A Mother With Many Worries

In Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” a mother thrusts the traditional feminine role and the danger of female sexuality upon her young daughter. The central topics of gender roles in a family structure are evident, and the expression of the feminine sexuality is examined throughout the story. Readers are to look into the mother’s beliefs on the importance of serving your husband and remaining sexually conservative and content. There is even a sense of importance for food and clothes in the text, which provides evidence to the central claim of being content with the traditional feminine lifestyle. Finally, the relationship between a mother and daughter is also a major focus in this text.

The portrayal of gender in this text shows the husband as the prime breadwinner of the household while the wife stays home to clean the house and tend for the children. This is clearly our traditional family lifestyle of a household. Now although this can be considered traditional, we clearly see this lifestyle outdated in our twenty-first century society today. The text is demonstrated to show the young daughter her place in society, and teach the young girl the everyday tasks she will need to know in order to run a household smoothly and successfully. It is also clear that the mother’s life reflects all of these ideals that a husband should be the one working and the wife is to be happy and content by taking great pride and satisfaction in the caring for her home. The mother also has strong view on the behavior for a women in society and throughout the story gives many warning on her daughters behavior such as “on Sundays try and walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming”. (Kincaid 56) This is a clear statement from the mother tha...

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...e other gender without any retaliation of some sort. Kincaid also goes on to say that it is okay if things do happen to fail in a relationship, because there are always alternatives to every situation at hand. Kincaid is simply stating that a woman has the freedom to chase after various solutions that are tangible. One of my favorite lines from the text about how a women can spit in the air if she wants to, implies that a woman has the absolute freedom to behave like a man if she feels like it.

In conclusion, Kincaid doesn’t necessarily list limitations of women, but she lists their freedoms that women can have in their everyday lives. Kincaid does an incredible job of making the story a simple sentence with a massive amount of information to be passed down to a young women who will one day have to take on the various amount of roles presented to us in this text.