The short story "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid is an interesting text. The story, only about one page in length, is a series of lessons a Mother gives to her Daughter. The content of the lessons seem to be, to a certain point, fairly trivial; the Mother is often telling the girl different ways to cook, clean, or present herself to the public. With this, we can see that the mother does not expect the daughter to do much more than become a housewife. Another interesting thing about this story is that it is all presented in one sentence, using commas and semicolons to separate different ideas. Thanks to this formatting, the story seems to flow continuously, at an almost hurried, uncaring pace.
To me, one of the more important recurring lines was when the Mother, on several occasions refers, to the "slut" that the daughter is waiting to become. With these examples, and the others listed before, it becomes clear that the Mother feels some kind of anger towards the Daughter. The Mother does not believe that the daughter could become a person capable of taking care of things outside of a trivial realm.
According to the introduction to the story, the metaphor of Mother to Daughter could be seen as a real life relationship between larger, more powerful countries and smaller commonwealth countries. This is an interesting interpretation for this story, and it seems to work very well in that a more powerful country may never expect a smaller country to become independent.
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This is a great analysis. I liked how even after all of the mom's nagging and lessons, she still views her daughter as a "slut."
ReplyDeleteI felt like this whole text was kind of sarcastic towards her mom's tutelage, which in itself would show that the daughter didn't take any of her lessons to heart.
I like how you brought up that the lack of real sentence structure made the story seem rushed- it was like she was telling her daughter these things and not really even paying attention to what she was saying- very monotonous and hurried.
ReplyDeleteI never even thought of making a connection between the story and relationships between other countries. I read it as an inner monologue going through the woman's head as things she has learned over the year. good job
ReplyDeleteI like the fact that you picked up on the idea mother does not expect her daughter to be more than a housewife. They never directly mention it, but the evidence lies in that she doesn't seem to teach the girl anything but domestic duties. Good observation.
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