was home anyhow." Indeed, she eventually allows the younger child, Susan, to stay home as well, "to have them all together." She claims she is trying hard to establish a warm environment and create rapprochement between the sisters, where now only "poisonous feeling" and "corroding resentment" reign. Her attempts she labels "that terrible balancing of hurts and needs", for Emily's emotional conflicts have become significantly worse since the birth of her younger sister.

Part of the mother's explanation for allowing Emily to absent herself from school is that the child was sick, "though sometimes the illness was imaginary." We should not be surprised that Emily's affliction is asthma, a condition clinically linked to the dependent character which expresses an "exaggerated need for a bond with the mother … accompanied by an acute fear of loss of the mother's love…." The asthmatic seizure itself, as Fenichel points out, is first and foremost "an anxiety equivalent. It is a cry for help, directed toward the mother, whom the patient tries to introject by respiration in order to be permanently protected." It accomplishes its purpose in Emily's case by constraining the mother to attend to her every need, and the latter seems half aware that the attack resolves a conflict, for she notices that Emily's "breathing, harsh and labored, would fill the house with a curious tranquil sound."

Susan's birth has contributed to Emily's distress by precipitating this asthma and other symptoms. Still recovering from measles upon her sister's arrival, Emily "stayed skelton thin, not wanting to eat, and night after night she had nightmares." Olsen's use of "skelton thin," prefigures the deadened affect of Emily's depression and speaks as well to the deadliness of emotional deprivation. Emily's not eating in this instance most probably serves multiple functions, expressing both her insatiable desire for attention from the mother and her own extreme defensive denial that she needs food, which has understandably become equated with both love and mother.

Emily engages in a similar hunger strike, for example, when she is sent to the convalescent home to recover from the measles and loses seven pounds during her stay. These oral conflicts continue, interfering seriously with the child's growth. The mother observes of Susan, for instance, that "for all the five years difference in age [she] was just a year behind Emily in developing physically." We thus obliquely discover that Emily's emotional deprivation has resulted in an actual lack of physical growth, a not uncommon phenomenon.

The child's psychic dwarfism may also have other, defensive functions, serving, for example, to reject adulthood. To not grow up is to not become an adult with all attendant responsibilities. The mother herself has informed us that responsibility was thrust on Emily, now with four younger siblings, much too soon. "She had to help be a mother, and housekeeper, and shopper. She had to set her seal." Regression under these conditions is common, especially when those whose own emotional needs haven't been adequately met are constrained to nurture others. As Gardner has noted, "… Adolescents may regress and entrench the dependent tie with the mother to provide protection from venturing forth into a demanding and less benevolent world."

And Emily has already discovered that the outside world is less than benevolent. She had "painfully" loved a little boy for a year and stole money from her mother's purse to buy him candy daily, "but he still liked Jennifer better'n me. Why, Mommy? The kind of question for which there is no answer." Though we too cannot answer the child's poignant question, we can understand why Olsen chooses this particular enactment to express symbolically Emily's disappointment in love. Raiding mother's purse is typical behavior among children who are excessively dependent. "Some children steal as a way of acting out hostility, and anything that can reduce their anger may be helpful. Others do it because of feelings of deprivation of affection, the stolen object symbolizing love or a prized possession or present." Both of these motives are consistent with what we already know of Emily, and it is additionally interesting that she chooses to bribe the little boy with food to obtain love, that is to do actively to someone else what she most fervently would like done to her.

The sleep disorders typical of separation anxiety disorder also begin with Susan's birth when Emily begins having nightmares, crying out for the mother. The mother, however, refuses to tend her in her anguish and gets up only twice when she has to get up for Susan anyway. The mother's indifference may be due to her exhaustion and distraction, but it is also possible to see it as stemming from hostility, perhaps unconscious.

Olsen herself has provided us with a clue to this aspect of the mother's troubled relationship with Emily during the child's chicken pox. Having been sent to the in-laws so that the mother could hold a job down, Emily returns home, and says the mother, "… I hardly knew her, walking quick and nervous tike her father, looking like her father,… all the baby loveliness gone" (italics added). It is a reasonable inference to discern in the child's resemblance to the abandoning father the source of mother's hostility toward her, displaced from him. This helps us better understand why the mother finds it so difficult to balance her own hurts and needs and why despite her continual best intentions, aside from external reality factors (her job, etc.), she seems unable to act beneficially in the child's best interests, giving her enough food, enough love of herself.

Emily, however, eventually ceases her hunger strikes and develops "her enormous appetite that is legendary in our family", probably using food as a substitute for love. The mother refers to this change as taking place only as "in those years," but it appears to be during high school and World War II since the mother occasionally writes "V-Mail to Bill." This, of course, tells us that as a consequence of the war, Emily's second father has, from her point of view, in a sense, "abandoned" her and his family.

As important as mother is to Emily, we should not underestimate the significance of these various fathers and their presences and absences on the psychic development of the child. Chodorow points out that "The child uses its father not only in its differentiation of self. The father also enables more firm differentiation of objects. The infant, as it struggles out of primary identification, is less able to compare itself and its mother, than to compare mother and father, or mother and other important people she relates to This comparison indicates the mother's boundedness and existence as a separate person. The comparison also reveals the mother's special qualities—finding out that the whole world does not provide care increases her uniqueness in the child's eyes." How much more poignant, then, that from Emily's point of view neither mother nor the world—represented here by father—provides adequate care.

