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What is the understanding of the short story "On Her Knees" by Tim Winton?
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"On Her Knees" by Tim Winton explores themes of dignity and social class through the relationship between Victor and his mother, who works as a housecleaner to support his education. Initially, Victor struggles with guilt over his mother's job, associating dignity with social status. However, after a misunderstanding involving stolen earrings, Victor learns true dignity stems from character, as demonstrated by his mother's integrity and refusal to accept undeserved money.
Author Tim Winton uses a first-person narrator to provide an individual perspective and show the changes that the narrator undergoes through the course of the story. The story uses two characters, a son and his mother, to offer insights into their unique relationship, showing how Victor, the son, comes to appreciate his mother through a specific set of events. These characters also exemplify personal, class, and gender relationships within society at large.
Victor has the goal of becoming an attorney, and his mother had formerly been employed in a medical office, where she worked for doctors. The careers of lawyer and doctor are upper-middle-class professions so we can see that Victor wants to move up in the social hierarchy. Currently, however, the mother is employed as a housecleaner, which is causing Victor to experience an internal conflict. He recognizes that his mother wants to help him with his educational expenses,...
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and he is deeply grateful for her support. Nevertheless, he feels guilty that his mother is working on her hands and knees to help him move up in the world. The physical position of the mother is thus contrasted to the conceptual, social position of both characters.
In addition to the class dimensions, gender is important because the majority of house cleaners are female and they earn relatively low wages. Because finances play such an important role in the characters’ lives, it becomes especially significant that the mother declines the money that the employer offers after realizing her honesty. Victor learns to get past his guilt and to contextualize the class system, separating the individual’s worth from the value that society tries to impose.
"On Her Knees" is about dignity: about maintaining dignity and understanding the true meaning of dignity. The narrator supposes his mother's dignity is devalued, perhaps destroyed, because she works on her knees cleaning other people's houses. This is especially true since she used to have specialized employment in a medical office.
The narrator is himself pursuing his dignity at law school, feeling that externals, like employment, provide the basis for dignity. In connection with this feeling, he loathes to see her lower herself and disregard and degrade her own dignity. He equally loathes to lower his dignity to help her.
One day her dignity--and his understanding of dignity--is put to the test when she is accused of stealing a pair of $500 earrings from a householder form whom she cleans.
Metaphorically yelling and screaming all the way, the narrator helps her do an all-out four-hour cleaning job for the angered householder's home. The missing earrings are found when he vacuums under the bed. His mother deduces what must have happened so that the earrings were carelessly tossed to the floor with candy wrappers, and she cries silently when his back is turned: "I heard her blow her nose."
The narrator finally understands true dignity when his mother refuses the money offered by the householder. As proof that he understands that dignity is from one's inner being and not related directly to one's knees, he digs the earrings from the kitty litter box where he has tossed them and leaves them "beside the unstrung key and the thin envelope of money." All these are left behind and rejected by the mother's inner dignity. Further proof the narrator understands true dignity is given in the symbolic closing lines: "It seemed that the very light of day was pouring out through her limbs. I had my breath back."