Exploitation In Michelle Cliff's Down The Shore

Michelle Cliff’s short story Down the Shore conspicuously deals with a particularly personal and specific, deeply psychological experience, in order to ultimately sub-textually create a metaphor regarding a wider issue of highly social nature. More specifically, the development of the inter-dependent themes of trauma, exploitation, as well as female vulnerability, which all in the case in question pertain to one single character, also latently extend over to the wider social issue of colonialism and its entailing negative repercussions, in this case as it applies to the Caribbean and the British Empire. The story’s explicit personal factor is developed through the literary techniques of repetition, symbolism, metaphor, as well as slightly warped albeit telling references to a distinct emotional state, while its implicit social factor is suggested via the techniques of allusion, so as to ultimately create a generally greater, undergirding metaphor.

More specifically, the protagonist recalls herself as a young girl being held “by the hand” by a “woman with Kool”, who purchases for her a “Mason Mint” subsequently takes her to a cabin but abandons her, being “nowhere to be seen” at the moment of the young girl’s experience with the harrowing symptoms of presumed oral sex, therefore allowing for the assumption of her mother (the “woman with Kool”) being the person prompting her to partake in unpleasant sexual encounters at a tender age. Furthermore, the metaphor that she feels devoid of “arms or legs” lying in the cabin, in concert with the reference mentioned previously of her feeling like a girl in a sideshow (essentially like a puppet), fortifies this idea of her having no agency over herself, of being controlled and exploited by her