By the early twenty-first century, the notion of women in their seventies rediscovering a zest for life and rekindling possibilities of passion is no longer dependent on comedy. Both Alice Munro and Mary Gordon portray their women of a certain age with empathy and nuance as they face surprise visitors from the distant past. In Gordon’s novella “The Liar’s Wife” and Munro’s short story “Dolly,” a woman who has lived a full life experiences an important internal shift and a heightened appreciation of living when a visit from a former lover prompts a renewed sense of vitality in the former and a relaxing of rigidity in the latter. I end the chapter with these two stories because I enjoyed reading them and because they remind me that even after years of increasing routine and familiarity, one is capable of pleasure and that the opening of old memories can sometimes allow an unexpected release. Unlike the “Deathbed Bookends” stories of the previous chapter, these plots explore passion in the present.

“Dolly” by Alice Munro

Like “The Liar’s Wife,” Alice Munro’s 2012 short story, “Dolly,” tells a tale of a visit that stirs up old emotions. Set in Canada, “Dolly” is an interior monologue narrated by an elderly woman whose name we never learn. The narrator recollects a visit from a saleswoman who turns out to be her partner’s long-ago lover, a woman he memorialized decades earlier in a published poem whose raw power has always disturbed her. The narrator also recounts the details of the thoughts and experiences that bracket her life before and after the visit. Munro’s story explores the ways in which life-changing epiphanies are possible, even when one is old and mired in seemingly unchangeable habits and behaviors. Her quiet but powerful narrative demonstrates how a life is made up of the stories we tell ourselves and how small shifts in perspective may open new chapters and revelatory capacities to choose new narratives, even—and perhaps most importantly—within our existing stories, our current lives. Dolly’s visit changes the way the narrator “reads” her common-law marriage and revitalizes her and her partner’s experience of one another and their options.

Munro does not introduce the Dolly of the title until nearly halfway through the narrative. The story opens with the narrator’s account of an even more distant time in the past, prior to the upsetting visit, when she was seventy-one and her partner, Franklin, was eighty- three, and they were contemplating mutual suicide because they both assumed that their predictable lives were unlikely to contain anything of future importance. On a perfect autumn day, they went searching for just the right location for their deaths, wanting privacy yet also wanting fairly quick discovery. However, after locating the ideal spot, in the woods near a country road, they disagreed about whether or not to leave a note explaining their actions. This disagreement led Franklin to pronounce his wife too young to make the decision, declaring that they would revisit the discussion when she reached seventy-five. When she told him that she was actually bothered by his assumption that nothing more of any importance was going to happen in their lives, he pointed out that their argument about leaving a suicide note was an event, and one sufficient for him to decide the entire subject needed to be postponed.

In this interaction, Franklin evinced little passion—they usually avoided all arguments and assumed that whatever was right for him was right for her. We get a glimpse into the dullness into which their lives had settled, a dullness both undercut and oddly reaffirmed by their planned mutual suicide, itself rendered a task whose details became minor irritations, annoying enough to him to insist on sidestepping the conversation.

Recalling the argument about the propriety of, or need for, a suicide note, the narrator ruminates on other ways she and Franklin differ. He is a retired horse trainer and a poet, though he downplays his occupation as poet, seeming to be embarrassed by the apparent idleness of writing poetry in contrast to the obvious business of training horses. She describes him as a reticent man except for his best-known poem, a blatantly explicit account of a two- week sexual adventure with a woman named Dolly, a poem that the local folks, and he himself, still call “pretty raw.” She describes herself as a retired high school mathematics teacher who tried staying home with Franklin after retirement, grew bored, and began writing “tidy” yet entertaining biographies of little-known Canadian women novelists “who had been undeservedly forgotten or have never received proper attention.” Although she duly credits Franklin’s reputation as a poet for helping her get acceptance as a writer, she admits to having more sympathy for novelists than poets. She is generally satisfied with her solitary days at home and usually enjoys the control and quiet of writing on her own after years in classrooms.

About halfway through the story, we get the impression that age seventy-five has come and gone prior to her next rumination with no further talk of suicide. The narrator recalls an afternoon when she yearned for some company and so, uncharacteristically, invited a door-to- door cosmetic saleswoman into her home, a saleswoman who (unbeknownst to them both) turns out to be the Dolly (real name Gwendolyn) of her husband’s poem. The narrator compulsively relives every detail of that initial encounter with Gwen/Dolly as if it were happening in present time.

