There are many expectations and roles for adolescents, especially daughters. Many young girls are taught from an early age how to act and what to do in order to fit into the small box that is being a mother, wife, or daughter. This box includes knowing how to make food for the family, clean up after others, and constantly being polite and respectable. When someone cannot or will not fit into the box, they are judged and looked down upon. Although women and children in the past have always had strict and specific duties in the home, today these expectations are unrealistic and unfair, and therefore these assumptions should be challenged.
Girl by Jamaica Kincaid is about the roles and expectations in society. The article is written as
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This idea that young women are not as successful or cannot be as successful as men restricts many girls today. They already have it in their mind that they cannot do what they want simply because they are a girl and must first and foremost be a daughter or a wife. There has always been the idea that women and children should be seen and not heard. Teenage girls being considered both a child and a girl gives little room to voice opinions and restricts young women. It is as if someone is always watching behavior and image but not actually listening to anything that …show more content…
She cares so much about the appearance and perception of her daughter by the rest of society that even doing something normal could be considered too promiscuous. This type of social pressure and judgement can be extremely harmful for young women. It is difficult to understand how is it expected that young women should be polite but not too friendly as not to give off the wrong impression. There is a thin line teenage girl are supposed to be walking but it is virtually impossible. There is also harsh stereotyping towards teenage boys Kincaid calls "wharf-rat boys." Likely being a "slut" or a "wharf-rat boy" means they are a in a lower class and seen as unworthy of talking to people not also considered a part of the same social
Gender Roles and Feminism in Killing a Mockingbird. When the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, was written by Harper Lee, the Southern United States was still clinging tightly to traditional values. Southern societies pressured men to behave as gentlemen, and women were expected to be polite and wear dresses. These stringent gender roles were adhered to in small southern towns because they were isolated from the more progressive attitudes in other areas of the United States.
This was the illustration of this entire story. As the story goes it present a lot perspective and though of the mother and very little of the girl. More importantly, the story shows that the mother doesn’t really care about how the girl feels about her advice; it wasn’t a choice either she take her advice and become a good daughter and a good wife in the future or she will become known a “slut” who doesn’t follow her tradition. This story will make you wonder if the girl will ever become the perfect girl that her mother wants her to be or if she gets use to the American tradition and not be the perfect girl her mother ought her to
Society places ideas concerning proper behaviors regarding gender roles. Over the years, I noticed that society's rules and expectations for men and women are very different. Men have standards and specific career goals that we must live up to according to how others judge.
The story “Girl” takes the form of a series of lessons; the point of the lessons, according to the mother, is to teach her daughter to behave and act properly. Kincaid’s complicated relationship with her mother comes out in the mother-daughter dynamic in the story. The mother mentions practical and helpful advice that will help her daughter keep a house of her own someday and also how to have a life of her own. It can be argued that in Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “Girl” that the mother 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.
It is said that a girl can often develop some of her mother's characteristics. Although, in their works, Kincaid, Hong Kingston and Davenport depict their protagonists searching for their own identities, yet being influenced in different ways by their mothers. Jamaica Kincaid's poem Girl, is about a young woman coming-of-age receiving helpful advice from her mother. In this poem, Kincaid addresses several issues where a mother's influence is beneficial to a young woman's character. The mother, or speaker, in Girl, offers advice to her daughter- advice that she otherwise would not learn without being told or shown. The mother advises the daughter about everyday tasks, and how to go about them properly (in her opinion).
Although teenage girls can be impacted nagatively, it also makes them aware of the issues that face women in our world today and empowers them to make a change.
