Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in On Her Knees, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Class, Money, and Power
Integrity and Reputation
Pride and Dignity
Summary
Analysis
Victor is sixteen when his father leaves. His mother Carol Lang cleans houses to pay for Victor’s college tuition and pay off his father’s debts. Carol wants Victor to focus on his studies and won’t let him get a part-time job. She tells Victor that there’s more honor in cleaning a house than in having your house cleaned, but he’s not convinced. Sometimes he helps her clean even though he hates it. Sometimes he stays home rather than help, and feels guilty.
Carol’s profession indicates that she and Victor are working-class, and depend on the single income of Carol’s cleaning job to pay the bills. Victor’s desire to get a part-time job to help with their expenses is an indicator both of his protectiveness over his mother, especially after their abandonment by his father, and his distaste towards Carol’s job. Cleaning up after others is not something Victor finds honor or dignity in. While Carol wants Victor to focus on his schoolwork to presumably allow him to enter a higher-paying career and a higher class himself, she is not ashamed of her working-class position or her job as a cleaner. Rather, she takes pride in her work. It is noteworthy that Victor and Carol have opposing opinions on what honor means and what is honorable from the outset of the story.
Themes
After Victor’s father left, Carol became a model of working-class pride. Her honesty, order, hygiene, and high expectations earn her an excellent reputation as a cleaner among the families of a wealthy riverside suburb. She is proud of her reputation, but Victor resents how her employers patronize her and take her for granted by being “the worst payers and the biggest slobs.” Over the years, despite everything, Carol maintains “her dignity and her hourly rate.”
Carol’s reputation is both vital to her work and important to her personally. Her reputation reflects her integrity, her work ethic, her dependability, and her success as a cleaner. Now, it becomes clear that Victor’s dislike for his mother’s profession stems not only from the work itself but also from how she is treated by her wealthy clients—she performs a service that they value and yet both underappreciate and underpay. Yet Carol maintains a firm and unyielding sense of self-worth by refusing to have her hourly rate negotiated down and also by refusing to allow external circumstance to affect her inherent dignity.
Themes
Carol is only ever fired from a job once, after she is accused of stealing a missing pair of earrings. She is given a week’s notice. Victor tries to convince her not to return for the final week, and he and Carol have their first argument since Victor’s father left. He thinks it’s unfair of the client to ask her to return after accusing her of theft after so many years of spotless service.
Carol’s clients have the power to fire her on a whim—they don’t need a good reason to do so, let alone hard evidence of theft. In addition, the client’s request that Carol return for one final week of work even after firing her based on no evidence betrays both the client’s arrogance and her disregard for Carol’s feelings and long-time service. Victor perceives the request as an insult to Carol’s dignity, and Carol’s compliance with the request as a passive acceptance of an indignity that should instead be fought against. The fact that this is Victor and Carol’s first real argument since the departure of Victor’s father implies that they either often agree or usually work through disagreements more easily. The magnitude of this fight indicates the importance of the subject of pride for both of them.
Themes
They’re still arguing the morning of Carol’s last trip to the client’s apartment. Carol lectures Victor about personal pride, which makes him feel like a child. He tells her he’s not going to help, and she replies that she never asked him to. At the last minute, as Carol loads the car with cleaning supplies, Victor decides to go and help her. He thinks that she must have known before he did that he would come along.
Rather than see going back to the apartment as a simple indignity, Carol sees the job as an opportunity to actually display her pride by going back and finishing her job to the best of her ability. Victor remains unconvinced—he is still focused on the demeaning nature of the request, as opposed to the pride Carol sees in doing honest work. Even so, his own pride—and his desire to help and protect his mother—compels him to go with her to the cleaning job, despite his hatred of cleaning and his opposition towards the job as a whole. This passage, as well, introduces the idea that Carol knows Victor better than he knows himself, and implies that she probably knows best about the cleaning job as well.
Themes
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Carol drives carefully. She tells Victor that he’s “good” to come with her, and he responds that she needs the help. She corrects him: he is company, not help. Victor thinks again about how Carol is worth more than what she’s paid and how her integrity means she would never steal anything.
It is important to Carol not to take charity from others. She didn’t ask Victor to come along in the first place, and refuses to call him “help,” even though he’s there specifically to help her clean. With this clarification, she makes it clear that, while she appreciates Victor being there, she doesn’t need him to help her or protect her from anything. Though Victor has a different understanding than Carol of what the client’s actions mean for Carol’s pride—that the accusation and request to return have somehow injured it—he still firmly believes in her inherent personal goodness and worth.