The scene is one of mutual discomfort and awkward conversation across class lines.

Gwen has brassy, thin hair, is ill at ease, requests an ashtray, and then apologizes for interrupting the narrator’s letter writing. However, when she learns that the narrator is writing the biography of a neglected woman writer, not a letter, Gwen gushes, “You must be one smart person. Wait till I get to tell them at home that I saw a book that was just getting written.” We learn that Gwen’s common-law husband has died, and the narrator surprises us, telling Gwen that she, too, is unmarried. We sense she is trying to find a way to connect with her less- sophisticated acquaintance.

Although she does not use cosmetics, the narrator orders “some lotion that would restore her youth,” and Gwen promises to drop it off next time she comes around. When Franklin comes home, she tells him all about Gwen and then dislikes herself for admitting, “ . . . it’s another world. I rather enjoyed it,” suggesting the depths of her boredom and her curiosity about someone different from herself, and potentially her pleasure in perceiving herself as an unmarried woman who strikes up unusual conversations. Rather than showing any curiosity, Franklin suggests she needs to get out more and should apply to be a substitute teacher.

On Gwen’s return visit to deliver the lotion several days later, the two women chat, and the narrator is again embarrassed by her acute discomfort with Gwen’s grammatical mistakes and her obvious awe at speaking to a writer. She feels, she says, “as if I had no right to be so superior,” but we also sense her enjoyment of the attention. She gives Gwen a copy of the novel by the author whose biography she is writing and is startled when Gwen says she has never read a book through but will read this one. The narrator feels flattered and then a bit embarrassed and cautious, as she once did when a student had a crush on her. Through the exposition to this point, Munro’s tone is conversational and her pace is slow, as if the narrator is still pondering the significance of the visit, what she learned about herself through the event.

Only later in the story, when we learn that Gwen is the Dolly of Franklin’s poem (a poem about which Gwen knows little), do we begin to understand the significance of the scene that has unfolded between Gwen and the narrator, and yet Munro invites us to see the import of the exchange even before the narrator is (or we are) aware that her heightened emotional response will soon be pushed to uncharacteristically dramatic heights.

In the period before Gwen is revealed as Dolly, we learn that, after their long conversation, Gwen’s car will not start and is blocking the driveway when Franklin arrives home after dark that evening. Without coming in to meet the owner of the car, he tries unsuccessfully to start it and calls the village garage only to learn that it is closed until morning. Reluctantly, and with a sense of good manners, the narrator invites Gwen to stay for supper and overnight. She worries about Franklin’s reaction to the stranger, fearing that polite conversation with Gwen will mean upsetting Franklin’s usual routine of quietly watching the news, and she speculates whether Franklin will remain in the room and eavesdrop or whether he will slip away upstairs. She suggests Gwen call home and secretly hopes someone will come and get her.

When Franklin finally enters the kitchen and sees Gwen, the narrator vividly recalls that “both she and Franklin . . . were struck at the same time.” Gwen blurts out, “Oh my Lord,” to which he responds, “No, it isn’t . . . It’s just me.” They recognize each other, are uncomfortable in the narrator’s presence, and repeat each other’s names in tones of mockery and dismay:

“Frank.”

“Dolly.”

The narrator shares her sense that, if she were not present, they would have immediately fallen into one another’s arms.

She remembers that Franklin’s voice “insisted on going back to normal,” while Dolly/Gwen emphasizes the enormous or even supernatural joke of their finding each other. In retrospect, the narrator realizes the oddity of her own participation in the general merriment of that evening, bringing out a bottle of wine, though Franklin no longer drinks. Dolly explains that she had been working as a nursemaid in Toronto when she met Frank on his last leave before he went overseas during World War II. They had “as crazy a time as you could imagine,” and then lost track of each other. She makes vague references to being too busy to answer his letters and then marrying a young man she met on shipboard after the war while accompanying two evacuated children back to Europe from Canada.

Until that evening, the narrator had not known anything about this part of Franklin’s life other than the erotic details of his poem. In it, he is enthralled by Dolly, enraptured by her lavish lovemaking during their adventurous two weeks together and fascinated by all her superstitions, such as her belief that she is protected from pregnancy by wearing “her dead sis’s hair in a locket” around her neck. The poem recounts that she gives him a magic tooth to protect him during the war. Years earlier, the narrator had teased some details out of Franklin and had somewhat hoped that Dolly might have been made up, but even then, she thought that unlikely given the particularity of her poetic representation and how foreign her qualities seem to the Franklin she knows.

