"I think, therefore I am"...just going to sit and do my work idly until replaced by a newer model

After reading Robbins article, I could not help but view the women in Smith’s Hotel World as being parts of in their own “‘involuntary, palpitating’ world of labor” (Robbins 87). On their own, Sara Wilby, Else, Lise, Penny, and Clare Wilby are all people in Smith’s fictional setting, but they are also all different pieces in the labor machine. They all fulfill a different role which is integral to the economic system in which they live. Sara and Clare are representatives of new labors; Sara having entered the working world shortly before her dead and Clare following close behind. Lise helps run the hotel and keep things in order for the real consumers like Penny, who is a guess.

However, Penny also helps facilitate the hotels revenue in writing a publicity review for them. So in Penny’s case she is an interchangeable part of the system. Just as all the other women are. When Sara dies it can be assumed that another young woman took her position as chambermaid at the Global Hotel branch. They hotel system, might have been inconvenienced for a while Sara’s death was investigated, but afterwards it received an increase in business from people wanting to view the scene of the young woman’s tragic death. So while Sara is a part of the hotel’s labor machine, she is as easily replaced as battery in a car. In today’s economic systems, when one piece of a whole stops functioning, one simply replaces it with another and continues on with daily life.

The same thing can be assumed when Lise falls ill. No one from the hotel comes to check up on her and it can be assumed again that she was probably replaced by some other receptionist from another branch of the hotel parallelly similar to the Global Hotel in which Smith’s novel takes place.

This all ties in with our class discussion on people no longer being known by their personalities and physical traits/abilities but as a set of skills on a piece of paper. It is this system of categorizing and labeling people that makes people like Sara and Lise disposable in our consumerist societies. This also relates back to one of Robbins first points about the electric tea kettle quoting, “Would we all be better off boiling our own water in a pot hung over an open fire?” Here in quoting the text, Robbins brings up the point that, we may be better off just doing things ourselves instead of outsourcing our abilities and adding to the economic sweatshop system. Mainly, Robbins seems to want to open the eyes of his readers to the bigger picture. He wants readers to become aware of their part in the “sweatshop sublime” and take umbrage rather than sit idly by until being replaced themselves.