Themes
Victor tells Carol it’s “demeaning” to go back to clean the apartment. Carol asks if Victor means it’s demeaning to him, then laughs at his pride. Victor wonders what type of woman would fire Carol for stealing and then ask her to come back for a final week. Carol says that it’s the client’s loss since she won’t find anyone better than her. Victor agrees that there’s no one as good as Carol.
Though Victor finds the situation demeaning, he doesn’t answer his mother’s question of who exactly is demeaned by it. It is noteworthy that Carol does not seem humiliated by it, leading readers to question why it is that Victor is so insistent and upset. For Victor, the way the client has acted is incomprehensible. He genuinely can’t understand what sort of person would do what she did. The lives and motivations of the upper class are strange and alien to him. During their argument, Carol and Victor find common ground repeatedly in their shared belief in Carol’s inherent worth as a cleaner and as a person.
Themes
Victor brings up the fact that the client hasn’t even gone to the police about the earrings. Carol thinks the client must know that she didn’t steal anything. Victor says the entire situation is an attempt to get some advantage over Carol. He thinks the client might give Carol the job back to make her grateful and then try to underpay her for her work. Carol argues with this—the client has probably already found the earrings by now. She adds that the client wouldn’t have called to tell Carol about finding the earrings because “these people” never apologize. Silence is their idea of apology.
Carol’s generalizations about “these people,” as she calls the wealthy upper class, reveals two things First, that she also sees the wealthy as not just wealthier but morally different than her and Victor. Second, it makes clear that she has far more experience and knowledge in dealing with them than Victor does. Victor finds them indecipherable and comes up with unfounded conspiracies about the client’s motivations, while Carol calmly and assuredly explains what the wealthy are like. Both Victor’s and Carol’s theories about the client seem plausible, given the way the wealthy have been characterized in the story thus far, but Victor’s portrays the client as malicious while Carol’s understands that the client is simply careless and arrogant.
Themes
Still, Carol notes that she has plenty of clients on a waiting list and she’ll always have business. She tells Victor that they’ll “show” the client by cleaning her apartment flawlessly. Victor is not satisfied with the idea.
Up to this point, Victor has advised his mother towards petty retribution—to not show up for the last week and leave the client without a cleaner until she can find a replacement for Carol. Victor wants to respond to the pain caused by the client by inflicting pain back. Carol, however, has a different strategy. Rather than getting upset and doing something that might damage her reputation among her other clients, Carol decides to finish her job perfectly, both to remind her client of what she’s losing and as a statement of her uninjured personal and professional pride.
Themes
The client’s street smells like old money to Victor. He urges Carol to park in the client’s spot, but she refuses to “give her the satisfaction.” Carol has brought her own cleaning supplies today, rather than using the client’s as usual. Victor correctly guesses that this is because of “the principle” of the thing. He feels “sick for her” and thinks she looks old as they walk into the apartment.
Just as it’s important to Carol’s pride to not require Victor to come help her, it’s also important to her also to take nothing from the client. She refuses to use the client’s parking spot, or to even use any of the client’s cleaning supplies. Even as she plans to do a perfect job for the client, she is consistently asserting her own independence and worth. While Victor remains agitated and sick about the situation, Carol seems unaffected and almost cheerful, determined to make the best of the situation. Victor feels “sick” for his mother because he believes her response is ineffectual—that she is asserting something that has already been taken from her by the client’s false accusation. He thinks the only honorable way forward is to take some direct and aggressive counter action.
Themes
The apartment smells like cats. Carol opens an envelope left for her and seems upset by it, but won’t tell Victor what it says. There is money in the envelope. Victor looks in the refrigerator, curious to learn what he can about the client who would brusquely fire Carol after years of service. Carol tells him not to snoop.
Here, Carol and Victor differ again in their methods. Carol wants to treat the apartment as respectfully as she always does, but Victor feels that the client has lost her right to his respect for her privacy. He wants to understand the client, and there is the implication that he hopes to find something in the house that will explain her actions or possibly incriminate her. That the client’s letter upsets Carol shows that Carol is affected by the client’s treatment of her, such that her refusal to act on that upset is highlighted even further.
