oklam
...stances beyond her control. 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. Through the use of a powerful language that enables the reader to visualize the pain, frustration and despair of being working class, Olsen's works never seem to lack the message that things need to be changed even when it appears that the protagonists have given up or simply accepted their situation. In her short story "I Stand Here Ironing", for example, a mother is thinking about all that her daughter has had to endure while growing up and is trying to figure out why a counselor at her daughter's school wants to meet with...