1
Danielle Veal
12/06/06
ENGL 127
Anderson
LIVING IN THE SHADOWS
Imagine growing up without receiving a great amount of attention from your
parents. Try and picture your dreams and achievements being drowned by your siblings’
success. Think about how you would feel if everyone thought your sibling was “better”
than you, including your own mother. This issue was a reality for two fictional
characters, Emily and Maggie. Tillie Olsen and Alice Walker both used fiction, Olsen
with “I Stand Here Ironing” and Walker with “Everyday Use” to illustrate how mothers
express feelings of guilt after not providing their children with the attention and
motivation they needed. Both authors use symbolism and metaphors to reveal the pinned
up feelings of guilt the mothers have for their daughters. In analyzing both works, the
reader can see both Olsen and Walker surround their writing around the theme of love
and guilt, as well as self-identity.
In Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing," an unnamed narrator reflects on her somewhat
distant relationship with her eldest daughter. The short story begins with the mother
releasing her feelings about the distance between her and her daughter, “You think
because I am her mother I have a key…She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that
life that has happened outside of me, beyond me” (Olsen, 560). Here, the mother admits
that she does not know her daughter like she should. “I will become engulfed in all I did
or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped” (Olsen, 560).
2
Reflecting on the past, the mother “…remembers, sifts, weighs, estimates, and totals” all
the right and wrong things she did in raising her daughter.
In today’s society, mother’s guilt is a common aspect of raising children. It was
even more prevalent in the 1930s during the Great Depression Era. The narrator of "I
Stand Here Ironing" describes her daughter as "a child of her age, of depression, of war,
of fear." Though the story was published in 1961, it has been seen as having ties to the
Depression era and to the socially-conscious literature of the thirties. The narrator
explains how she had to “leave her [daughter] daytimes with the woman downstairs”
(Olsen, 560), while she worked or constantly looked for work. The mother justified this
by saying, “It was the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression” (Olsen, 560). She
also finds a short-term solution to this problem by finding a night job, and shortly
thereafter, she had to “bring her to his family and leave her” (Olsen, 561). The mother is
stuck between working to support herself and her child and spending time with her child.
In “I Stand Here Ironing,” all these feelings of guilt are centered on the metaphor
of a mother ironing her daughter's dress as she mentally attempts to ''iron'' out her uneasy
relationship with her daughter through a stream of conscious monologue. As she is
ironing, she exposes to the reader the underlying insecurities that puzzle her mind about
her mothering. She wonders if the decisions she made while she was younger, really
affected her daughter, along with her other children. As a young mother, the narrator
expresses how she wanted to be the best mother, the right mother for her child Emily. She
admits that she was a first time mother, “with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, I
did like the books then said” (Olsen, 560). She reads books to educate herself and she
believes the “experts” about what makes the best kind of mother. The mother also
3
explains the physical pain and sacrifice she went through to nurse her child, “Though her
cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with swollenness…”(Olsen, 560).
Despite these positive nurturing moments, there was still a large gap between the narrator
and her daughter.
Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” also contains the underlying theme of a mother’s
guilt in insufficiently nurturing her daughter. However, the mother is not as unconcealed
and straightforward as the narrator of “I Stand Here Ironing.” This is so because most of
the action and dialogue occurs between the mother and an older sibling, Dee, not the
neglected child, Maggie. We can interpret Dee’s and the mother’s dialogue, along with
Maggie’s actions and conclude that there is tension between the mother and Maggie, very
similar to the tension between Emily and her mother in “I Stand Here Ironing.” While the
narrator in Olsen’s story reflects on the things she did and did not do and how it affected
her daughter, Maggie’s mother focuses more on Maggie’s insecurities and continually
compares her to her older sister, Dee. We do sense some of the mother’s guilt when Dee
is attempting to claim the quilts. The mother says she did something she had never done
before, "hugged Maggie to me," then took the quilts from Dee and gave them to
Maggie. This moment gives light to Maggie’s relationship with her mother. If her mother
had never hugged her, that suggests some serious tension between them. The mother felt
guilty for always putting Dee’s wants and needs in front of Maggie’s, so she took the
quilts from Dee and gave them to Maggie, even though Maggie said she would be okay
without them.