In contrast to her earlier uneasy feelings of superiority to Gwen/Dolly, we can tell the narrator’s discomfort now stems from a sense of failed competition. Her assumptions have been thrown off course in ways both big and small. The narrator recounts in detail each “abnormal” behavior of the never-to-be-forgotten morning after their visitor stays the night.

She dresses and does her hair—which she would not normally do so early in the morning. Franklin uncharacteristically offers to make her breakfast. She notices, with discomfort and annoyance, that Gwen not only cleaned up the dishes she had been too tired to do the previous night but also washed a row of long-neglected dusty jars that formerly sat on a high shelf.

When Franklin goes outside to prepare Gwen’s car for towing, the narrator is convinced Dolly follows him “as if she didn’t want to lose sight of him for a moment.”

Recalling the full force of her anger and jealousy, the narrator admits she wanted to run after them and “pound them to pieces” as they drove off together. Usually complacent, she is overtaken by a sense of “grievous excitement” and rashly determines to leave Franklin. Flushed with feeling, she leaves him a terse note about going to check facts on her current novelist. She then packs a suitcase, drops her house key through the mail slot, and drives off in her car. She had written a longer note, but then takes it with her, not wanting Gwen to see it “when she came back with him as she surely would.”

In that letter, she writes, without dignity or grace, about his deception and self- deception, using words such as lies and cruel and puke. She had planned to rewrite it, but ends up mailing it without revision. The intensity of her letter and the rashness of her departure reveal how much she has tamped down her emotions during her years with Franklin. They seem to have taken each other for granted, settling mostly into his routines. Her jealousy appears to remind her of a time she and Franklin were passionate rather than simply careful with one another. Munro suggests through this rekindling of emotion, even if negative, that there was once passion between them, and a non-narrated and buried history when feelings were not so carefully managed.

Dolly’s visit shows the extent of the narrator’s docile adaptation to Franklin’s whims, such as not eating in restaurants or rarely purchasing anything for herself. In her one night away from Franklin, sleeping alone in a strange motel after dining in a restaurant and nearly purchasing a silk scarf, she recalls herself as a young student teacher spending the night with a married man in a cheap motel, when she was reckless and unconcerned about anything but her pleasure. The contrast between her youthful, passionate self and her present dull routine is sharp.

The narration of the aftermath of the Dolly visit has the urgency of present tense although it is a recollection. By 6:00 a.m. the next morning, she knows she made a “terrible mistake.” Driving home, she is slowed by an accident on the highway, and she realizes that she or Franklin might, too, have an accident and never see each other again. She is eager to get home to him. When she arrives home, she argues passionately with Franklin about Dolly, who has left. After reassuring her, he remarks, “We can’t afford rows.” She realizes she had temporarily forgotten “how old [they] were, forgotten everything. Thinking there was all the time in the world to suffer and complain.” She decides she does not want to fight, does not want to engage the jealousy or bitterness, and that she would have to be on the lookout for the letter she had mailed the previous day, since “you can think yourself in reasonable shape and then die, just like that.”

Munro implies that the narrator’s decision to stay, to choose a life with Franklin that is peaceful, kind, and without rancor is not the same as her previous, more passive acquiescence but suggests a different sort of conscious appreciation and desire. As a result of their unexpected visitor, they realize the value of days together, in contrast to the opening explanation of such days as unworthy of life itself. They realize they have to appreciate what little time they have left together.

I chose to include this story in this chapter about sexuality because of Munro’s portrayal of the awakening of the narrator’s anger and jealousy brought about by Dolly’s visit—proof of the existence of the sexuality celebrated in Franklin’s poem and of the narrator’s own repressed desire. Dolly’s appearance stirs in both of them a suppressed love, a passion long forgotten. The story reminds the reader that our relationships define us, that there is some balance between choice and accommodation, useful passion and hurtful rows, partnership and loss of self. The story is not upbeat, nor is it bleak. We sense that the narrator is more self- aware and will no longer compare herself to the Dolly of the poem who has always haunted her imagination. Franklin is no longer the inexperienced service man, and the narrator is no longer the young graduate student who had an affair with a married teacher. They are now in their eighties and nineties—still capable of strong feelings and also more capable of kindness, of quiet choices, and of care. Dolly’s visit was an anomaly for both of them, jarring them out of their comfortable indifference, and suicide is now untenable. Munro reveals the ways in which aging people have the capacity to redefine their attitudes, subtly but significantly recalibrating the emotional tenor of their lives in ways that fundamentally shift their vision of themselves, of time, and of life itself.

