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Impact of social class
Impact of social class
How poverty can impact on a persons mental health and wellbeing
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The meaning that could be made in “I Stand Here Ironing” through a Marxist lenses is that financial crises diminish an individual's status and growth in society. The story took place during the Great Depression where poverty was high and finding work was difficult, especially for a women. The narrator was a single mother with a lower class social standing because of the economic crisis. It was difficult for a single women to hold a job and balance time with her family. Therefore, her daughter, Emily, was affected internally and externally because of her mother’s financial difficulties. Emily loathed the caregivers she was handed to, but never rebelled against it. She was constantly sick and never had an appetite which made her incredibly thin.
Therefore, Emily was sent away to a convalescent home where she would get the kind of food and care that her mother could not offer her. This sacrifice revealed the family’s social and financial standing in society. Emily was also self-conscious. There were expectation in society of how a little girl was supposed to look but Emily was the complete opposite. Thus, Emily felt unequal in the world of youthful competition. She would constantly torment and measure herself against others. There was also a binary opposition present between Emily and her sister, Susan. She was everything Emily was not. Susan was chubby and had golden, curly hair while Emily was thin, dark, and foreign-looking. The only time Emily was known in her society was when she performed an outstanding comedy show. Moreover, the narrator’s financial suffering affected her social standing and Emily’s childhood negatively.
It is the worker’s condition that he truly focuses on. Many of the problems that people faced during this time include: tenement housing, poor working conditions, child labor, monopolies of business, social and political inequality, and most importantly people putting profits over lives. It is around the same time that a terrible fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The unsafe working conditions made the employees escape nearly impossible.
Marx’s idea of the estrangement of man from the product of his labor described the suffering of countless hours or work by the laborer, contributing to the production of a product that he could not afford with the wages he made. He helped to produce a product that only those wealthier than he could afford. As the society around him became more object-oriented, he became increasingly more alienated. In the lager, one factor that distanced the laborer from his product was that he no longer worked for a wage, but for survival. In a description of his fellow worker, Levi wrote, “He seems to think that his present situation is like outside, where it is honest and logical to work, as well as being of advantage, because according to what everyone says, the more one works the more one earns and eats.” Levi pitied his fellow worker for his naivety, as the Lager was not a place of labor for prosperity, but strictly a place of labor by force. One worked in order to live, focusing more on the uncertainty of their next meal, day, or even breath than the product of their l...
Rebecca Harding Davis wrote “Life in the Iron Mills” in the mid-nineteenth century in part to raise awareness about working conditions in industrial mills. With the goal of presenting the reality of the mills’ environment and the lives of the mill workers, Davis employs vivid and concrete descriptions of the mills, the workers’ homes, and the workers themselves. Yet her story’s realism is not objective; Davis has a reformer’s agenda, and her word-pictures are colored accordingly. One theme that receives a particularly negative shading in the story is big business and the money associated with it. Davis uses this negative portrayal of money to emphasize the damage that the single-minded pursuit of wealth works upon the humanity of those who desire it.
In Marx’s opinion, the cause of poverty has always been due to the struggle between social classes, with one class keeping its power by suppressing the other classes. He claims the opposing forces of the Industrial Age are the bourgeois and the proletarians. Marx describes the bourgeois as a middle class drunk on power. The bourgeois are the controllers of industrialization, the owners of the factories that abuse their workers and strip all human dignity away from them for pennies. Industry, Marx says, has made the proletariat working class only a tool for increasing the wealth of the bourgeoisie. Because the aim of the bourgeoisie is to increase their trade and wealth, it is necessary to exploit the worker to maximize profit. This, according to Marx, is why the labor of the proletariat continued to steadily increase while the wages of the proletariat continued to steadily decrease.
The mother of Frank McCourt, Angela, is an antagonist. She blamed Malachy Sr. for all of their problems calling him “useless,” “sitting on your arse by the fire is no place for a man”(218). Angela constantly ridiculing Malachy Sr. could be the cause of his alcohol addiction. Angela never made him feel like a man throughout the book she was always putting him down, the assumption of alcohol was the only thing he was really happy about. Angelas constant nagging drove him away leaving his family without much. Also, Angela constantly abandons her children. Her sexual desires caused her to continue having children despite the hunger and poverty they were already facing. Every time one of her children died she abandoned the rest of them, not taking care of them. The children had to survive on their own during her time of grieving. After Frank’s fight with Laman, Angela never once made sure Frank was okay. Instead she goes to Laman,
The working class faced conditions in the factory that wealthier skill workers did not have deal with. These men were not in a comfortable financial situation at home, and could not find comfort in hazardous working conditions with the dangerous machines they had to operate. Workers were harmed daily and among these injured employees were children (Shi 62). Many of these children were as young as nine years old, and due to financial reasons their families sent them away to work in workshops, mines, and even in factories surrounded by dangerous machinery. Realistically, these children were doomed to working in a factory for their entire lives. They did not attended school and worked to help provide for their families. With no education, they would not be able to find a more prestigious job with higher pay. The waged for factory workers were low, but they were not always guaranteed. The Knights of Labor pushed for a federal law that would force employers to “pay employees weekly, in full, for labor performed during the preceding week” (Shi 62). These people were only working in harmful conditions to survive but were not guaranteed enough money to feed their families. Charity handouts did not necessarily help feed a poor family, but aimed to “... produce most beneficial results to [the] community” (Shi 60). This meant that the wealthy didn’t directly give citizens money, but
In the short story "I Stand Here Ironing" by Tillie Olsen the conflict between a mother whose giving is limited by hardships is directly related to her daughter's wrinkled adjustment. Ironing, she reflects upon when she was raising her first-born daughter, Emily. The mother contemplates the consequences of her actions. The mother's life had been interrupted by childbirth, desertion, poverty, numerous jobs, childcare, remarriage, frequent relocations, and five children. Her struggling economic situation gave way to little or no opportunity to properly care for and nurture her first-born child. In spite of the attention and love Emily craved and never received, she still survived, and even made strengths, and talents, out of the deprivations she had endured.