Both mothers contribute to their daughters’ low self esteem by comparing them to
their siblings. In “Everyday Use” the mother tells us that "Dee is lighter than Maggie,
4
with nicer hair and a fuller figure” (Walker, 136). She speaks of the fire that burned and
scarred Maggie, explaining why Maggie stands “hopelessly in corners.” The narrator
tells us how Maggie is not bright, how she shuffles when she walks, comparing her with
Dee whose feet were always neat-looking, as if God himself had shaped them. We also
learn of Dee's "style" and the way she awes the other girls at school with it. Because of
all the attention that Dee receives, Maggie feels as if Dee “held life always in the palm of
one hand” (Walker, 135). Whenever Dee came around, Maggie would scatter off
somewhere, embarrassed and probably afraid of what Dee might say about her.
In “I Stand Here Ironing” Emily’s mother speaks of Susan as "quick and articulate
and assured, everything in appearance and manner Emily was not." Emily "thin and dark
and foreign-looking at a time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she
should look a chubby blonde replica of Shirley Temple." Like Maggie, Emily had a
physical limitation also, asthma. Even though Emily was the oldest, she was second-best
to Susan, emotionally and physically. “Susan, who for all the five years’ difference in age
was just a year behind Emily in developing physically” (Walker, 563). The mother
admits that she was happy about Emily’s slow physical development because she felt that
Emily was not ready for “that terrible world of youthful competition, or preening and
parading.” We also hear from the mother that Susan got all the attention from people,
telling riddles that she learned from Emily, while Emily kept quiet about it. We see that
these feelings of low self esteem cannot be entirely contributed to the mother’s neglect.
Physical limitations also affected the way Emily felt and behaved with other children,
including her younger sister.
5
Both Emily and Maggie struggled with their self-identity because of their
childhood. Being constantly compared to their sisters prevented them from developing
their own unique self-identity. Both Emily and Maggie show resentment towards their
sisters, the sisters who God rewarded with good looks and poise. Emily's mother points
out the "poisonous feeling" between the sisters, feelings she contributed to by her
inability to balance the "hurts and needs" of the two. In “Everyday Use” we see Maggie
"eying her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life
always in the palm of one hand, that ‘no’ is a word the world would never say to her”
(Walker, 135). Maggie's mother seems to have reinforced this by being unable to say no
to Dee also. This is what makes the point in the story when she finally does say no to
Dee such an important moment in Maggie's life. After that moment, Maggie finally felt
accepted by her mother and opened the door to a happier girl with a better sense of who
she is, outside of her sister’s shadow. Emily comes close to finding her identity when she,
along with others, realizes that she has a special talent. She sets herself apart from her
sister and becomes her own person. “Now suddenly she was Somebody, and as
imprisoned in her difference as she had been in anonymity” (Olsen, 564). Her confidence
boosted, despite all the troubles and setbacks of her childhood, and she began to perform
at other high schools and even colleges. Although it took her a while to overcome her
shyness, she managed to command the crowd with roaring laughter. She was finding
herself.
Although both mothers realize their faults and, in some ways, try to make up for
them, they also realize the contrasting aspects of their daughters, almost viewing their
more esteemed daughters with a sense of disgrace. In “Everyday Use” the mother mocks
6
Dee, claiming that Dee “washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with knowledge
we didn’t necessarily need to know” (Walker, 136). She claimed that Dee shoved them
away “like dimwits” when they were trying to understand something she had read. In “I
Stand Here Ironing,” the mother realizes that Susan would take Emily’s belongings and
sometimes even break them, while Emily sat there and watched. By interpreting the
mothers’ thoughts and actions in both stories, the reader can conclude that Dee and Susan
are self-centered and selfish while Maggie and Emily are caring and giving. Despite these
character flaws, Dee and Susan still received the greatest amount of attention.
Both “I Stand Here Ironing” and “Everyday Use” are stories about a daughter’s
quest to find herself outside of her sister’s shadow and a mother’s quest to look past her
own guilt and accept her daughter for who she is, despite her limitations. Emily
eventually begins to discover her hidden talent and slowly develops an identity, she
becomes somebody. Maggie finally feels accepted by her mother and she gains
possession of something that Dee couldn’t have. Dee finally heard the word “no” from
her, and Maggie finally received the attention from her mother. Have the mothers finally
gotten over their guilt of raising one daughter differently from the other, or do they
simply feel sorry for the childhood their daughters experienced? In “I Stand Here
Ironing” the mother is aware of Emily’s downfalls and she admits that she tried her best,
despite being a first-time mother. She acts as if she doesn’t feel sorry for her daughter,
only that everything is out of her hands. In Walker’s “Everyday Use” the mother sees that
Maggie feels inferior to her sister and has watched Dee get everything she wanted
growing up. Now, the mother is finally realizing that this unequal treatment of her
7
daughters was building a barrier between her and her daughters. Both mothers had to
make a change in the way their daughters’ were being treated. They had to love them.