In her adolescence, of course, the separation anxiety symptoms persevere and others develop. She "tomented herself about not looking like the others", like a typical teen, and it is probable that this self-accusation is fed by the hostility felt against the mother but deflected toward the self in order not to endanger the relationship. Frye, though, sees in it "the limitations of a parent's capacity to foster a child's growth in selfhood …," noting that "a human being cannot rely on the perpetual presence of external seeing eyes to validate her own authenticity as a separate self."

While this is to some extent true, what Frye overlooks is the reason Emily still seeks that validation: she has never had her own existence and separateness from her mother fully confirmed by adequate mirroring, the reciprocal gazing into the eyes of the mother that establishes the basic trust of consistency, continuity, and sameness of care provided by that mother. Through this process, intimately linked to breast feeding and stimulation of the smile response, the infant makes mother, once an outer predictability, into an inner certainty, a sense that the world is a good place where one's needs are provided for. "Hopefully," as Robert Coles has put it, "the infant is held and feels held, craves food and finds his appetites satisfied, looks and sees in return his mother's eyes." In these eyes, the infant finds confirmation of his own existence, the initial sense not of who I am but that I am.

The infant, literally mirrored in his mother's eyes, apparently constructs a series of connected notions: "(1) the infant-child in the mother's eyes (that is, the actually observed reflection); (2) the infant-child in the mother's eyes (that is, as she sees him); (3) the primitive self observation, the earliest mirror of self; and (4) the gradually developing sense of reality—what I really am, as compared with what the mirror tells or seems to tell of what is my identity." Optimal mirroring therefore aids the child in consolidating his own identity because it enables him as a separate entity and to realize the existence of a separate object out there, an "I" vs. a "not-I." On the other hand, poor mirroring—insufficient holding, smiling, gazing, nurturing—leads to deeply rooted conflicts such as those Emily exhibits.

Olsen, however, strikes a single optimistic note when she provides the child with, if not an ostensible path to salvation at least a means of obtaining attention and adulation and alleviating her anguish. This is, of course, of Emily's talent for producing laughter in others. "Sometimes," the mother says, "to make me laugh or out of despair, she would imitate happenings or types at school." A chance remark of the mother's encourages her to enter a school talent show which she wins, starting her amateur career as a comedian. As the mother phrases it, "Now suddenly she was Somebody, and as imprisoned in her difference as she had been in her anonymity", the statement revealing the confirmation of separateness in the eyes of others that she had not been able to find in the eyes of the mother.

We should remember, too, that earlier Olsen has stated that Emily would relate jokes and riddles to Susan with which the latter would then amuse the mother and company, while Emily sat silent and resentful, complaining later that they were hers originally. In her public career, then, she appears to be imitating her younger sister's method of finding favor with the mother. The latter harbors her own suspicions that Emily's levity has its origins in the darker recesses of the girl's conflicted mind, as revealed by her speculation that it is done "out of her despair" and by her own anguished remark that her daughter's talent is "deadly clowning."

This deadliness appears in Emily's final words in the story when she reveals her fantasy about the future. Asked by her mother about her midterms as she kisses her goodnight, Emily blithely responds, "… In a couple of years when we'll all be atom-dead they won't matter a bit." Frye believes that this does not indicate Emily "succumbing to that despairing view; rather she is asserting her own right to choice as she lightly claims her wish to sleep late in the morning." This unwarranted optimism, however, conveniently overlooks virtually all the evidence of the girl's depression and despair. Given this, it is impossible not to see in Emily's remark both her projected rage and a fantasy of her ever undependable world violently disappearing. It symbolizes that long-feared calamitous event that would separate her absolutely and forever from the mother she has longed for since birth.

Indeed, the mother herself finds the remark unbearable: "She has said it before. She believes it." Returning then to her symbolic ironing, she tries to remove the wrinkles of life and stress, hoping that Emily will recognize that she is "more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron." The probability is low. Kirschner, like the mother, retains hope for Emily, yet is forced to admit that "a childhood of poverty and emotional deprivation have obviously taken their toll …," and that there are "lasting psychological implications that Emily may never overcome."

These psychological implications are enormous, for the findings in regard to children like Emily are consistent: significant personality disturbances almost inevitably result from "repetitive separations associated with other traumatic and depriving experiences," and that "reversibility becomes improbable with increased age." It is no wonder then that, from Emily's point of view, the future seems hopeless, and the world she could never trust or depend upon may vanish shortly in a tremendous roar, a blast of light, and a mushroom cloud.

Martin, in her biographical sketch of the author, has observed that "Though Olsen disclaims the 'autobiographical' label for her work, she does admit that this story is 'somewhat close to my own life.'" This is a courageous statement on the author's part, and yet that "somewhat" spans the often vast distance between reality and artistic creation. Whatever the former, the latter is a faithful depiction, compassionate to both, of a mother and daughter trapped in circumstances frequently not of their own making and struggling as best they can to win out over those circumstances. The portrait is clear, the harrowing anguish of both evident.

Abandonment by an irresponsible father, the innocence and ignorance of youth on the mother's part, an unstable home situation, chronic illness, birth order, poverty and deprivation—all these combine to affect Emily deeply, and perhaps irrevocably. The mother, trying to balance her own hurts and needs, does her best trying to help Emily balance hers, hoping out of desperation that the child may prove more than the inert dress from which she attempts to press the symbolic wrinkles and creases.

It is testimony to her heroism that she irons throughout her narration and continues to do so at story's end, her Sisyphean labor depicting her maternal love for her daughter and her desperate hopes for her well-being. A chance remark about a talent show, after all, once saved Emily, moved her from anonymity to being Somebody; some other event just might again change her life for the better. In a world as bleak as theirs, one must hope for the best and, like a Beckett character who can't go on, simply go on.