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• Analysis Of Tillie Olsen's I Stand Here Ironing

Analysis Of Tillie Olsen's I Stand Here Ironing Superior Essays

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Open Document Essay SampleCheck Writing Quality Show More In the twentieth century, there were some significant events happened that impacted to the world and many Americans such as World War I, The Great Depression, World War II, and the Civil Right. This time also was a remarkable for many talented American writers. Although each writer had different literary style and expression, all of them still focused on the facts of historical time for showing their experiences and voices to support and help people about the discriminations, segregations between classes, genders, and races. Especially, Tillie Olsen was a famous political activist who positively participated in the movements of working-class people. She also was one of the feminists who stood out for helping women and raising their voices in …show more content… By adding her inner thoughts into the lines, Olsen’s writings became more special and powerful for readers. “I Stand Here Ironing” is the first short story in Tell Me a Riddle book by Tillie Olsen which was published in 1961. This outstanding story describes the hard lives of people during The Great Depression in the 1930s and focuses on the numerous difficulties of a mother who had to take care of a child by herself. By recalling all memories between her and her daughter, Emily, the narrator realizes that there are a lot of things which make her feel guilty and regretful about the childhood of Emily. There is a strong connection between the narrator in “I stand Here Ironing” and the author. Olsen seemed to use the image of the mother in the story to express herself as a nineteen year-old single-mother who got separated from her family and survived through the time of The Great Depression in 1930s. Being a single-mother is always a challenge because it is very difficult to do the roles of both mother and father for loving and raising the child properly. Although the narrator and Olsen spent all efforts to take care of their children, being a good teenage single-mother in The Great Depression was an impossible duty. In an article by Anne-Marie Cusac, Tillie Olsen revealed that she had tried to get …show more content… Olsen began to write this story in the early 1930s when she was nineteen. However, some chapter of the draft were missed, she could not find and publish it until 1974. The story tells about a working class family from Wyoming named Holbrook. In the story, Olsen describes the problem which the Holbrook family has to solve is their poverty. They have to work a lot of works in different environments, such as mining, farming, and meatpacking, to help their family survive through the period time of the post-World War I and The Great Depression. Those awful workplaces “sucked the bloods of the unorganized and nonunion workers in the 1920s and 1930s” (Pearlman 39). The author continued to build the image of the oldest daughter character, Mazie Holbrook, based on her childhood experiences. The Holbrook’s children have many diseases because they have to live in very poor health care condition at mining town, tenant farming and slaughterhouse. Moreover, when Mazie and her younger brother come to the new school, they usually suffer the unfriendliness and contempt of their schoolmates. Tillie Olsen’s family used to bare the same problems. According to the interview in The Progressive, Olsen said, “For the first time, I encountered class differences, clothes, attitudes, backgrounds. The dean called me down to give me cast-off clothes to wear, which were usually

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