i stand here ironing

“I Stand Here Ironing": Motherhood as Experience and Metaphor. The uniqueness of Tillie Olsen's "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 rein fused with the power of genuine metaphorical insight into the problems of selfhood in the modern world. Can you make a strong case that the ironing is really a metaphor for "the ups and downs, …showed first 75 words of 1620 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1620 total…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 story’s possibilities of experiences, like motherhood, which have rarely been granted serious literary consideration. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Bibliography**