Conclusion

The stories in this chapter begin with the mistaken notion that erotic desire is meant to disappear along with youth and is either a matter of embarrassment or ridiculous humor in women of a certain age. From tales of childish crushes to near-death memories of past entanglements to regrets for missed experiences, desire, passion, and sex permeate literature and life. While women are consistently the objects of a male desire, which is treated as normal (“wild oats,” “boys will be boys,” etc.), female sexual desire is often portrayed in literature as dangerous and even monstrous. From Eve’s first bite of the apple, to the insatiable appetite of the Lady of Bath, to Shakespeare’s erotic Cleopatra, to the lusty or languid women of the eighteenth-century seduction plot, women’s erotic passions may result only in marriage or death, and the sexier the passion, the more likely death is the answer!

Even in contemporary fiction, erotic love and lust are usually assumed to be dead in women over sixty. Long after medical research has revealed the falseness of such notions, noting that women do experience orgasms well into old age, outlasting the common erectile dysfunction often experienced by men and treated with drugs such as Viagra, outmoded ideas about the death of women’s erotic passion persist. We see this both in cultural narratives and in the internalized notions of women themselves.

This chapter opened with two novels set in boarding homes for the able-bodied, well- off, elderly residents who have outlived their partners and cannot live on their own. In the first novel, we learned that the residents all retained some desire or passion that was unfilled.

Underlying all the various sexual proclivities was a desire to continue to matter as a person, to be viewed in a positive light, to exercise some individual control. Similarly, in the second novel, Mrs. Palfrey continues to care about appearances as well as to long for tenderness. Reading these two novels heightened my sense of the importance of maintaining friendships with younger people throughout our lives and of learning to live with one’s self before one becomes elderly. None of the characters in either novel has a spiritual life or a deep set of beliefs. They are not comforted by art or music or literature. They do not have an internal store of imagination, fascinations, or beliefs to comfort or bolster themselves.

In comparison, the second set of stories is entertaining and upbeat. Both stories portray the discomfort adult children feel when confronted by their mothers’ sensual behavior. Miss Hazel and Julie are far less imprisoned in stereotypes of maternal behavior than are their children. Whether or not Miss Hazel goes to bed with the old blind man, she is happy to dance in public and to enjoy her body. Although she cares about her children and will cook for them the next day, she will not repress her enjoyment at the community meeting. And, after years of being a proper divorced grandmother who is available to babysit on a moment’s notice, Julie allows herself to experience her own dormant passion and, in the process, frees her daughters to follow their own hearts.

In the final set of stories, two long-married women who have settled into predictable patterns over decades are shaken out of their habits and reconnect with their submerged desire in time to enjoy their final years. The protagonist of “The Liar’s Wife” is able to appreciate how much she has matured and how repressed she had become, and the unnamed first-person narrator of “Dolly” is able to lose her sense of competition with the Dolly of Franklin’s early erotic poem. We leave these stories with a sense that each woman may continue to discover some of the unexplored parts of herself that she gave up in her youth.

Running through all six stories are portrayals of the persistence of desire and passion beyond any arbitrary age limit. We all want to love and be loved, to experience ourselves in new ways, to continue to matter as individuals. We need to nurture interests and friendships throughout our lives if we do not want to be bored and lonely in our old, old age. Our age does not prevent self-discovery or preclude happiness.

“Auntie Mei felt doubtful, but her questioning silence did not stop him from admiring his own invention. Nothing, he said, is too difficult for a thinking man. When he put away his tools he lingered on, and she could see that there was no reason for him to hurry home. He had grown up in Vietnam, he told Auntie Mei, and had come to America thirty-seven years ago. He was widowed, with three grown children, and none of them had given him a grandchild, or the hope of one. His two sisters, both living in New York and both younger, had beaten him at becoming grandparents.”

I think that this passage simultaneously draws a parallel and a contrast between Auntie Mei and Paul–they are both isolated immigrants to America, both widowed. Our narrator articulates another similarity, though not one specific to Paul and Auntie Mei: “The same old story: they all had to come from somewhere, and they all accumulated people along the way.” Paul though, shows a vulnerability and desire that Auntie Mei stuffs. Paul then becomes a catalyst for an exploration of self Auntie Mei has long avoided. 

