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Girl By Jamaica Kincaid

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Girl -Jamaica Kincaid Jamaica Kincaid is award-winning author whose work mainly speaks on the issues of being a girl in poor 3rd world country. She currently lives in New England but she was born and raised in Antigua, an island in the West Indies. She wrote Girl as a conversation between her mother and her pre-teen self. With a blunt and formal tone Girl paints a picture of a girl growing into puberty in a low socio-economic situation in a 3rd world country. Girl is a replica of a one sided conversation between a mother to her daughter; the mother advices and warns her daughter on what a girl her age should and shouldn’t do. The story starts out with a demand which continues on to a laundry list of chores and duties. The tone remains formal …show more content…

Since her mother warns her from being a slut she tells her about a medicine that would ‘throw away a child before it even becomes a child”(Kincaid, 470) which suggests that the mother did not trust her daughter and feared that she would become a ‘slut’ despite the constant warnings. “You are not a boy” (Kincaid, 470) perfectly sums up the entire story because this one sentence summarizes all the warnings and advice the mother was giving her daughter. In Becoming members of Society: Learning the Social Meanings of Gender by Aaron H. Devor it shows that gender is a merely socially constructed and assigned and in Girl by Jamaica Kincaid that is exactly what’s …show more content…

• Given the time and place the story is set in, was the mother overbearing on her daughter? • Do you think the mother went through a similar situation with her mother? Work Cited Kincaid, Jamaica. “Girl.” Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing. Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, Bonnie Lisle. 7thed.Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004. 469-470 Devor, Aaron H. “Becoming Members of Society: Learning the Meaning of Gender” Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing. Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, Bonnie Lisle. 7thed.Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004.

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