The Alienation of Emily - Essay Example

The Alienation of Emily The short story "I Stand Here Ironing" is Tillie Olsen's dark portrayal of the inadequacies we face as parents, the difficulties of growing up, and a grim reminder of how far apart a mother and daughter can be in such a close place. The story conveys the indifference and despair of hard times, with a mother too busy to succeed at work or at home. These failings are passed to the daughter, Emily, as she grows up in a twisted world as a deformed being, "thin and dark and foreign-looking ", out of place and out of step with her surroundings.

Her mother's hard luck had become Emily's own fate, the future of a wash woman hopelessly trying to keep the wrinkles out. Her mother is unable to offer any comfort or correction for life already passed, the wrinkles already set. "I Stand Here Ironing" is the way we live, succumbing to life and stoically accepting that there will never be enough time to build anything but walls. .The mother tells us early on that she has surrendered to the bad hand that she was dealt, and that she has accepted Emily's unknown and uncertain future.

Her opening conversation with an unknown figure, possibly her own conscious, pleading to help Emily, shows her lack of will in the matter when she remarks, "Even if I came, what good would it do". The mother has given up on Emily. She gave up on Emily a long time ago, when Emily was young and the father had abandoned her. Just as is often the case in everyone's life, we see the mother making choices, accepting the lesser of the evils, foregoing the opportunity for fun or pleasure. Emily's mother knows that her daughter is the product of her own shortcomings.

The old man's words, "You should smile at Emily more when you look at her", continue to haunt her, yet for Emily it was too late. She feels the guilt when she remembers, "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 them -- too late for Emily". These feelings would well up inside the mother every time she had to leave for work or fulfill the obligations of adulthood. And inside the mother's bleak world there were few smiles outside her children, no opportunity for pleasant anticipation.

Emily's bad experience with life was a constant reminder to the mother to do better with the other children, and they seemed to be closer to normal, perhaps happier. Yet, Emily had inherited the blackened and pessimistic view of the world from her mother. That infectious, poisonous outlook invaded her health and dimmed Emily's hopes, as her mother demanded, "She had to help be a mother, and housekeeper, and shopper. She had to set her seal". As children do, Emily had become the parent. The too far distant and too often neglecting parent.

Yet, Emily was able to overcome the immense odds of her mother's discouraging attitude, and able to find the one thing her mother did not have and was unable to offer, laughter.When Emily discovers her gift for laughter, her mother still insists on subduing any pleasure for Emily. The mother muses, "You ought to do something about her with a gift like that -- but without money or knowing how, what does one do" The simple answer would be to smile, and laugh. But in her mother's world, as too often in our own, when pessimism meets the guilt of pleasure, it darkens the world and becomes the struggle of just trying to keep the wrinkles out.

BibliographyOlsen, Tillie. Tell Me a Riddle. Laurel ed. New York: Dell, 1976.