In the eyes of the mother, the child must do all these things in order to prevent herself from being shunned by the community and becoming a “slut”. Girl also has a set of expectations from her mother on how she should act and behave. Choosing not to behave the way she’s taught to could result in losing her social standing. The only time her mother show’s sympathy toward her daughter is when speaking of the relationships her daughter will one day have with men. Her mother tells her how men will bully her, and how she should respond to them.…
Kincaid shows the reader that the two live in a very conservative and strict cultural society, where women are held to a very high standard and most are responsible for taking care of housework and fulfill motherly duties. Scenario A: Girl goes through life as she is supposed to. After a couple years at the age that sexual curiosity tends to begin, girl has obtained a very basic level of knowledge. During this stage of her life she is withdrawn from her studies at school to learns how to become a woman of the West Indies culture.…
In her prose poem, Jamaica Kincaid wrote Girl for the New Yorker in 1978 which uses a very unique syntax that resembles a long lecture a mother would give her child as well as establishing ethos by using traditions known in Antigua and very feminine lessons, including how to sit like a woman and how to make pills to get rid of child. The lecturing, condescending tone is very reminiscent of a mother, especially when they are giving orders to their child. This is true because she is not only telling her daughter to be as ‘sweet’ and ‘innocent’ while scorning the daughter for being acting like a slut and not wanting to act the same as her. Kincaid probably wanted to show her reader the conflicting opinions of an older generation and a younger, while also showing the…
In “Girl” the mother 's final words to her daughter are, “…you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?” (271). This suggests that she will become a slut if she does not follow her mother’s guidelines, and overall will become a disappointment to her. It also becomes clear, in Russell’s short story, that the girls wish to please their mother when Claudette says, “But we knew we couldn’t return to the woods; not till we were civilized, not if we didn’t want to break the mother’s heart” (240). Instead of running away, they chose to become respectable ladies that their mother can be proud of, even if it means sacrificing their own happiness and…
Broken Bread, Broken Community: Hunger During the Holocaust In Holocaust narratives, food and starvation emphatically repeat, differing in their context, but consistently representing a fight against death of spirit or body. Hunger could take over and control a person’s body and mind, and starvation’s effects became a singular focus inside the ghetto or the concentration camps. Bread had the power to break apart families and connections to other people, further dehumanizing the individual’s spirit.…
In reading world literature, it becomes abundantly clear that the reality of women being subjected to different and sometimes harsh treatment by society is not a regional or even a national truth. It is a theme that is extended from the beginning of time until present day in literary works. While there are many examples of this truth, Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” is exceptionally poignant. Kincaid’s careful use of form and character identities work in perfect tandem to convey the truths of human femininity.…
As she ranted off about what to do I realized it was a lot of women tasks so I see it as her mother wanting her to have a good social status as women so she doesn’t end up single. Kincaid was a single woman when this story was published and her experience might have influenced the story’s perspective and contributed to wanting her daughter to be the greatest. What she said that struck me to realize she was giving tips/directions on how to become a woman with high social status would be when she mentions, “don’t squat down to play marbles- you are not a boy, you know”, she is sure to cover many topics from cleaning, fixing things, and acting in a correct manner she clearly cares about her daughter’s whole future (Kincaid 185).…
In History “In History”, by Jamaica Kincaid, weaves together the stories of Christopher Columbus, George Clifford, and Carl Linnaeus so that the reader may understand why the author is questioning her own history and those who are like her. Kincaid questions us, “What is History? Is it a Theory? Is it an Ideal” She answers these questions through the stories of these three men as they come across and label foreign people, lands, or plants. Kincaid implies that the act of identifying and labeling unfamiliar with familiar terms are taken from these men 's subjective lives.…
Kincaid’s “Girl” in that both mothers in the stories are faced with an issue regarding the raising of their daughters. Nowadays however, the issue of parents becoming too active…
How Style, Tone, and Characterization in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” Show the Universal Pressures on Woman in a Patriarchal Society "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid reveals the overwhelming pressure on young women to look and act in certain ways in order to please men and society. Through the use of the literary elements style, tone, and characterization, Jamaica Kincaid is able to place the reader into the shoes of a young Caribbean girl as her mother describes to her what she must do in order to protect her reputation and grow into a respectable woman. Gender and gender-roles are a main theme in this work as scholar Carol Bailey writes in her article, Performance and the Gendered Body in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” and Oonya Kempadoo’s Buxton Spice,…
In the article by scholar Carol Bailey, his focus is on the idea “preserving the self” Bailey states that readers of “Girl” only observe only the fictional representation of how to educate a child. Bailey points out how the speaker of “girl” provides many guidelines of living and lectures to the girl, but the girl has no room for discussion to defend herself. The idea that there is no room for discussion comes from the repetitions of “This is how” in Kincaid’s work “Girl” (Bailey 108). The constant nagging to a child of “This is how” gives the child no sense of just simply learning from her mistakes, instead she has to always strive to be correct. In order for women to be successful they need to appropriately perform their gender based on their culture, constantly being judge whether they do or…
Mothers, grandmothers, and stepmothers play an important role in every child 's life. They show and tell their child what to do. In the short story “Girl,” written by Jamaica Kincaid, a mother is doing just that. She is telling her daughter what to do and how to do it. “Girl” is more complex than a simple list of instructions and how-to’s.…
“Girl” written by Jamaica Kincaid is an unusual writing that portrays a mother’s list of rules that her daughter must obey in order to be accepted in society. Having no knowledge about what culture or time period this was, the reader can understand about how a woman must portray herself to the outside world. The reading also concentrates on a variety of issues including gender, social class, and feminist criticism between mother and daughter. Also, the reader can easily identify that the story is about a mother telling her daughter how to become a traditional woman in all of the common things a household wife would do to survive. Overall, the mother expresses a strict relationship by the tone the author portrayed on her towards the daughter,…
Visual Communication Term Paper Introduction The photo The Struggling Girl by Kevin Carter, was a war photograph that brought the attention of millions to the struggle of Sudan. In this paper the photo will be broken down and analyzed into six unique perspectives that the class of COMM 300 learned about all semester. These perspectives are as follow: the personal perspective, which is what my thoughts of the image were after first seeing it. The second is the historical perspective, giving the reader some insight on the background this photo.…
The relationship is based on the mother delivering a long list of instructions, advice, and warnings to her daughter so that the daughter can become a respectable young lady of society. According to Carol Bailey “Performance and the Gendered Body in Jamaica Kincaid's “Girl” and Oonya Kempadoo's Buxton Spice,” Bailey talks about how the mother’s (in Jamaica Kincaid's “Girl”5) “instructions relate mainly to domestic chores, but also include directions for social relations and moral conduct” (Bailey 107). The mother gives her daughter list of instructions on how to clean, cook, speak and to present herself as a…