I Stand Here Ironing

Senior year is time for high school students to celebrate their accomplishments and move on to their new life - an independent life from parents. However, you should respect and appreciate these last moments of love, care and support from your parents because many unfortunate children such as Emily in “I Stand Here Ironing” story written by Tillie Olsen have not received all the care from their parents since their youth age. Olsen expresses successfully in this monologue story the distance between a mother and her daughter along with the mother’s guilty feeling of not being able to fix their relationship.

The author agrees with the idea of women as victims through the characterisation of women in the short story. The women are portrayed as helpless to the torment inflicted upon them by the boy in the story. This positions readers to feel sympathy for the women but also think of the world outside the text in which women are also seen as inferior to men. “Each season provided him new ways of frightening the little girls who sat in front of him or behind him”. This statement shows that the boy’s primary target were the girls who sat next to him. This supports the tradition idea of women as the victims and compels readers to see that the women in the text are treated more or less the same as the women in the outside world. Characterisation has been used by the author to reinforce the traditional idea of women as the helpless victims.

While James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” depicts the connection between two brothers, Tillie Olsen’s short story “I Stand Here Ironing” represents the bond between a mother and her daughter. Both Baldwin and Olsen focus on family relationships and how emotional support vs neglect have an effect on family members. Also, each author conveys a message of finding self-identity even amidst adversity, while including the symbolism of everyday objects. Furthermore, Baldwin compares light and darkness throughout his story, and Olsen has the mother scrutinize her actions in an interior monologue.

In everyday life, a relation is always identified as trust and support. In this novel, a relation between a husband and a wife is shown in a different way. Min, one of the characters in the story, is shown losing her mental stability and is living with her two children. She did not have any contact with her husband in few years and neither did he try to contact

Words could possibly change individuals ‘s thoughts from hopelessness, brutality, to become a normal human being that used to be living inside a prison. Some convicts spend a certain amount of time serving a long or short sentence, some of the time they lose themselves in a world of brutality and turn out to become worse after coming to the prison. Jimmy Santiago Baca carried on with existing by hardship and an unavoidable pathway of loss. Children who are neglected at a young age are increasing the risk of emotional and behavioral problem. The absence of parenting, especially at a young age, disconnects the relationship between the child and the parent. Family is one of the main themes that the author Jimmy Santiago Baca, wants the reader

The Monkey King character in Wu Ch'eng-en’s “Journey to West” displays excellent examples of characterization through both direct and indirect methods. The author directly references some of the Monkey King’s character traits directly in the story; however, the progression of his character is seen more completely through the character’s actions, thoughts, and his effect on other characters. While direct characterization sets the stage for the reader’s view of the Monkey King, the character’s personality is best seen through the various methods of indirect characterization.

This highlights the realistic atmosphere prevailing as well as reflects the true meaning of relationship. The readers are exposed to the mother-son relationship. It can be seen that even if the narrator is a twenty-year old law student, he is still the little boy who needed his neck scrubbed from the point of view of the mother. Whatever good advice the son gives, it is not followed and instead he is given a lecture. This is a typical mother-son relationship which shows that no matter how much a child grows, he always remains a little kid for the mother. Moreover, the readers also notice the routine life of the narrator and his mother. The boy used to accompany his mother to work and help her which makes a four-hour job becomes two. There is solidarity, strong family bond and understanding between them because although he did not like his mother

To start with, I would like to express my thoughts about “Night Women”, which has become one of my favorite stories due to its unique language, exquisite metaphors, and powerful message. It is about the life and hard times of any single mother who has to do whatever possible to provide a means for their family because her son’s father decided to “disappear with the nights shadows a long time ago.” It shows different feelings, which are mixed, and some of these feelings are the innocence of a child as well as the care and love of a mother through hard work, sacrifice, and dedication. She was a prostitute, a job that is very hard for any woman, but most of them depend on it in order to succeed and make money to cover their costs of living.

In the short story, the writer tells a woman’s depression which guides her to break the limits and restrictions over woman. The woman who has no name or identity symbolises all women’s suppressed position in patriarchal society. In the story, the woman describes the house and her rooms with the words; ancestral hall, old-fashioned chintz, barred windows, heavy-immovable bed. The descriptions depict the house as patriarchy’s realm. Also, the yellow wallpaper’s surrounding of her shows the woman in a trapped, confined and repressed position. Not only the yellow symbolise the weakness, but the paper also

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

“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” (Tillie Olsen). The last sentence of a story might not mean a lot to some readers however, for most reading this story, the last sentence makes one rethink the whole perspective of Emily’s mother. Is she really this awful mother who only took care of her daughter, Emily, half of the time? Did she actually care for her daughter and didn’t know how to show it until it was too late? In “I Stand Here Ironing” Tillie Olsen uses symbolism, flashbacks, and theme to develop the narrator as an unsympathetic mother who is unable to treat her daughter, Emily, with the attention and care that she needed to blossom into adulthood.

The first feeling of this story is that the boy and his father struggle with their relationship, but as it unfolds, the reader sees how they do care for each other. It also becomes easier to spot the difficulties of communicating within a broken family. The father does a fine job to of turning the boy’s scheduling obsessions into a positive for the boy by noting it as one of his strong points.

What do Betty from "Pleasantville," June from "Leave it to Beaver," and Donna Reed from "The Donna Reed Show" all have in common? They all represent the image of the perfect housewife in the 1950s. They represent women who gladly cooked, cleaned, dressed in pearls and wore high heals while waiting for their all-knowing husbands to come home. They represent women who can only find fulfillment in male domination and nurturing maternal love. Tillie Olsen, as a single mother with four children (204), provides readers with another view of women. Through the representation of the narrator in I Stand Here Ironing, Olsen contradicts the image of the 50s ideal woman, a happy housewife and a perfect mother.

In the 1950s, advertising first arose to promote many things such as refrigerators, automobiles, and appliances that were plentiful after World War II (adage). Many advertisers during this time incorporated family values; as old traditional ways, such as a Father being the provider of the family and the mother being the home-worker became a new (adage). This directly led to advertisers promoting men in many advertisements, as their “alpha” role appealed to consumer interests. This generation of advertisement was known to objectify women and view them as being socially lower than men (Prezi). In the advertisement for Van Huesen’s ties for men, “Show her it’s a man world”, women are marginalized through imagery and language to appeal to the masculinity of men , giving them a sense of power and superiority over women Amplifying the stereotypical and sexist principles of societal views during this time period.

America has always been known as the melting pot of the world, with no exception of the American school system. Here at Conant High School, they are one of the most diverse schools in all of Illinois. Along with being diverse, Conant also happens to be part of one of the richest districts in Illinois. Despite all Conant has to offer, the road to a great education isn't always smooth sailing. Then of course,if you don't got to well off school there can be new and even worse problems with the type of education you receive. Our culture, what makes us who we are, is a humongous part of what our education turns out to be. These two coincide with each other, working off one another to make experiences different from person to person.