I noticed in our first reading that Barbara was constantly adjusting her mindset to give herself a or ethical moral motivation for the job so as to perhaps lessen the mental toll of the job. In the reading for today, she does this once again on page 66 when she says, “I will become a luminous beacon in the gathering darkness of dementia.” Now that she’s adjusting her mindset once again, I wonder if that is sort of unaddressed privilege that she has since she is working there for only short periods of time. The other workers at the nursing home seem far more cynical about their day to day affairs. What do other people think about Barbara’s privilege to adjust her mindset accordingly to the task at hand?
I think you make a valuable point, Stephen. As we have discussed in class, Ehrenreich constantly validates her own experiences in order to justify the situation she is in. For example, when she works at Wal-Mart, she interprets her work as motherly and thus helpful and charitable towards mothers. She feels as though she is a mother for other mothers that are usually busy mothering their own children. Thus, she is “giving these women a break” from their normal duties. Her normally blue-collar work has miraculously transformed into an act of charitable justice!
I think that Ehrenreich’s mind-playing game is a form of self-denial of her situation. She knows she is not really like her colleagues: at any point in time, she has the freedom and the will to leave her situation as a minimum-wage worker. I think she knows this and instead of viewing her work as her livelihood, she perceives it as an act of charity. Clearly, she is utilizing her privilege as a comforting mechanism in order to remind herself of her superiority in contrast to the people around her.