ENGL 200 D: Reading Literature: Literature in the Marketplace

For the first paper I’m planning on answering the question “What makes labor value difficult to establish?” with the answer “Labor value is difficult to establish because though the quality and amount of labor should equal the quality of product, it doesn’t always. The two are not necessarily synonymous.” I plan on using Montague and Duck to argue different aspects of this answer

Montague is a good voice to use for this topic because the main conflict of her piece is a man who thinks that the fruits of his academic labors are good enough to buy a prostitute without paying her. This is essentially a difference in opinion on labor value. His social standing is his value and his peer group highly values it. He thinks he is being cheated because she didn’t do the work he paid her for, she didn’t labor for him. The two people in the poem have completely different views on what labor is and how value is assessed which supports my answer.

Duck will be useful because he is a laborer with obvious issues as to what his labor is worth. He not only gives his landlord the labor he provides during the day but he lives his whole life in servitude to them, his youth his health, even (though I’m not sure Duck specifically talks about it) the production of children is intended to produce more workers for the family. There is at least one section in his poem about how he and the landlord disagree about how hard the laborers have been working. Another is when the women come to work in the fields as well, he values his own labor but not that of the women’s at all even though it is the same work. The part about women I think will have to be an acknowledged as a difference in labor value just because they are women and therefore kind of annoying. That’s a whole different essay about labor value of the sexes that I’ll have to be careful to stay off my soap box.