Themes
As his first task in helping his mother clean the house, Victor cleans the litter box. Rather than disinfecting it as he usually would, he just empties the litter box and fills it back up with litter. The smell is awful. Meanwhile, he overhears Carol singing to herself as she cleans the bathtub. As Victor dusts the counters and shelves, he thinks about how someone who had to clean their own house would never own so many trinkets and figurines which have to be individually and carefully dusted.
Victor’s halfhearted cleaning efforts are another aspect of his campaign of petty revenge against the client. As he cleans, Victor contemplates the wealthy class that employs others to clean their houses. His thoughts about how a person who had to clean their own home would never own so many trinkets raise the idea that simply having such wealth makes people blind to the fact that they are, at once, spending money on things that have no value and lazily creating more work for those with less money for no good reason.
Themes
The apartment feels lonely, and Victor thinks that, despite his and his mother’s “grim few years” since his father left, their own place is never as melancholy as this. He tries to imagine a stranger cleaning their place and touching their belongings. He decides that people who have their houses cleaned must either ignore the existence of the “intruders” or have perfect confidence, “a kind of annihilating self-assurance.”
Again, Victor finds it difficult to understand the choices of the wealthy. He can’t imagine how a person could so casually reveal themselves by letting others into their most intimate spaces, and he concludes that the only answer has to be that the wealthy, because of their wealth, feel such “annihilating self-assurance” that they don’t even realize what they are revealing. This thought further suggests that the wealth and privilege of the upper class allows them to disregard the working-class people they consider to be beneath them. Their arrogance allows them to invite cleaners in to tidy their messes and assume the cleaners don’t judge them for it. Victor, who knows what it’s like to be the working-class cleaner, can never have the same ignorance as the wealthy upper class.
Themes
Victor looks through the bookshelves, stocked with novels, psychology, feminist literature, and erotica. In the study he finds biographies and academic work, including a “clumsily written” paper. Above the desk are photos of the client who looks “decent, happy, loved.” He looks through her desk but doesn’t find anything interesting. He realizes that he won’t find anything that will satisfy his curiosity about the client’s character or incriminate her enough that he can hate her fully.
Victor finds nothing in the apartment to prove that the client is a particularly bad person. In fact, she seems perfectly normal for someone of the upper class, with friends and loved ones. This realization that the client is ordinary might be disappointing for Victor, as he wishes he could reveal the client as some kind of villain. But the client’s ordinariness allows the story to more profoundly condemn the upper class. As an ordinary upper-class person, the client comes to stand in for her entire class. Her ordinariness implies that all upper-class people have the capability for such casual cruelty—any wealthy person could treat Carol as the client has treated her because any wealthy person has the means and opportunity to do so. There isn’t any real reason for the client’s actions beyond the banality of her carelessness and the ordinary disdain of the wealthy for the working class.
Themes
Victor cleans the bedroom quickly. He is preoccupied with why the client did not report the supposed theft of the earrings to the police. Victor’s uneasiness about his own snooping leads him to wonder if the client might know he had been to the house before and suspect him instead of Carol. Maybe she knew who he was from college—he attends the university where she works—and had decided not to report him as a kindness. Victor vacuums the house “feverishly.” When the client’s cats jump out from behind some curtains, he chases them from the bedroom. In the kitchen, he asks Carol what the note said, and whether the client suspects him of the theft. Carol tells him not to be silly, and Victor goes back to vacuuming.
Still unsatisfied with the idea that the simple carelessness of the upper class led to his mother’s treatment, Victor considers other motivations. Guilty about his own behavior in the apartment, he wonders whether the client might have acted as she did as a way to patronizingly protect him. This logic is rather tenuous, but captures both Victor’s own guilt about his behavior in the house and his confusion about why the client acted as she did. Victor searches for a reason for the client’s behavior because he doesn’t yet fully understand what Carol already knows—that the power of the upper class enables them to do pretty much whatever they want without thought, reason, or consequence.
Themes
When Carol follows Victor into the bedroom, he asks again why they didn’t just give the place a light clean, or, better, take the money and leave. Carol says it would look like an admission of guilt. He suggests she “force the issue” and call in the police, but Carol says that regardless of what the police did or didn’t find, such an act would result in her losing her reputation and her other jobs because of the resulting gossip. She’s going to grin and bear it.
