HELPLESS BEFORE THE IRON

The motives of housework in I Stand Here Ironing by Tillie

Olsen
Jon Zboil
Housework is too trivial to talk about is a quote I found in
an article by Pat Maniardi called The Politics of Housework. At
first I did think the idea of my essay would be too
unimportant, ridiculous even: The theme of housework in I
Stand Here Ironing by Tillie Olsen. However, the story is so
moving and the perspective on a seemingly trivial theme of
chores so complex I decided to try and focus on it. Housework
is seen not only as a necessary aspect of survival, but also an
obstacle keeping one away from joy. It can even modify the
language of the story. To sum it up, it is because housework
might seem so irrelevant that I decided to stress the
importance of this theme in I Stand Here Ironing.
The story of I Stand Here Ironing opens up, not surprisingly,
with a mother ironing a dress of her daughter Emily, thinking
about an unsettling message from Emilys school counsellor: I
wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me
about your daughter.

Im sure you can help me understand her.

Shes a youngster who needs help and whom Im deeply interested

in helping.

It is easy to assume the narrator failed as a mother. The text

is filled with guilt, which is represented either in doused
cries of excuses I was nineteen, or overwhelming sadness in
simple confessions When [Emily] saw me she would break into a
clogged weeping that could not be confronted, a weeping I can
hear yet. The worried narrator starts reminiscing the life of
her oldest daughter who arguably had the most difficult
childhood compared to her siblings: After a while I found a
job hashing at night so I could be with [Emily] days, and it
was better. But I came to where I had to bring her to family
and leave her. One of the most heartbreaking moments of the
story is when the narrator realizes her daughter was seldom
smiled at: You should smile more at Emily when you look at
her.

What was in my face when I looked at her?

I loved her.

There were all the acts of love. It was only with the others I
remembered what he said, and it was the face of joy, and not of
care or tightness or worry I turned to too late for Emily
When the narrator is not blaming herself, she admits there were
seldom opportunities to just enjoy each others presence:
There was so little time left at night after the kids were
bedded down.

She would struggle over books, always

eating . . . and I would be ironing, or preparing food for the

next day, or writing V-mail to Bill, or tending the baby.
Sometimes, to make me laugh, or out of her despair, she would
imitate happenings at school.

In the portfolio of the author Tillie Olsen there is one

keyword defining her work silences. Although this word
reffers to Olsens book of essays mostly dealing with the
struggles of women writers, I would like to use the word in a
slightly different context. There are only two mentions of a
man a partner a husband in I Stand Here Ironing. The men as
members of the family are silenced, or, to be more precise, the
narrator silences herself when talking about them. One partner
leaves: I worked or looked for work and for Emilys father,
who could no longer endure (he wrote in his good-bye note)
sharing want with us.
The other is sent V-mails. Where is the partner to help out at
home, to help raise the children? The question could be
answered with the quotation of Politics of Housework from the
beginning of this essay: Housework is beneath [mens] status.
[Mens] purpose in life is to deal with matters of
significance. [Womens] is to deal with matters of
insignificance. [Women] should do the housework.
Housework is obviously not insignificant, neither it is
trivial. Moreover, it can be argued that constant attention on
chores makes the gap between the mother and Emily even wider. A
bit of irony pops up by the end of the story, where Emily
(presumably as a joke) understates her mothers work: Aren't
you ever going to finish ironing, Mother?

Whistler painted his

mother in a rocker.

I'd have to paint mine standing over an

ironing board.
The symbolics of housework and ironing in particular could be
seen in the very last paragraph of the story: Let her be.

So

all that is in her will not bloom - but in how many does it?
There is still enough left to live by.

Only help her to know -

help make it so there is cause for her to know - that she is

more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the
iron
According to Rose Kamel, Emily is in fact a disembodied dress
pushed and pulled her mothers iron until her mother claims,
or wishes, Emily is more than that. The daughter is not
helpless before the iron. Unlike the mother herself.
The last thing I would like to comment on is the language of
the story itself. I Stand Here Ironing is in fact an inner
monologue of a distracted mother, or a clumsy writer who has
laid under the budren of chores for most of her youth. As the
author herself claims in her book Silences: The habits of a
lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are
not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it
possible for writing to be first; habits of yearsresponse to
others, distractability, responsibility for daily mattersstay
with you, make you, become you. The cost of discontinuity
(that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of

things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that

everything starts up something else in me; what should take
weeks, takes me sometimes months to write; what should take
months, takes years
As Rose Kamel noticed, I Stand Here Ironing is full of
characteristic stylistic clues embedded in the occasionally
inverted syntax, run-on sentences interspersed with fragments,
repetitions, alliterative parallels, an incantatory rhythm
evoke the narrator's longing not only for a lost child but for
a lost language whereby she can order the chaotic dailiness of
a working mother's experience.