“I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen, is a story about a mother's struggle to balance the demands of raising children and having to work to make ends meet during the Great Depression. The story’s primary focus is on the relationship between the narrator, a mother, and her first child, Emily. Throughout the story, the narrator reflects on the decisions and mistakes she made while raising Emily. The narrator was detached from Emily almost completely during her younger years, but she desires an emotional connection to her, like she has with her other children. She also wants Emily to have a better life than she had.
In Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest multiple literary criticism can be applied such as the Feminism theory, the Historical criticism, as well as the Freudian theory. One theory that's applied mostly in the book is a Marxist literary criticism, using a Marxist point of view, readers gain a greater understanding of the novel’s images, the division of people, and power struggles.
In this paper, I am going to explore the differences between communism and socialism and how different the thoughts and opinions of these two ways of life are from the current western views on religion and God. To explain about the differences between socialism/communism and western thoughts on religion I will explore the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. They are founders and writers of a lot of the socialist and communist thoughts on religion and God. In our western society when we discuss God and religion, people for the most part are going to lean one way or another when it comes to their beliefs on religion. If you are from the western part of globe like myself the views and thoughts hinge on the belief of God as a superior being, a perfect one, one who controls everything that happens. The other side of the coin in western culture would be the atheist who does not believe in God at all. There are many other views about God and Religion that differ greatly from the views that are held throughout the western regions of the world. In a lot of the Eastern countries of the world the teaching of the Socialist and Communist parties that rule these areas of the world has influenced the views that have been passed down and taught through out the years. Communism and Socialism do not believe in the theory that there is one perfect God and that you can only receive salvation through him.
Classic Marxism is a socioeconomic ideology concerning the major division between the working class or the proletariat, and those in power also known as the bourgeoisie. In the short story “The Brave Little Tailor,” the motif of class
Wives had the jobs of housekeeping, childcare, and spending an average of 55 hours a week on domestic chores. This lifestyle however was completely contrasted by the main character in “I Stand Here Ironing”, a short story written by Tillie Olsen. The narrator is a single, working class mother during the Great Depression and during a time where women were expected to stay home and care for their children. The story follows the mother’s economic hardships and struggle to be a good mother for her daughter while facing the difficulties of inequality. This short story highlights the challenges of working-class women and represents the struggle of American women during this
The changes accompany the transition from one epoch to another. In the late nineteenth century labor has become a commodity to the merchants, and the formation of a new mode of production has risen which gave rise to a capitalist society. There is a new class distinction between the laborer and those who owned the means of production.
Marx describes the problem in great detail in the first chapter. He feels there is a problem between the bourgeoisie and the proletarians. The bourgeoisie were the oppressed class before the French Revolution and he argues that they are now the oppressors. The proletarians are the new working class, which works in the large factory and industries. He says that through mass industry they have sacrificed everything from the old way of religion, employment, to a man’s self worth and replaced it with monetary value. He is mad that the people of ole that use to be upper class such as skills man, trades people, & shopkeepers, are now slipping into the proletarians or working class. He talks of the bourgeoisie getting to be so greedy that they are forced to nest all over the world to hock their goods. This is talking about the new import and export system that has formed. He says the working class has to deal with the flux of the market and is disposed of more easily than the machines used in the market. He says that they actually become part of the machine while working. Doing the simplest and most monotonous part of the job. In this new system Marx says “as repulsiveness of work increases, the wage of work decreases”. He also prophesizes that machines will become so advanced that the wages for man will become one extremely low rate. He says the proletarians live a life of exploitation. By being exploited at work in the w...
Every story can be viewed in several different ways, and one of these different ways of viewing stories is Marxism; Marxism consists of the political and economic theories created by Karl Marx; its posits and oppositional relationship between the Proletariat, the working class, and the capitalist Bourgeoisie, those members of society that own the means of production. Marx believed that the government exploited its power to oppress the laboring masses for the benefit of the wealthy white portion of society. Ernest Hemingway, an American novelist and short story writer in the twentieth century, wrote many short stories during his lifetime, one of them being “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife”, which can be viewed through the Marxist lens. This short story consists of several Native American log workers, the Proletariat, and the wealthy white citizens of the society (in this story, the Doctor), the Bourgeoisie. The story follows the Doctor’s day as he interacts with the log workers and later, with his family. Ernest Hemingway, in his short story “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife”, blurs the lines of distinction between the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat to show that the Marxist concept of different social classes is not completely true.