“Not at Home in her Own Skin”: Self-Invention through the Resolution of Conflicts in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy

“not at home in her own skin”: Self-Invention through the Resolution of Conflicts in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy

Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy is a Bildungsroman centering on the self-invention of the title-character, who is a young immigrant woman from Antigua. As part of this process, Lucy, as a character, struggles against the various forces of her mother, her past and her even her femininity at a very personal level, thereby setting up a series of conflicts seen throughout the novel. Lucy as a text, however, adds another layer to these conflicts. By grounding these widely different conflicts in Lucy’s overarching struggle to assert her individuality by differentiating herself from the masses, the text sets up these conflicts as a struggle against the blurring of boundaries between Lucy and others, which then becomes the principal force Lucy must struggle against to re-invent herself as an individual.

One of the most conspicuous conflicts that Lucy engages in is against her mother. Lucy’s hatred for her mother is set up from the beginning when she reminisces about her own heartlessness in causing her mother pain (Kincaid, 22), whereas incidents such as her mother telling Lucy that her name was derived from that of Satan (152) indicate a degree of reciprocation. However, at a textual level, this conflict is seen to take the form of Lucy’s “feeble attempts… to draw a line [between herself and her mother]” (90) against her mother’s efforts to “turn [Lucy] into an echo of her” (36). The particular use of the word “echo”, with its connotations of being a weaker, deficient reflection of the original, succinctly sums up why Lucy needs to assert her independence from her mother, as she strives “to be with the people who stand apart” (98...

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...i-layered, with those seen at the level of Lucy’s character, namely those that involve Mariah, her mother, her past and her femininity being mirrored in an overarching conflict present at the level of the text between a fierce independence and the blurring of boundaries between Lucy and others. Consequently, these conflicts all call for the demarcation of clear boundaries between the differing factions for their resolution, which represents the only way Lucy can achieve an individual identity. However, this simplified binary solution is seen to both be not completely effective, as well as being implausible by Lucy herself, who, as part of the novel, is writing after a period of time after which she has gained perspective on life. The novel ends such, at a note of inconclusiveness both with regard to the self-invention of Lucy, as well as the narrative in Lucy.