The theme of “I Stand Here Ironing” is essentially Emily’s mothers’ responsibility in her upbringing vs. Society’s. The question is whose fault is it the Emily had such a troubled life that followed her throughout her adulthood. The mother tells her anguished tale to someone who the reader supposes is Emily's social worker or guidance counselor. The mother is caught between feeling responsible for her daughter's unhappy childhood and recognizing her powerlessness and lack of alternatives to change that. Emily has experienced the way society treats certain aspects of physical aspects in young girls. The story is written in the first person main character point of view, the mother, making it bias. The mother seems to not accept or can’t accept that she has done a poor job with raising Emily.
The story starts with the mother talking to the counselor as to the problems that faced Emily as a child to give reason to the fact that as an adult she is depressed and unhappy. Throughout the story the mother comforts herself by reasoning the decisions she made such as sending Emily away multiple times and not giving her the love that the rest of the children encountered. Emily jumps from place to place getting differe
The conflict in the story is indeed that the mother had and internal conflict with the way things was done with Emily. The mother constantly referred to the bad decisions that she had made for Emily throughout her childhood. She had the struggle of deciding to stay home with her child or to work during this depression. These decisions caused the mother to constantly nag at her internal self. At the end of the story the mother accepts the decisions that have been made and just wants her daughter to feel beauty on the inside regardless what she sees on the outside.
nt influences of care. From daycare to babysitters to the hospital all of which play influence in her personality now.
Emily is a complex character that showing intellect, emotion, physical, and will. Emily was never a smart child. She always seemed to be the “slow learner who always had to play catch up and missed entirely too much school.” “She was thin, dark and foreign-looking” and this bothered her so much that she cried out as to why she could not have been born different. However, the will to continue is present for her. She is a kinetic character because at birth she was beautiful and happ
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