How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)
Quote #1
I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron. (1)
The story opens as if the narrator is interrupted while at a typical domestic task. This simple first sentence gives us some clues about our narrator. What kind of a person would say "I stand here ironing?" We think this person is probably a woman, a woman who does not have the money to pay for someone else to do the laundry, a woman who, if she is ironing constantly, probably has a large family to care for. As we read on, we find that our guesses would be right on target.
Quote #2
You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? [...] There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me. (3)
It could seem that the mother doesn't care enough about her daughter to really know her. But really, we think she has a rather defeated tone. As the story progresses, we find that as a poor, single mother, the narrator simply did not have much time to spend with her daughter, however much she wanted to.
Quote #3
You do not guess how new and uneasy her tenancy in her now-loveliness. (5)
The narrator points out that Emily, who has only recently blossomed, struggled with her appearance in the past.
Quote #4
I nursed all the children, but with her, with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood. (6)
The narrator recalls how she nursed Emily regularly, but this is also a time when Emily's father was still living with them.
Quote #5
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 [...] (7)
Good mothering is not an instinctual thing that all women share, as the negligent "woman downstairs" shows.
Quote #6
What was in my face when I looked at her? I loved her. There were all the acts of love. (17)
The narrator's neighbor chastises her for not looking at her daughter with affection, but also for not looking like an affectionate mother. Despite appearances, the narrator points to her own struggles to support her daughter as "acts of love."
Quote #7
[I]t was the face of joy, and not of care or tightness or worry I turned to them – too late for Emily. (18)
Motherhood comes easier for the narrator when she finds another man and begins another family under better material conditions.
Quote #8
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 replica of Shirley Temple. (35)
Things haven't changed much; girls back in the day still wanted to look like the latest teen/tween idol.
Quote #9
She had to help be a mother, and housekeeper, and shopper. (44)
Emily has to mature quickly in order to help her mother; at a young age, she is already taking on the roles of a grown woman.
Quote #10
"Aren't you ever going to finish the ironing, Mother? Whistler painted his mother in a rocker. I'd have to paint mine standing over an ironing board." (51)
This refers to the 19th-century American artist James Whistler's famous painting of his mother sitting in a rocker. As a daughter, Emily has a special knowledge of what mothering is really like: constant labor.