Class, Money, and Power Theme Analysis

In “On Her Knees” by Tim Winton, Victor Lang’s mother Carol works as a cleaner in the homes of wealthy clients. By having the working-class Carol and her son Victor go into the homes of wealthier clients, the story sets up an exploration of the qualities of and relationship between these two different classes. Put simply, the story portrays the working-class Carol as dignified, trustworthy, decent, and industrious, while, in contrast, presenting the upper-class people whose homes Carol cleans as careless, lazy, and greedy in their actions with the working-class. By centering the story around an accusation of theft leveled by one wealthy client against Carol, the story captures how the upper-class is instinctively suspicious of the working-class people whom the wealthy assume to be their inferiors, and how the upper-class’s money and social connections combine to give them the power to exploit and control working-class people such as Carol.

The working class, represented in the story by Carol, is portrayed as honorable, honest, and possessing a “stiff-necked working-class pride.” After the client’s accusation of theft, Carol brings her own cleaning supplies (rather than using the client’s) to the client’s apartment, and leaves the money she’s owed for her work, both as a statement of pride by refusing to take anything further from the client and as a statement of integrity by insisting that she wouldn’t steal so much as a bottle of Windex. Victor characterizes the wealthy upper class as alien to working-class people like him. He can’t imagine living as they do, arrogantly inviting strangers into their houses to clean up their mess. When Victor finds the earrings Carol was accused of stealing on the floor in the apartment, it reveals the client’s carelessness and laziness. Rather than searching thoroughly for the earrings, she immediately assumed Carol stole them. In Victor’s eyes, the wealthy are self-important, ignorant, and careless with both their possessions and the lives of the people they employ. Victor is suspicious of the wealthy in general and the client in particular, searching her house to find something incriminating about her. What he discovers, though, is that she’s in many ways a perfectly normal person. Her pictures reveal that she’s loved by her friends and family. This portrayal of the client as ultimately ordinary emphasizes the pervasiveness of wealthy people’s disdain for the lives of the working class.

As made clear in Carol’s inability to fight back against the accusations of her client, the money and social connections of the wealthy give them power over the working class. Carol has no real recourse to the false accusations of her client because she must stay on the good side of her clients to maintain her reputation, which would be easily destroyed by careless slander. She can’t “force the issue” by bringing in the police to prove she did not take the earrings to clear her name, because in order to keep getting work from other clients she must be discrete and not cause trouble for their wealthy peers. Her very livelihood depends on her ability to be what her clients want her to be: convenient, relatively cheap, and close to invisible. Though she is skilled at fulfilling those requirements and excellent at her job, she lives with the risk of being replaced at the first sign of inconvenience. Even when Victor and Carol find the missing earrings, Carol understands that there is no way to clear her name because the client has the social power to make any claim against Carol that she wants. It would be all too easy for her to argue that Carol stole the earrings and then later brought them back. Carol has no power to act—only to react to the accusations placed on her by responding with dignity and being accommodating towards her accuser. She is helpless to publicly respond against the power of her clients to exploit, control, and eventually discard her.

Through Victor’s perspective and the client’s mistreatment of Carol, the story presents an almost entirely negative portrait of the wealthy. Carol is portrayed as a kind of working-class hero, a David valiantly and gracefully facing down the Goliath of wealth simply by continuing to do her job. In contrast, the story presents the wealthy as holding themselves up as superior to the working class while emphasizing how this self-regard is in fact the root of the everyday evil of the upper class’s moral deficiency.