Girl by Jamaica Kincaid, is a story about a mother who tells her daughter what to do and how to act. The girl in the story wants to become a normal teenager, hang out with her friends and do fun things so we assume. Her mother on the other hand, wants her to start preparing meals, wash the clothes, and not to talk to boys among other things. Numerous times within the story the mother believes the daughter wants to become promiscuous, so the mother is continually trying to show her how to do things and how to act so that she doesn’t become a promiscuous woman. It seems as if the girl doesn’t have a choice to live a normal life, or to live her life the way that she wants to just like any other girl her age. Instead,
Throughout the story, however, the word girl is constantly used as an insult against her. For example, when a feed salesman comes to the father, the father introduces her as a hired-hand, and the salesman laughs and says, “ ‘Could of fooled me.’ He said ‘I thought it was only a girl.’” The mother also reinforces that she should not be out there when she talks to the father about keeping the girl inside. The narrator sees her mother in a negative light and does not want to become her; she hates housework and describes it as depressing and endless, despite the fact that shortly after she says that the father’s work is “ritualistically important.”
To say that girls are different from boys is an understatement. Boys and girls are treated and raised differently while growing up in a patriarchal environment(Chesney-Lind & Sheldon. Chapter 6); the diverse ways in which they mature physically and emotionally, boy’s and girl’s involvement or path that leads to their potential delinquency are worlds apart. In addition, bombardment by role models and advertisements of society plays a large aspect in the differences between boys and girls. The majority of female role m...
Even with the advancement of women in society, their roles and societal expectations have not changed. Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” are two stories with varied elements set in different periods in history, that show the role society has deemed as belonging to women. "The Story of an Hour" was written in the year 1894, almost a century before Kincaid wrote "Girl". However, despite the large gap in the times of the authors, a common theme emerges and that is the theme of the oppression of women and the role they are expected to assume in society.
“Girl” written by Jamaica Kincaid is essentially a set of instructions given by an adult, who is assumed to be the mother of the girl, who is laying out the rules of womanhood, in Caribbean society, as expected by the daughter’s gender. These instructions set out by the mother are related to topics including household chores, manners, cooking, social conduct, and relationships. The reader may see these instructions as demanding, but these are a mother’s attempt, out of care for the daughter, to help the daughter to grow up properly. The daughter does not appear to have yet reached adolescence, however, her mother believes that her current behavior will lead her to a life of promiscuity. The mother postulates that her daughter can be saved from a life of promiscuity and ruin by having domestic knowledge that would, in turn also, empower her as a productive member in their community and the head of her future household. This is because the mother assumes that a woman’s reputation and respectability predisposes the quality of a woman’s life in the community.
In the short story “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid is a story that everyone can related to. The story is about a mother telling her daughter what to do, what not to do and how to do things. Kind of like society or parents or a friends of what to do. There has also been always been expectations of what to do and how to do things in life regards of gender, nationality or religion. The male has he’s duties and the female has different duties. However, in the typical society today, a person is supposed to graduate from high school and go straight in to an Ivy League university, to get a degree in a field of study that makes lot of money. While working a person must save money for that dream big house with the white picket fence. At the same time, you have to look for that perfect spouse so you can have the big beautiful dream wedding. After the wedding it’s the romantic honeymoon to Bora Bora. After a couple years the baby comes, and you are a happy family. Typically, that is what parents teach their children of what is what is expected of them.
The fact that there are so many rules and moral principles that are being passed to the daughter indicates that mother and daughter spend a lot of time together. The reader gets the impression that the advice that the mother gives her daughter has been passed down from many generations of women. The advice of the ages has enabled their daughters to endure hardships and to avoid making the same mistakes that they had made, such as planting okra far from the house because it attracts red ants. There were some women in the past that learned this lesson the hard way, and included it in the litany of advice for future generations. But "Girl" also shows the hostility and family dissension that the females suffer.
The short story, “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid deals with being a young female in a poor country. This can be seen because Kincaid’s complicated relationship with her own mother is illustrated with the mother-daughter dynamic in the story. As I continued to read the story, I saw bitterness and worriness from the mother grow towards her daughter as she became a teenager. Throughout the story, the mother would tell her daughter, “this is how you do this… and you must act like this,” forcing the young women to act and be someone she did not want to be. It was like she was protective of her daughter and did not want her to ruin her life. Throughout the whole story, the mother was telling the daughter how to do chores a certain way so when she grew into a woman she knew how to do them
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.