Girl

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Girl
Jamaica Kincaid

The short story “Girl,” like many of Kincaid’s books, deals with the experience of being young and female in a poor country. Kincaid’s complicated relationship with her mother comes out in the mother-daughter dynamic in the story. This story also shows the difficult labors of women and the limitations put on girls. History has taught us that these limitations have been passed down generation after generation and this story shows the extreme complexity of our relationships between mothers and daughters.
To understand the story of “Girl”, you will have to understand the past and biography of the writer. According to my research, Kincaid was born to Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949 in Antigua, once a British country in the West Indies. Kincaid’s relationship with her mother was less than ideal. Kincaid describes her mother as a literate woman who struggled against her poor circumstances, eventually feeling bitterness toward her children because of all her problems. Kincaid was forced to drop out of school when she was 12 and help raise her brothers because he stepfather was sick and unable to work. Even though she enjoyed school and was very good in it, her mother felt she would be better served at home. At the age of 17, she was then forced to move to New York State in the U.S. to work as an au pair for a wealthy family to help support her family in Antigua. Once Kincaid was in New York, she refused to send money nor respond to letters from her mother due to the resentment she felt for her mother forcing her to leave school that she loved and then forced to leave the only home she knew and go to a foreign country. However, the move turned out to be a wonderful thing in her life because she not only was able ...

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...ects her to have the strength of her mother. Strength is usually learned through experience, not instruction, I believe. The mother also has a built up regression or resentment for her own child since she continually calls her a slut. Which shows that she does not like the girl for the person she is becoming. And even though this is a short story, there are many truths in it. The writing reads like a “say so” but what exactly is being said is more ambiguous. There is a declaration of love for certain, but also of dislike and judgement from someone who is suppose to be loved unconditionally. Yet, this is the mothers process on how to make a girl into a woman though in some ways it’s very “old fashioned” and it is damaging to the overall relationship between the two, undoubtedly causing resentment on the part of the daughter to the mother and an unstable relationship.

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