Jamaica Kincaid Girl

Girl, written by Jamaica Kincaid, is a short story about the relationship between a mother and daughter. Actually, it reflects the true living background in Kincaid’s time by listing a series of imperative sentences, which show how the mother had a certain life style on how she wanted her daughter to live up. In this story, the setting and tone and characters interlace and work together to create an intense description of the daily conversation between the mother and daughter, and they present the low social status of working-class women’s living attitude. An important influence on Kincaid’s writing is the era she was living in when she composed her stories. At that time, Antigua and Barbuda was colonized by England, so that the
For one perspective of using words, there is no term of endearment. Nowadays, we would always use polite language such as “dear” or “yours” at the beginning or the end of our letters or emails, and sometimes we even send it to the person whom we are not familiar with. Nevertheless, in this story, it is a conversation between a mother and daughter, and we couldn’t even find a word like that! How ruthless is the society! For another perspective of the sentence structures, almost all of them are imperative sentences. For example, “This is how you iron your father’s khaki shirt so that it doesn’t have a crease; this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house” (Kincaid 258). The mother lists all the instructions by using the similar imperative sentence structure without giving any speaking chance to the girl. We can’t find any relationship which could make a conversation like that in today’s life, can we? Without expressing direct emotions, Kincaid presents the contemporary relationship between the mother and daughter incisively and vividly by using the single and bare
The mother in this story is such a cold and mean woman who is indifferent about her daughter’s emotional world. Cynthia Bily, who writes a literary criticism of “Girl”, points out that” She gives no advice about how to be a friend, or how to sense which women to confide in. There are no tips about changing a diaper or wiping a tear or nurturing a child in any way; she mentions children only when she shows’ how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child’” (Bily 2). Maybe the mother was also brought up in such a cruel family, then she does not have the awareness to consider her daughter’s emotion at all. Besides, the mother has a negative living attitude because she doesn’t care whether the world outside is beautiful. In the contrast, what she care is the right way that the girl should behave in front of people. Kincaid writes” don’t squat down to play marbles- you are not a boy, you know; don’t pick people’s flowers- you might catch something; don’t throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be blackbird at all” (Kincaid 259). All the statements concerning about the natural scene are prohibitions. She doesn’t teach her daughter how to enjoy such a beautiful living environment or how to make herself feel happy, however, all the suggestions are