Essay Database

“I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen is a fictional piece of literature written in the time of the Great Depression. This is a literary piece that a mother views her past and recognizes the mistakes that she had made and the choices that she felt and knew were wrong. 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 …

…of motherhood and the probing of parental responsibility, Tillie Olsen has taken that reality and developed its peculiar complexity into a powerful and complex statement on the experience of responsible selfhood in the modern world. 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 narrative possibilities of experiences, like motherhood, which have rarely been granted serious literary consideration.