Paul has a desire to caretake, to share intimacy with children, that we see in this passage. Though it is not stated directly, there seems to be a grief in his lack of grandchildren. The language of being “beaten” by his younger sisters at the task of becoming a grandparent indicates a desire to have what they have. Auntie Mei plays into Paul’s desire, upon his leaving narrating for baby, “‘Say bye-bye to Grandpa Paul.’” In this way Auntie Mei gives Paul something he desires, something that she herself avoids. Auntie Mei would never give herself the honorary grandparent title for an infant she was looking after–“Auntie Mei…called every mother Baby’s Ma, and every infant Baby. It was simple that way, one set of clients easily replaced by the next.” Though it is not explicitly one of Auntie Mei’s rules, one can imagine that if Auntie Mei holds a rule for herself not to cultivate a personal relationship with any one infant, then to refer to Paul as Grandpa, thus calling in a personal relationship, even if only a joke, would constitute a broken rule for her. After breaking this rule, she starts to break more. She moves the baby’s crib into her room, and takes on the responsibility of grocery shopping, which she notably enlists Paul to help with. Once again, Paul becomes a vessel for Auntie Mei’s breaking of her own rules. 

The grocery shopping becomes another space in which Paul projects his desire onto the baby, asking Auntie Mei, “‘Do you suppose people will think we’re the grandparents of this baby?”’ This is not just a question, but a wish–Paul does not just want to be a grandfather, he wants to be seen as a grandfather. We see this again when Paul asks Auntie Mei to bring the baby to the park with them, articulating why he wants to be seen with them in front of his long-time enemy: “‘I want him to think I’ve done better than him.’” Paul’s claimed “knowing” of this person provokes a kind of vulnerability in Auntie Mei’s narration. Though clouded with a proposed indifference, what I think we actually see is an exploration of a fear of abandonment, a fear of knowing someone enough to care: “Being known, then, must not be far from being imprisoned by someone else’s thought. In that sense, her grandmother and her mother had been fortunate: no one could claim to have known them, not even Auntie Mei. When she was younger, she had seen no point in understanding them, as she had been told they were beyond apprehension. After their deaths, they had become abstract. Not knowing them, Auntie Mei, too, had the good fortune of not wanting to know anyone who came after: her husband; her coworkers at various Chinese restaurants during her yearlong migration from New York to San Francisco; the babies and the mothers she took care of, who had become only recorded names in her notebook.” The ending of this story follows this fear of knowing enough to care, but it is not just the fear of knowing other people: “She was getting older, more forgetful, yet she was also closer to comprehending the danger of being herself. She had, unlike her mother and her grandmother, talked herself into being a woman with an ordinary fate. When she moved on to the next place, she would leave no mystery or damage behind; no one in this world would be disturbed by having known her.” Auntie Mei externalizes her fear of knowing or being herself onto other people, as if she is preventing other people harm by avoiding herself, but it is clear that she is the one most scared of herself. 

One of the most surprising things about this reading was how extremely dark the character Fran has to become older and living longer lives. Throughout the first pages we focus on her, she has multiple times questioned about the purpose and the worth of having a long life. One passage was Fran “exercises herself by trying to recall the passionate and ridiculous emotions of her youth”(15). This particular passage has Fran define these positive emotions as “ridiculous” especially correlating when she was younger, a time which I can assume her was not as pessimistic as she is currently. Not assuming that she resents or having any regret with experiencing these feelings before but it’s her correlation between being young and experiencing some form of feeling these types of emotions. This particular passage really stuck out for me since it is something we don’t expect for people in her age group. This is contradictory to the stereotypical image of people who are older since we expect them to be more reflective and to look back with a sense of nostalgia, and even to want the experience of what it was like being young again. Fran is quite frankly very different from her reflection with being young, especially when thinking about her these types of emotions and mindset when she was younger. She wants to feel like this again but not so much as to relive these emotions but to fake her way to feel. Usually, when we are given a moment of reflection or nostalgia, it has an air of positivity and would bring us some form of joy when we re-think about it. But for Fran, these particular feelings were something she wants to practice feeling again rather being inherently something she can enjoy by just remembering a fond memory. The reason for this “exercise” is because Fran is taking care of her ex-husband Claude and to feel these passionate feelings she had before, she wants to go back to feel this again to get out of this “middle-age” crisis. 

