Alienation In Annie's Development

Since that time she has not any male friends and grows up “in a world populated by women” (Paravisini-Gebert 111). Instead of male characters, female figures like Mrs John, Ma Chess, Ma Jolie, Gwen and the Red Girl play important roles in Annie’s development. Annie sees beautifulness only from female characters: “When my eyes rested on my father, I didn’t think very much of the way he looked. But when my eyes rested on my mother, I found her beautiful” (Annie 18). Mistron’s study shows that women play a central role in the domestic domain in West India; mothers have close and strong relationships with their children, they train young generation and expect from them care when they are old. Children often stay at home until their twenties or

[...] Kincaid focuses intensely in all her works on the relationship between the narrator and her mother. There is always a correlation between the narrator and her mother. There is always a correlation between the political difficulties afflicting the relationship between the island and the “mother” country and the problems affecting the separation from the mother, or the “mother” country, evokes extreme anxiety that appears as a cultural and physic alienation. The absence of the once-affirming mother, or an affirming “mother” country, causes dislocation and ultimately speaks to the importance of such bonds

“The road for me now went only in one direction; away from my home, away from my father, away from the everlasting blue sky, away from the everlasting hot sun, away from people who said to me, ‘This happened during the time your mother was carrying you’” (134). Leseur writes about Annie’s decision, “[i]n her mid-teenage years she finds herself deeply isolated from her parents, from most men, from her classmates, and from the culture of the island itself. For Annie, who has no interest in the typical lifestyle of wife and mother, there are few choices but to leave Antigua forever” (180). Simmons stresses, “she is leaving, not because she wants to go to England or to study to be a nurse, as is planned; she is leaving because departure is the only way to preserve a precarious, newborn sense of identity” (118). The last chapter of the novel begins with the sentence “My name is Annie John” (130). Annie introduces the reader her real name at the end of the novel. It means she is now grown up and ready to start new adolescence life. However, her new life must begin not in her homeland, not with her mother, not with her best girlfriends, but in England, all alone. By separating herself from her mother, who embodies colonial culture, Annie achieves her freedom and personal identity, “I was looking at them with a smile on my face but disgust in my heart”