Suppression of the female sexuality has been a constant struggle for young ladies for thousands of years, and is still considered a problem today. In the short story “Girl” (1984), by Jamaica Kincaid, an overbearing mother is instructing her daughter on how to be the perfect lady within the village where they live. The mother explains the tasks in a list and points out her daughter’s imperfections throughout the story. After conducting a formalist reading of the short story “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, it is shown that readers are able to identify the major theme of rejection of female sexuality through the author’s use of narration, and writing style.
The author, "Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949 in St. Johns, Antigua, in
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the West Indies" (504). When she moved to New York at the age of seventeen, "She changed her name...to shed the 'weights'...of her past life" (504) and wrote her first book, At the Bottom Of the River (1984) which included the short story “Girl”. Not long after she wrote, "Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), My Brother (1997), and A Small Place (2000)" (504). Her short story “Girl” is a reflection of the suppression she felt when living in Antigua. This story is historically accurate because it takes place when the woman’s job was to run the household and take care of her husband. This prevented women of that time from being themselves and having their own self discoveries, especially in the form of their own sexuality. Within the short story the theme is proven through the author’s use of point of view and narration. The narrator of the story is a mother, her dialogue is first person narration. The mother’s opinions are the only ones known, except for when the daughter interrupts, to voice her objections to what the mother says. She explains that the daughter needs to, “Try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are bent on becoming” (504). The daughter interrupts and tries to say that she doesn’t think of herself as a slut, but the mother will hear nothing of it. Since the mother grew up in a different time than her daughter, she has different ideas than her daughter on what makes a girl a ‘slut’. All the daughter has done is, "Speak to wharf-rat boys" (504) but in the mother's mind, that means her daughter is a slut. The daughter thinks nothing of it since she has grown up in a different time than her mother. The mother had to grow up in an environment where she learned to suppress her sexuality so now through her narration and point of view, she is trying to do the same to her daughter. Suppression of the female sexuality within “Girl” by Kincaid is also shown through the writing style.
The story is written as one giant sentence in the idea of a demonstration list. The mother within the story is explaining to her daughter how to be a perfect woman within their village. Some of the demonstrations the mother gives to her daughter are, "This is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest" (505). All of the tasks that the daughter will have to perform someday will make her the perfect lady in her mother's eyes. The mother's plans are ruined though because she believes that her daughter wants to be a slut when she is older. So in order to keep her daughter on the right track the mother explains in her list on, "This is how to behave in the presence of men who don't know you very well, and this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming" (505). The mother is trying her hardest to raise her daughter right so she will not become a village outcast. The author's writing style within the story in the form of a list is the mother trying to distract her daughter from embracing her
sexuality.
The values and rules of traditional community add great pressure on an individual 's shoulder while choosing their identity. While women 's have relatively more freedom then before but however values of traditional communities creates an invisible fence between their choices. It put the young women in a disconcerting situation about their sexual freedom. Bell demonstrates the how the contradiction messages are delivered to the young woman 's, she writes that “Their peers, television shows such as Sex and the City, and movies seem to encourage sexual experimentation... But at the same time, books, such as Unhooked and A Return to Modesty advise them to return to courtship practices from the early 1900s”(27).
Society continually places restrictive standards on the female gender not only fifty years ago, but in today’s society as well. While many women have overcome many unfair prejudices and oppressions in the last fifty or so years, late nineteenth and early twentieth century women were forced to deal with a less understanding culture. In its various formulations, patriarchy posits men's traits and/or intentions as the cause of women's oppression. This way of thinking diverts attention from theorizing the social relations that place women in a disadvantageous position in every sphere of life and channels it towards men as the cause of women's oppression (Gimenez). Different people had many ways of voicing their opinions concerning gender inequalities amound women, including expressing their voices and opinions through their literature. By writing stories such as Daisy Miller and The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Henry James let readers understand and develop their own ideas on such a serious topic that took a major toll in American History. In this essay, I am going to compare Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” to James’ “Daisy Miller” as portraits of American women in peril and also the men that had a great influence.
She then moves through the chapters exploring the changing experiences of female maturation. Throughout the book, Brumberg intermingles her own voice as a historian with the voices drawn from girls personal diaries to provide entry into the hidden history of female adolescents’ experience with the body. Brumberg includes prominent women from history that wrote or talked about puberty such as Anne Frank, Lucy Larcom, Margaret Mead, and even Queen Victoria. She includes these historical women to provide the realization that even a queen, a popular poet, a feminist writer in the 1920s all left indications that they felt self-conscious in adolescents, as most girls do. When writing this book, Brumberg felt the twinge of embarrassment in talking about the female body, realizing then that even today women still struggle talking about this subject.
In Deborah E. McDowell’s essay Black Female Sexuality in Passing she writes about the sexual repression of women seen in Nella Larsen‘s writings during the Harlem Renaissance, where black women had difficulty expressing their sexuality. In her essay, she writes about topics affecting the sexuality of women such as, religion, marriage, and male dominated societies. In Toni Morrison’s short story, “Recitatif” there are examples of women who struggle to express their sexuality. The people in society judge women based off their appearance, and society holds back women from expressing themselves due to society wanting them to dress/act a certain way.
Bartholomae, D., & Petrosky, A. (2011). Ways of reading: an anthology for writers (9th ed.). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. “Judith Butler; Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy.”
