Role of Family in Personality: A Psychoanalytic Reading of 'I Stand Here Ironing'

'I Stand Here Ironing' is a short story by American writer Tillie Olsen. The story is about struggle of a mother – who is also narrator of the story – to bring up and console her psychologically problematic child, Emily. Emily is projected as one with various psychological core issues; namely low self esteem, fear of intimacy, and sibling rivalry. As the story progresses, she is gradually healed. In this process of problematisation and healing, the mother is seen always with her. Besides, the unnamed mother too shares those core issues. In fact, it is the mother (and indirectly the father) who incorporated the psychological problems into the daughter. Thus, the story shows that parents' treatment to children during childhood in the family directly influences their personality formation.

Emily's father left the family before she was of age of a year. The mother married another man, with whom Emily couldn't get close enough as a father-daughter relationship. She is also deprived of mother's love and care from early age (eight months). She received no love and care but chicken pox in the mother's husband's house; and again only punishments and humiliation in the school. As a result, she grew low self esteem, fear of intimacy, fear of abandonment, sibling rivalry and other psychological problems in herself.

Emily has low self esteem. She is shy to speak with others except the mother. She thinks that she is unattractive, and people do not like her. She does not smile easily; and her face is closed and sombre. "She fretted about her appearance, thin and dark and foreign‐looking at a time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a chubby blond replica of Shirley Temple" (Olsen, 4). But her sense of inferiority is result of the mother's definition of Emily. For her, the child was once very beautiful, but she lost all the beauties as she grew up. The mother says, "She was a beautiful baby…She was a miracle to me, but when she was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all" (Olsen, 2).

From very childhood, she is raised in the way which allowed her to perceive that she is something less than others, even less than her own siblings. For this, the mother is responsible. She could not provide equal love and care to her as her next child, Susan. She compares in the story, "Susan, golden- and curly-haired and chubby, quick and articulate and assured, everything in appearance and manner Emily was not…"(Olsen, 5).

This very sense of differences leads her to develop fear of intimacy. She doesn't want to be intimate with her sister Susan, from the very day of her birth. When the mother is back from the hospital after the birth of Susan, Emily doesn't come near to both the mother and the baby. The story doesn't include any incident when Emily is with Susan. This is enough to show that Emily does not want to develop intimacy with the sister. Even she cannot develop intimate relationship with the "New Daddy".

Of course, the school was not good, and the teachers were evil. But, she could have some fun time with pantomimes and comedies in school. Despite this, she doesn't want to go to school because she has fear of intimacy. She always finds – or makes - some excuses for missing school and staying at home. She once had developed a sort of affair with a boy at school, but that is not continued as she cannot get intimate with him. Even at home, she fails to make anyone intimate. "The doorbell sometimes rang for her, but no one seemed to come and play in the house or be a best friend. May be because we moved so much" (Olsen, 4)

The sentence, "May be because we moved so much" also suggests that the mother is also a victim of fear of intimacy. Were she not, they needed not to shift here and there frequently. This might be reason behind why she fails to maintain continuity of marital life. Because the mother also has fear of intimacy, she cannot teach her child to recognise and heal the problem in early parts of the story. Rather what she does is supporting her to develop them larger and larger and further repressing them. She easily accepts the child's excuses for missing school. She can easily leave the child so that both of them need not develop intimacy with each other. Further, she tries to deny the fact that they share fear of intimacy. When Emily asks why the boy loves Jennifer more than her, she thinks it doesn't have any answer – "The kind of question for which there is no answer"(Olsen, 4). Here, she does not know the answer (because the problem for both of them is unconscious), and she wants both of them not to know it. Thus she tries defense mechanism of denial to repress the problem further.

Emily also uses denial as a defense against her core issues. At the time when the mother gives birth to Susan, her mental state is so unstable that she even fears from the clock. She says, "The clock talked loud, I threw it away, it scared me what it talked” (Olsen, 3). Regularly she has nightmares. In these conditions too, she is not ready to acknowledge that she is frightened by something or someone. She answers to the mother, “No, I’m all right, go back to sleep Mother” (Olsen, 3).

Besides denial, Emily uses her creative skills of imitation and pantomime as defenses against her core issues of low self esteem and fear of intimacy. And, these defenses serve her very well. She sometimes "imitates happenings or types at school" so that she can forget all the negative experiences she went through at school and the mother will be happy. She also sometimes performs her pantomime at public functions, which ultimately gives her "the control, the command, the convulsing and deadly clowning, the spell, then the roaring, stamping audience, unwilling to let this rare and precious laughter out of their lives" (Olsen, 6).

Since pantomime and imitation serve her very well to reduce the problems of low self esteem and fear of intimacy, they can be called "healing mechanisms" rather than defenses. "The defenses are the means by which we keep ourselves from becoming conscious of the experiences we've repressed…defenses become more destructive than helpful because they keep us from understanding – and therefore from healing – our own psychological wounds" (Tyson, 83-84). And, in the story, use of imitation and pantomimes has helped Emily to heal her psychological wounds.

By the end of the story, both mother and daughter seem happier than the beginning, as both of them have identified and attempted to heal their psychological wounds with whatever they have, rather than worrying about whatever they do not have. The mother says, "My wisdom came too late. She has much of her and probably will come of it" (Olsen, 7). In this process of healing too, the mother seems always guiding to Emily. Thus, the story clearly portrays how a family can influence in not only problem formation but also problem reduction in a personality of its member. 

Works Cited

Olsen, Tillie. "I Stand Here Ironing." Tell Me a Riddle. 1961. 1 Dec 2012

Tyson, Lois. Using Critical Theory. 2^nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2011.