Carol’s spotless behavior, while motivated by personal pride, has also been an attempt to minimize the damage already done by the client to her reputation. By performing perfectly, Carol ensures the client has nothing to complain about and robs the client of any motivation to slander her further. In this passage, Carol attempts to convey to Victor the scope of her wealthy clients’ control over her livelihood and the importance of her good reputation. Her reputation reflects her work, but it is not a perfect representation of it. Her clients are the ones who control her reputation, recommending her to others or accusing her falsely of theft. By involving the police—which would spread the story and make her look defensive—Carol would only be harming her reputation further, even if she was proven right. Not only that, bringing in the police would make clear that Carol was willing to publicly contradict or embarrass her clients, which none of them want. At this point, it is clear that Carol’s reputation is only a reflection of what her clients think of her, and it is not simply a product of her personal pride, dignity, or behavior.
Themes
As Victor vacuums up a pile of chocolate wrappers near the head of the bed, there’s the sound of something hard being sucked into the pipe. He stops the vacuum and digs his hand inside the disgusting bag. Inside, he finds an earring. Victor and Carol search nearby where the first one got sucked up, and find the other earring on the floor against the baseboard. Carol realizes the client left the earrings on the pillow, then knocked them onto the floor accidentally, and never even seriously looked for them. It was all just carelessness. Victor thinks the client hasn’t gone to the police because the earrings are cheap and calls it “fake outrage.” He comments that it wasn’t important to the client. Carol responds to note that it was important to her, though.
With the discovery of the missing earrings, Victor finally finds the evidence he was looking for on the client’s character: she is careless, thoughtless, and inconsiderate. That the earrings were so easy to find highlights how little effort the client put into actually trying to find them, and how quickly the client shifted to blaming Carol. The earrings were at once not important enough to the client to call the police for or even to search under the bed for, which makes clear just how little regard the client had for Carol that she felt the lost earrings were something worth firing her over though there was no evidence to suggest she had taken them.
Themes
Victor tells Carol that at least she’s cleared her name. Carol shakes her head, angry but smiling. She realizes that the client can just claim that Carol felt guilty and returned the earrings to save her job or her reputation. All Carol has is her good name, and the clients can take that away from her. She can’t fight back. Carol blows her nose as Victor looks down, realizing he is “powerless to defend her.” As Carol finishes cleaning the kitchen and Victor continues vacuuming, he looks over at the earrings on the bed. He wonders if their value is sentimental. He picks them up and throws them into the cat litter box, thinking that the client can have them if she cares enough to look.
For one final time, Victor underestimates the power of Carol’s wealthy clients and their own comparative powerlessness as working-class people who work for the wealthy. The client can make any claim and she will be believed above Carol because of the influence of her wealth and social status. Carol has no meaningful way of sticking up for herself, presumed guilty whether the earrings are missing or found. Her reputation and the actions of her clients are beyond her control, and any attempt to establish her incidence will be taken by the wealthy as a sign of her lack of innocence and her willingness to air dirty laundry in public. All Carol can do is respond with her certainty of her own integrity and her exemplary cleaning skills. Throughout the story, Victor has been frustrated by his mother’s response to her mistreatment by her wealthy client. Now that he knows that she is responding in the only way she can, Victor properly aims his frustration at the wealthy upper class and at the social systems at play which serve to oppress and exploit the working class. However, he still responds with his method—petty revenge—rather than his mother’s display of personal pride.
Themes
As they finish up with cleaning the house, Carol tells Victor she isn’t taking the money left for her in the envelope because she’s “worth more.” They pack up the cleaning supplies. Victor goes back to the cat litter box and cleans off the earrings. They weigh nothing in his hand. He places them beside the envelope of money and Carol’s key to the house. He sees Carol silhouetted by light in the doorway, and he’s able to breathe easily again. He follows her outside.
Though Carol’s clients can mar her reputation, they can never take her integrity from her. By leaving the money, she makes an assertion of that integrity to her client as the final word of their relationship. In leaving the earrings with the money, Victor adds to that show of integrity, forcing the client—at least privately—to face the evidence that she might have been wrong about Carol. In leaving the earrings next to the money, Victor also finally follows his mother’s method of dealing with the upper class by asserting her own dignity rather than attempting to fight insult with insult. By Carol’s example, Victor recognizes that pride, integrity, and dignity are unassailable. The clients can’t take them from Carol, and Carol refuses to relinquish them for petty retribution. The final image of Carol is a triumphant one: she stands haloed in the sun, and Victor sees her as being like a hero or an angel. Though she has no way of clearing her name, she has triumphed morally over the client—a quiet yet not thankless victory. Meanwhile, Victor’s contentment in his mother’s dignity is more consoling to him than any revenge could be.
Themes