Though Fran is of older age, this crisis refers to her feeling like she is stuck and staying within a routine is making her question what she is doing.. We know that Fran is taking care of her ex-husband, Claude, by cooking and feeding him. I find it odd though that, out of everyone, Fran is the chosen and trusted one to take care of him since her interactions with anything seem cold. In later of the readings Fran clarifies they were married for only four years and the marriage was a loveless and with no emotional connections. The fact Fran is taking care of someone from a hostile, short-lived marriage is very unpredictable and even to say unlike her. Her character seems so cold and distant from feeling certain passions that it is surprising she would be the sole caregiver of her ex-husband. This relationship does have me rethink whether she was stuck in a loveless marriage or that it was part of getting older. I do think she is just afraid of growing old by herself. Though she doesn’t say a lot about herself being with someone, she just reiterates doing something different in her life and to not be stuck in a routine but does little to change that. Just like how she denies that she is imprisoned taking care of Claude but would hate herself about always thinking about food just like Claude. She is not being truthful about her feelings being with another person and leads her to still be stuck in this sort of self-hating because she picked up something she is sharing with her ex-husband. I guess this can be connected to a stereotype with older women is to care and do not want. For the second part, it is about how older women should be fulfilled after accomplishing the “criteria” of a happy life: husband, friends, children, and grandchildren. Fran doesn’t really represent these since she is not fulfilled and actually wants to change things up in her life. I think this is something normal for anyone who wants to do different things and not be stuck in a routine. For Fran, she doesn’t want to just care for her husband and only share one thing with him.

By Lila Goehring

“I stop the ironing. What in me demanded that goodness in her? And what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?” (Olsen 2)

To me, this passage highlights so much about the complex relationship the narrator has to her daughter, Emily. Particularly, I see this complexity as a contrast between distance and closeness, and about the confusion of roles of power.

 It is clear that the narrator did not trust her instincts as a mother, saying “[Emily] was a child of anxious, not proud, love” (Olsen 7). Yes, she loved her, but her lack of control in her mothering led to an unmendable distance between them: rather than listening to her instincts, for example, she fed Emily by the clock, teaching her that her mother would not come to her rescue in moments of pain; she was forced to soothe herself and mature early on. As the narrator says, “My wisdom came too late,” meaning that she now understands that her actions could have been harmful, and her wisdom is no good to Emily, who was damaged. (Olsen, 7)

In my highlighted passage, the narrator reflects on Emily’s “goodness” but is not too sure where it came from: though she appreciates it, she is conscious that as a young mother, she did not know how to ask (or “demand”) such a thing. It almost seems that she viewed Emily’s goodness as a result of her flawed mothering. In fact, Emily’s actions suggest that she was taking care of her mother from a young age; she sensed that her mother was not able to mother her in a mature, conscious way. One example is the behavior (or, lack of) that this passage refers to: the fact that Emily did not throw tantrums suggests that she was protecting her mother, who she knew would not be able to discipline her properly. One could view Emily’s constant asking to stay home as acting out, yet her motives seemed to be unselfish and protective. Using the excuse “Momma, you look sick” to stay home suggests that Emily is needed to take care of her mother. Additionally, this desire to stay home seems to come from Emily’s need to spend time with her mother, who she has been separated from many times and is desperate to be close to. (Olsen 2)

The highlighted passage also reveals how distant and disconnected Emily’s mother feels from her, something repeatedly seen throughout the story. In the beginning, she is puzzled by the person who comes to her seeking information about Emily, explaining that her nineteen years alive “is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me” (Olsen 1). This statement implies that the older Emily gets, the less her mother will know and understand her, rather than the opposite (in which the time would be spent getting to know her). There are many reasons for this, and it does not suggest that she is a “bad mother,” though she certainly feels like one: she had other children and was fighting to keep them above water. Incidentally, she grew apart from Emily and was unable to mother her in the way that she needed. “We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth,” her mother says. (Olsen 7)

Lastly, the idea of “anxious love” explains a lot about Emily’s life. As her mother’s first child, she had the unique experience of her mother learning to be a mother in raising her; this could explain why “Her younger sister was all that she was not,” among other similar details. (Olsen 7). Emily was forced to grow up quickly and was subject to bouts of separation and painful learning moments, and it is clear that her mother — in her latent wisdom — has a hard time forgiving herself for this.

The dark flood rises starts off with a depressing picture. It describes her and her sick friends, while expressing determination they feel to be the ones in control. It talks about the torment Fran feels about things she still hasn’t accomplished as she grows old.

The story goes slowly and I can’t really think of anything to say about it.

