The following is part of a paper I wrote while an undergrad at Gallaudet University. I stumbled across this draft and found the words fitting enough to share. If you have the time, I strongly suggest you read the essay by Tillie Olsen first. If you take care with the page numbers, you can find one copy here. ~kas
Applying New Historicism to “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen
Laying the printed copy of Tillie Olsen’s essay, “I Stand Here Ironing” on the table, I immediately grab a tissue to dry my tear stained cheeks. As a mother of three daughters, every word seems to resonate. I may not have faced the same challenges, or tried to find work during the Depression, but I know my own pains of raising my children. Like the mother in Olsen’s essay, “I was a young mother, I was a distracted mother. There were other children pushing up, demanding. […] My wisdom came too late” (Olsen 55)[1].
My own experiences color the lens I look through to analyze the piece, but that is part of the beauty of this critical framework. In applying both New Historicism and an additional Feminism lens of critical theory to Olsen’s essay, we are able to see how the writer’s own history and experiences influenced her writing and the effects of such on the bonds of motherhood.
Olsen’s writing is rich in meaning, yet she uses simple words and sentences. She utilizes a common voice, that of a mother with five children. Olsen also doesn’t add much in the way of descriptions, allowing the reader to visualize a mother, harried and busy, picking up the phone to answer questions about Emily, her oldest child. We are led through a flashback of the mother’s life and the difficulties that went along with raising Emily during the Depression as a single mother.
Olsen writes in an autobiographical way, and a quick search in Google confirms that this essay is based on life experience. As a mother, how do we possibly foster positive self-growth? How do we convince our children they are beautiful and loved long after the baby stage has been left behind? The mother is told to smile at her daughter more and she contemplates “What was in my face when I looked at her? I loved her. There were all acts of love” (17). The overwhelming nature of busy-ness, of survival, has a way of reflecting the somber instead of the joy.
There is also a recurring theme of intimacy, or rather the lack of intimacy between a mother and daughter that is seen at the beginning of the essay, “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. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me” (3). The departure from a close mother and daughter bond is emphasized after Emily returns from staying with her father’s family, “When she finally came, I hardly knew her” (11) and again after staying at a convalescent home, “I used to try to hold and love her after she came back, but her body would stay stiff, and after a while she’d push away” (34). The intimate bond a reader expects to see between the mother and daughter is missing.
Yet, the mother also does not try to explain the lack of bond away. She acknowledges that there were other children to take care of, “I was working, there were four smaller ones now, there was not time for her” (44), but she does not apologize. There are no easy answers, only difficult decisions that had to be made in order to survive. “I will never total it all. I will never come in to say: She was a child seldom smiled at” (55). I read these words and I understand on such a level that they could have been my words. There is no way to apologize or even change the past. There is no way to total all the “could haves and should haves” to make the present or future different.
Tillie Olsen’s essay, “I Stand Here Ironing,” moves me. It moves me to write more deeply, think more clearly, and accept more fully. Like Emily, Olsen has, “set her seal” (44). She writes of the bonds of motherhood and the facets that are not popular. This is not an essay that makes grandiose apologies. Instead it is a snapshot of what happens in an imperfect world, when surviving is an act of love, and in the simple understanding that, “There is still enough left to live by” (56).
[1] Clarification on citations for Tillie Olsen’s essay, “I Stand Here Ironing” references paragraph numbers instead of page numbers.
The Write To Be...Me 