Preview

Girl By Jamaica Kincaid Summary

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1314 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Girl By Jamaica Kincaid Summary
‘Girl’ is an astonishing prose poem written by Jamaica Kincaid, this is one of the monologue that is easily imagined in a clear dramatic context. The irony of this prose poem come from the title given to it “Girl” because the girl only gets to speak two line through out the text and the rest is covered by the mother. The prose poem consists of single sentences about a mother advising her daughter about femininity, society, traditions and sexuality. Throughout the text, the use of single sentence advices from the mother proves the purpose of the prose poem which is the mother’s fears for the girl’s future and the mother’s desperate need of her not becoming a ‘slut’. The mother intends to advice as well as scold her at once with the words of wisdom. Since the mother has dominated the poem, the central voice belongs to her and the use of sentences suggests her advices are at a very fast pace.

The complete text consisting just two character’s makes the sentences portray a brief meaning and this causes the repetitions
…show more content…
The mother’s social advices are also connected to sexual advices, she literally teaches her daughter how to smile at people that she likes and how to smile at men that she dislikes, and how to avoid people that may cause a threat to her sexuality, this is supported by the sentence “don’t throw stones at blackbird, because it might not be a blackbird at all”. This reference suggests how much the mother’s intermingling the social advice with the sexual

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Jamaica Kincaid’s article “On Seeing England for the First Time," uses metonomy to give her reader a precise analysis of her perception of England and its people. She begins with her first encounter of England on a map and the great significance it holds for the people of her nation. She speaks of it as a special jewel that only certain people may wear, as this country was described as precious and admirable. Later, she emphasizes England’s significance by informing the reader of a typical breakfast she eats, consisting of multiple components that are all imported from England. She repeatedly mentions the fact that she eats oat porridge and drinks hot cocoa, despite the fact that she is living in a country with a hot climate.…

    • 392 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Gwen Harwood’s work is influenced by several elements; poetic power, dramatic presentation and psychological insights, each to create compelling poetry. Significantly her rich feministic, religious and melancholic perceptions, influenced by her life experience and personal context is reflected in her poetry. This is clearly depicted in the poems, ‘Father & Child’, ‘The Violets’ and, ‘At Mornington’. Each of the aspects of Harwood’s work can be analysed independently in to receive the implications of whether “a pervading pessimism clouds her achievement”.…

    • 538 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    "Girl" by Jamica Kincaid

    • 715 Words
    • 3 Pages

    “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid is a short story/poem was published in The New Yorker in 1978. There are many things that the story “Girl” shows us. One is the oppression of women and the lack of the options that women got. Another is the change in parenting techniques as orders like these wouldn’t be issued in today’s world. The narrator also shows how the gender role has grown since the late 1970s, shows the little girl protesting toward her mother, and shows the love a mother has for her daughter.…

    • 715 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Anne Sexton’s poem, “Her Kind” presents a stark look at the roles that women place themselves in and are forced into by societal pressures. Throughout history, women have been expected to take on the role of obedient wife, and failure to do so can result in a barrage of retaliations on a woman and her lifestyle. Though Sexton’s troubled past of depression and eventual suicide has cast negative light on the meanings of her works--particularly speculation that her work is a confession-- “Her Kind” is not so much a personal story as it is the story of the three roles women continue to fall into, even to this day: a witch, an old-school midwife, and a whore.…

    • 815 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Comparing "Girl" and "A&P"

    • 1237 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Within every story or poem, there is always an interpretation made by the reader whether right or wrong. In doing so, one must thoughtfully analyze all aspects of the story in order to make the most accurate assessment based on the literary elements the author has used. Compared and contrasted within the two short stories, "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid, and John Updike 's "A&P," the literary elements character and theme are made evident. These two elements are prominent in each of the differing stories yet similarities are found through each by studying the elements. The girls ' innocence and naivety as characters act as passages to show something superior, oppression in society shown towards women that is not equally shown towards men.…

    • 1237 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Adam And Eve Poem

    • 1741 Words
    • 7 Pages

    “Adam and Eve” by Ani Difranco and “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid are two literary works that speak to the issue of how important it is to have a mother in a daughter’s life. It is the life experience(s) that can only be communicated to a daughter by her mother. The emotions, feeling and understanding of the female experience of what a woman goes through in life. When a young lady does not receive this information for the female prospective is the difference between socialites view and becoming of a “bad” or “good” girl. It is critical to have a mother in the life of a daughter to provide emotional balance, feeling and understanding from a woman’s point of view.…

    • 1741 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the story, A & P the theme highlights adolescence in which the author resonates young woman and men who are coming of age. First, the innocence of three carefree girls unashamed of wearing their bathing suits in a non-beach setting attracts the attention of Sammy, a nineteen year old male who works at the A & P grocery store. Second, the author describes the girls through Sammy as the protagonist who admires their bodies and using vivid imagery to describe their physical appearance of these young girls from a male’s point of view. Sammy describes each of the girls in detail, admiring their bodies and finds one of the three girls most attractive calling her Queenie. To contrast the beauty of these girls, Sammy describes the older women…

    • 395 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The descriptive language of the song shows examples of how men and women interacted and the double standards that existed for women. Women often needed to rely on men for financial stability, but interacting with men too often would invite criticism of their morality. The concept of “charity girls” created a new category of women who were both respectable and exercised sexual freedom. Many women also practiced moral self-regulation and rejected men who expressed interest in them. The song is written from this perspective and establishes the idea that remaining pure and moral will allow its subject to continue to provide for her family instead of pursuing her own selfish…

    • 979 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The short story “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid was a bittersweet warning from a mother to her daughter. The reader is experiencing the viewpoint of the protagonist through the soliloquy of her mother’s instructions that batter her like bugs smacking the windshield. This scolding reminds me of conversations with my own grandmother. The author doesn’t use periods or capital letters to symbolize the endless barrage of words, which I mistakenly perceived as nagging during my first review. A second reading brought about feelings of sympathy in the lament of a regretful mother’s memories; this reminded me of my own mixed perceptions of past conversations with family. I enjoyed the mother’s attempts to convey her own experience in life through her instructions on how to do mundane chores. When the mother in the story says, “Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them in the stone heap” refers to laundry, “Cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil, and “Soak salt fish before you cook it” refers to meal preparation (Kincaid 541). After repeated warnings to her daughter against walking like “the slut you are so bent on becoming”, I felt sympathy for the mother’s obvious experience with a hard life as she describes making medicine “to throw away a child before it even becomes a child”, and “bullying and being bullied by a man” (Kincaid 542). I wondered if the mother had been raped. My favorite reference on revenge was her instruction to “spit up in the air if you feel like it”, and “how to…

    • 694 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    On his college campus he find himself demonized by certain female peers because of his sex. Women accuse him of being part of group collectively “guilty of keeping all the joys and privileges to [themselves]” He finds himself condemned to share the guilt of the few, the few who actually took advantage. The jarring contrast, between the individual and the standard they are held to, recurs throughout the text. The saddening theme of the tragedy of assigned identity, the struggle with inescapable assigned guilt, rears its head throughout both texts. To amplify this feeling of injustice, both authors use vivid imagery to juxtapose the reality of their subjects against the supposed evil they both have cherished. