I Stand Here Ironing

I stand here ironing

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 reins fused with the power of genuine metaphorical insight into the problems of selfhood in the modern world. ironing is 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."

As we read the story we are drawn through a knowledge of the present reality and into participation in the narrative process of reconstructing and visualizing the past. " 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. As she rethinks the past, she frames her perceptions through such interjections as "I did not know then what I know now" and "What in me demanded that goodness in her?" But throughout, she is assessing the larger pattern of interaction between her own needs and her daughter's needs .

In Emily's concern with her physical appearance we can see, distilled the limitations of a parent's capacity to foster a child's growth in selfhood and finally of the possibilities of any full bridging of human separateness. "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. 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 such statements as "my wisdom ! came too late," the story verges on becoming an analysis of parental guilt. With the narrator, we construct an image of the mother's own development: her difficulties as a young mother alone with her daughter and barely surviving during the early years of the depression; her painful months of enforced separation from her daughter; her gradual and partial relaxation in response to a new husband and a new family as more children follow; her increasingly complex anxieties about her first child; and finally her sense of family balance which surrounds but does not quite include the early memories of herself and Emily in the grips of survival needs. In doing so she has neither trivialized nor romanticized the experience of motherhood; she has indicated the wealth of experience yet to be explored in the story’s possibilities of experiences, like motherhood, which have rarely been granted serious literary consideration. Rather she is searching for an honest assessment of past behavior and its consequences and for an accurate understanding of the role of cultural necessity which nonetheless allows for individual responsibility without ever relinquishing the immediate reality of motherhood and the probing of parental responsibility. Emily, feeling her isolation, and Emily's mother, feeling helpless to overcome her daughter's painful isolation, together give us a powerful lens on the vulnerability to external perceptions of selfhood: "the unsureness, the having to be conscious of words before you speak, the constant caring--what are they thinking of me!

Emily’s mother feels guilty because her “wisdom” came “too late, but only she knows that Emily “will find her way” that she is strong enough to do it. The narrator, a thirty-eight years old women who spent her life raising five children, is overwhelmed by guilt because she wasn’t always available for her daughter and she treated her different than her other kids. She realizes know that in her daily struggle of raising her children she forgot to show her daughter how much she loved her, and the fact that her daughter was more than the dress on the ironing board for her. In school she was a “slow learner” always unprepared “stammering and unsure in her classes” because she was helping her mother at home “be a mother, and housekeeper,