I Stand Here Displacing Published in the Partisan Review during the Great Depression, Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” is a short story about the author, who narrates a part of her life involving those who have emotionally impacted her. The person to impact her the most is her first husband, as she is left damaged when he leaves her. Through the denial and displacement of her negative feelings, we see the narrator’s relationship to her troubled husband and others. After a psychoanalytical reading, her true pain is revealed. To begin, when talking about how she couldn’t help her daughter, Emily, the narrator first shows denial when she says, “Even if I came, what good would it do?... There is all that life that has happened outside of
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She sees Emily often, as she is her kid, so when Emily looks alike to the person who triggered her, she has an everyday reminder of her troubled past. For example, this is how she describes her daughter, “...walking quick and nervous like her father, looking like her father, thin and dressed in a shoddy red that yellowed her skin,” (paragraph 11). This great description given, just goes to show how vividly she remembers, and how she is avoiding moving on from those scars. This avoidance can explain her displacement on nursery schools, to which she describes as “...parking places for children,” (paragraph 12). She feels she “...knew the teacher was evil,” (paragraph 14). It could be she only thinks they’re evil because of her past relation with her husband. He impacted how easy it is for her to think less of any person, including a future husband. So, by the denial of her displacement, rather the avoidance of recognizing it, we the audience are able to see the narrator’s pain when observing with a psychoanalytic lens. This gives us perspective to her pain, and we can understand why she is quick to show displacement. Even with her troubled husband, she’s been emotionally scarred so it gives us further
She sees Emily often, as she is her kid, so when Emily looks alike to the person who triggered her, she has an everyday reminder of her troubled past. For example, this is how she describes her daughter, “...walking quick and nervous like her father, looking like her father, thin and dressed in a shoddy red that yellowed her skin,” (paragraph 11). This great description given, just goes to show how vividly she remembers, and how she is avoiding moving on from those scars. This avoidance can explain her displacement on nursery schools, to which she describes as “...parking places for children,” (paragraph 12). She feels she “...knew the teacher was evil,” (paragraph 14). It could be she only thinks they’re evil because of her past relation with her husband. He impacted how easy it is for her to think less of any person, including a future husband. So, by the denial of her displacement, rather the avoidance of recognizing it, we the audience are able to see the narrator’s pain when observing with a psychoanalytic lens. This gives us perspective to her pain, and we can understand why she is quick to show displacement. Even with her troubled husband, she’s been emotionally scarred so it gives us further