Tillie Olsen’s ” I Stand Here Ironing, was published in 1961. This story is about a mother and who is telling a doctor about her daughter who struggles with an eating disorder. There are several instances where it is revealed that the daughter struggles with an eating disorder and is in a facility of some sort. Throughout the story there is a slow revelations about the daughters physical and emotional conditions throughout her life. Considering that this story was published in 1961, it appears that there is some taboo and lack of knowledge around eating disorders and body image/self esteem. The mother tries her best to understand her daughter and her daughter’s conditions are but her knowledge was limited and the mother’s tone appears to be very defeated. The skewed narrative does not allow the reader to make a decision about Emily as a person because we only here what her mother has felt and experienced. This is a problem especially when it comes to mental illnesses and food disorders.

The first time were learn about Emily’s condition is with an illusion to illnesses when the mother is mentioning how when she first had chicken pox as a child. It was as if chicken pox ruined Emily for good. The problem about having only the mother as the narrator clouds the point of view of Emily. As an audience we don’t know how she is feelings or what she is thinking. We don’t know her firsthand experience and so I think that this narrative is unfair for us as readers. The lack of understanding we have is apparent. The idea of Emily having an “illness” that early in her life is what creates the ongoing narrative for the mother that there is something “wrong” with Emily.

The next indication that we get of Emily being troubled is from Emily’s mother retelling of how she was an an older child. Emily’s mother believes there were indications in Emily’s infancy as well as childhood. The theme of “being sick” is something that is that the mother points out as an indication of Emily’s current behavior. Emily’s mother gives into the idea that Emily has always been “sick” as long as her mother has remembered. Classifying Emily as sick may be more damaging than we may realize as readers.

Overall, the narration skews our perception as readers. The mother’s narration leads up to believe that Emily is possibly more damaged than not.

by Elizabeth Rangel

Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” portrays the struggles of young motherhood and the hardships that rise in the midst of it all. The narrator in the story reflects back on the upbringing of her first child, all the while reflecting on her own behavior as a young naive parent. There is a guilt in the narration, and through the mother’s description of her daughter we can see how the narrators own inadequacies as a young mother appear in Emily.

The mother’s name is never mentioned in the short story, I think Olsen purposefully left out her name in to portray the mother’s own feeling of insignificance. As a matter of fact, the story start and end with the statement, “I stand here ironing.” I think this statement is a metaphor of the mother’s attempt at “de-wrinkling” her own life as well as her children’s only to be met with resistance, more labor, and self-doubt everyday. Mothership has taken a toll on the narrator.

The narrator describes the difficult decisions she’s had to make as a single mother, from sending her child away to live with her father as she worked a job to support herself, to sending her child away again to a convalescent home at the recommendation of a nurse in clinic. There is clear remorse in her narration of child’s upbringing but at the same time there is a certain helplessness and apathy in her tone, that I assume comes from not being able take control of her own life. Though of course it was the narrator’s intent to give her daughter the best life she possibly could, her child clearly suffered abuse as a result of being sent away, and thought the narrator is aware of this, to an extent she seems emotionally disconnected from it all. It appears as if she is in a constant dissociative state, perhaps trying to deflect her feelings of remorse.

The narrator comes to find out that her daughter, though having undergone a series of trials, is a beautiful and interesting person. However, it seems like concept that is difficult for our narrator to grasp, perhaps she sees her own short comings in her daughters newfound “arrival” or she feels as if she’s had nothing to do with her daughter’s emotional wellbeing.

The story ends with the narrator anticipating a similar life for her daughter as she’s lived.

Olive jitterakadge starts with a description that immediately pulls the reader in:  “For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving
every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summertime roads, when the wild raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy. Retired now, he still wakes earlier and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right, then the pines, tall and slender, and almost always he rode with the window partly open because he loved the smell of the pines and the heavy salt air, and in the winter he loved the smell of the cold.”

His wife, olive, is introduced, obediently talking to him in the kitchen.

It later shows the impression she made on her former student: [m]rs. Kitteridge. Holy shit. She looked exactly the same as she had in the classroom in seventh grade, that forthright, high-cheekboned expression; her hair was still dark. He had liked her; not everyone had. He would have waved her away now, or started the car, but the memory of respect held him back.”

Olive is shown throughout all the details to be brave and independent.

