Pride and Dignity Theme Analysis

Tim Winton’s “On Her Knees” tells the story of Victor Lang and his mother Carol, who cleans houses for a living. Victor hates the idea of his mother scrubbing other people’s floors, while Carol insists that there is more honor in cleaning someone else’s house than in hiring someone to clean your own. Though Carol is beloved by her clients for her rigorous work ethic, the story focuses on the aftermath of a particular client’s accusation that Carol stole a pair of earrings while cleaning her apartment. The client fires Carol yet asks her to return to clean her apartment for one final week until she can find a replacement. Victor considers the client’s accusations to be both unjust and demeaning, and thinks that returning to clean the apartment would be shameful. He tries to convince his mother not to go, or, if she must go back, to do a poor job of cleaning the apartment in retribution. However, rather than finding the work demeaning, Carol insists on returning to the apartment and cleaning it thoroughly as proof of her dignity and personal pride. Through Carol and Victor’s initially differing understandings of pride and the way that Victor comes to see Carol’s view as the correct one, the story suggests that true pride and dignity come from within and are unaffected by circumstance, mistreatment, or insults.

At the outset of the story, Victor understands pride as something that can be insulted, injured, and taken away by others. He doesn’t see Carol’s job as a house cleaner as something to find pride or honor in, but rather as a downgrade from her former profession as a receptionist. Since he already finds the profession undignified, he perceives the client’s unjust accusation as a further attack against his mother’s hard-won dignity and responds as if pride is a scarce resource or the product of a zero-sum game: to save his mother’s pride he tries to find ways to injure the client’s pride. Carol, too, perceives the situation through the concept of pride. But her understanding is opposite to Victor’s. She sees pride as something that she naturally has, and so rather than respond to the client’s slights by trying to tear the client down in turn, Carol instead simply asserts her own pride by not only returning to the apartment but also cleaning to the utmost of her ability.

The morning of the cleaning, Carol stands in Victor’s doorway to “lecture [him] on the subject of personal pride.” Though the lecture ends before they leave, the teaching experience continues through the day as Carol models her understanding of pride to Victor. Victor is frustrated by Carol’s decision to return to clean the apartment and her lack of desire for retribution on her client. Carol’s idea of getting back at the client, rather than embarrassing the client by snooping for evidence or taking the money without doing the job, is living well, completing her job in a way that brings her pride, and leaving the position as gracefully as possible. Her pride is not dependent on the actions of others, but, rather, reflects her judgement of herself and her performance. She takes pride in a job well done and knows that she has worked to the best of her ability for the client. The accusation has no effect on her personal pride.

As Victor realizes that no actions of his will affect the client or prove his mother’s innocence, he comes also to better understand Carol’s idea of pride as unassailable. He can’t control the actions of others, only his own responses to them. He comes to see that there is no reason that the wrongs of the client should reflect poorly on Carol—it is unfair and unjust. In the same way, it is unfair of him to insist her pride has been injured by something out of her control. As the day progresses, Victor himself finds no dignity or pride in his initial instinct to act pettily and seek revenge on the client. Rather, he discovers dignity in his mother’s behavior and in his own behavior modeled after hers. Through Victor’s change of heart, the story suggests that Carol’s idea of pride is the correct one. The actions of others might affect her reputation, but they can’t touch her dignity or her pride in her work. With the realization that Carol’s dignity—and his own dignity—is uninjured by the client, Victor is content to leave the client behind.