In the short story, “Girl,” the narrator describes certain tasks a woman should be responsible for based on the narrator’s culture, time period, and social standing. This story also reflects the coming of age of this girl, her transition into a lady, and shows the age gap between the mother and the daughter. The mother has certain beliefs that she is trying to pass to her daughter for her well-being, but the daughter is confused by this regimented life style. The author, Jamaica Kincaid, uses various tones to show a second person point of view and repetition to demonstrate what these responsibilities felt like, how she had to behave based on her social standing, and how to follow traditional customs.
This paper argued that the mother in Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “Girl” is loving towards her daughter because the mother is taking time to teaching her daughter how to be a woman, and because she wants to protect her in the future from society’s judgment. Kincaid showed that the mother cared and loved her daughter. The mother wants her daughter to know how to run a home and how to keep her life in order to societies standards. Alongside practical advice, the mother instructs her daughter on how to live a fulfilling
“Girl” makes the impression that the mother wants the daughter to take over the “women’s” work around the house as well as she tells her which day to wash the white clothes Monday, wash the colored clothes on Tuesday, and she is teaching her how to iron her father’s clothes the way he likes them done and how to sew on a button; “This is how to make a button-hole for the button you have just sewed on.” (380) The mother also is teaching her daughter how to cook for the family. “Cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil,” (380) so that everyone will eat them. The mother also discusses table manners, “always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn some-one else’s stomach.”
Jamaica Kincaid’s success as a writer was not easily attained as she endured struggles of having to often sleep on the floor of her apartment because she could not afford to buy a bed. She described herself as being a struggling writer, who did not know how to write, but sheer determination and a fortunate encounter with the editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn who set the epitome for her writing success. Ms. Kincaid was a West-Indian American writer who was the first writer and the first individual from her island of Antigua to achieve this goal. Her genre of work includes novelists, essayist, and a gardener. Her writing style has been described as having dreamlike repetition, emotional truth and autobiographical underpinnings (Tahree, 2013). Oftentimes her work have been criticized for its anger and simplicity and praised for its keen observation of character, wit and lyrical quality. But according to Ms. Kincaid her writing, which are mostly autobiographical, was an act of saving her life by being able to express herself in words. She used her life experiences and placed them on paper as a way to make sense of her past. Her experience of growing up in a strict single-parent West-Indian home was the motivation for many of her writings. The knowledge we garnered at an early age influenced the choice we make throughout our life and this is no more evident than in the writings of Jamaica Kincaid.
The poem "Girl" by author Jamaica Kincaid shows love and family togetherness by creating microcosmic images of the way mothers raise their children in order to survive. Upon closer examination, the reader sees that the text is a string of images in Westerner Caribbean family practices. Jamaica Kincaid has taken common advice that daughters are constantly hearing from their mothers and tied them into a series of commands that a mother uses to prevent her daughter from turning into "the slut that she is so bent on becoming" (380). But they are more than commands; the phrases are a mother's way of ensuring that her daughter has the tools that she needs to survive as an adult. The fact that the mother takes the time to train the daughter in the proper ways for a lady to act in their time is indicative of their family love.
The short story, Girl, by Jamaica Kincaid, can very easily be related directly to the author’s own life. Kincaid had a close relationship with her mother until her three younger brothers were born. After the birth of her brothers, three major values of her mother became apparent to Kincaid. In turn, Kincaid used the three values of her mother to write the short story, Girl. Specifically, these values led to three themes being formed throughout the story. It appears in the short story that the mother was simply looking out for her daughter; however, in all reality, the mother is worried about so much more. Kincaid uses the themes of negativity towards female sexuality, social norms and stereotypes, and the significant
n Prelude, Katherine Mansfield explores issues of sexual frustration and the restrictions on female identity in a patriarchal society, as experienced by three generations of Burnell women. Linda Burnells responses to male sexuality are tainted by their inevitable association to her obligations in fulfilling her role as a wife and a mother, both of which Linda has shown indifference towards. As a result, Linda's own sexuality suffers under feelings of oppression.
Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” shows in society how a woman should be placed and what it means to be a woman. A women doesn’t question her partner, instead she is subservient to him. A woman’s duties include staying at home taking care of the children and cooking; while the man works and brings home the money. A feministic approach to Kincaid’s “Girl” points to the idea of the stereotypes that women can only be what they do in the home, they should only be pure and virtuous, and their main focus should be satisfying their husband.
“Girls wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it is okay to be a boy; for a girl it is like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading” (McEwan 55-56). Throughout the history of literature women have been viewed as inferior to men, but as time has progressed the idealistic views of how women perceive themselves has changed. In earlier literature women took the role of being the “housewife” or the household caretaker for the family while the men provided for the family. Women were hardly mentioned in the workforce and always held a spot under their husband’s wing. Women were viewed as a calm and caring character in many stories, poems, and novels in the early time period of literature. During the early time period of literature, women who opposed the common role were often times put to shame or viewed as rebels. As literature progresses through the decades and centuries, very little, but noticeable change begins to appear in perspective to the common role of women. Women were more often seen as a main character in a story setting as the literary period advanced. Around the nineteenth century women were beginning to break away from the social norms of society. Society had created a subservient role for women, which did not allow women to stand up for what they believe in. As the role of women in literature evolves, so does their views on the workforce environment and their own independence. Throughout the history of the world, British, and American literature, women have evolved to become more independent, self-reliant, and have learned to emphasize their self-worth.
Over the years, the romance is being changed--and the women who write romances have struggled with the form. In fact, the struggle over the romance is itself part of the larger struggle for the right to define/control female sexuality. Catherine Kirkland--who studied a group of romance writers--found that most had been avid readers before they turned their hand to writing. Some may want to promote changes outside the privatized family environment (p. 75).