“A different road” has an unsettling start;”[a]n awful thing happened to the Kitteridges on a chilly night in June. At the time,
Henry was sixty-eight, Olive sixty-nine, and while they were not an especially youthful couple, there was nothing about them that gave the appearance of being old, or ill. Still, after a year had gone by, people in this small New England coastal town of Crosby agreed: Both Kitteridges were changed by the event. Henry, if you met him at the post office now, only lifted his mail as a hello. When you looked into his eyes, it was like seeing him through a screened-in porch. Sad, because he had always been an open-faced and cheerful man, even when his only son had—out of the blue—moved to California with his new wife, something people in town understood had been a great disappointment for the Kitteridges. And while Olive Kitteridge had never in anyone’s memory felt inclined to be affable, or even polite, she seemed less so now as this particular June rolled around. Not a chilly June this year, but one that showed up with the suddenness of summer, days of dappled sunlight falling through the birch trees, making the people of Crosby uncharacteristically chatty at times.”

I’m originally from new York, and liked reading about how nervous olive was to go there for the first time at age 72. It ends by reflecting on how much young people don’t know about old women.

Tymeirah Hayes

Being Open Minded 

In the story “Tell Me A Riddle”I was grabbed immediately by the very beginning passage. Specifically, the second sentence in the first passage for me was not only relatable but refreshing . The text states “ I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. I’m sure you can help me understand her. She’s a youngster who needs help and whom I’m deeply interested in helping” (Olsen 1913-2007). The reason why I found myself drawn to this quote was because I appreciated the tone and intent of the character that was asking for help in helping someone else. In life sometimes it seems people find it hard to reach out for help when trying to help someone else, and I thought it was a good thing to see a character taking a leap of faith, and asking for help in better understanding someone that they care about. Also, I appreciated the honesty in defeat in such a small statement. The statement was very loaded although very short. In this quote it is very clear that someone is eager to utilize all their options in trying to fix an obstacle in they face. That obstacle being understanding this teenager who they care for and feel that they are not able to understand without the help of the person they’re asking for help from, being that teenager’s mother. 

The mother responds saying “…Even if I came what good would it do? You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for 19 years there is all that life that has happened outside of me beyond me.”,Which to me is a very respectful response. I thought it was interesting for the girl’s mother to keep in mind the fact that in all of her 19 years she has lived a life of her own, and that just being her mother doesn’t  mean that she can fully understand her. In my opinion this is very relative to life outside of the story because many times parents assume that because their parents they automatically have an understanding of their children, which is not always the case, so it was nice to see a parent admit and acknowledge that being a parent isn’t always enough and understanding your child. Lastly, I respected the Mother character for immediately acknowledging the life that her child has lived outside of her and keeping in mind that-that is just as important in understanding her child as simply being her parent. 

The story for this week’s course is Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me A Riddle, a title suited to this short story about a mother, and the view of her firstborn. While seemingly direct, it had moments that were more abstract in language and harder to follow but felt necessary to convey the expressions of love and affection she had for her daughter. 

The narrator spends this story talking about her eldest, Emily, and reminisces on the experiences she had as a young mother with a newborn child, newly single from her partner, Emily’s father, having left the picture while Emily was still an infant. She discusses her life with Emily, the way she had to sacrifice time spent with her for the sake of work, the trials of war, and the general trials that came with any new mother handling the role of motherhood, especially as the only involved parent in said child’s life. She discusses the different ways in which she fretted and worried over Emily, in ways that felt as if she could hardly get a grip on the ways that she loved her, despite the conflicting situations of Emily’s childhood. Her narrative feels overwhelmed in all the affection she feels towards Emily, even if she does not know how to express it properly. An example of this is the way she discusses that she may not smile enough at her, and how it does not take away from the love she feels. 

It seems to consume every bit of the narrator’s being, so to speak, in this conflicted battle of the love she feels versus the parts of daughter that she can’t seem to understand, the way that there were times that she could not recognize who her daughter was capable of being, in comparison to how she knew Emily. It feels like a distinct look into the trials of motherhood, and all that comes with it, fulfilling or otherwise, and was a piece I enjoyed greatly. It was especially interesting to me that it was focused specifically on the firstborn, as it showed me that there would be different experiences and emotions faced with a firstborn as a new mother versus the children after. This is not to say that she loved them less, just that the love seemed to manifest differently according to each child. 

As someone who has no concept of what that attachment to your child feels like, and has no intention to partake in that aspect of life, the narrative was engaging and still managed to have the reader have a sense of empathy for the narrator, and all the emotions that are involved when taking the role of mother.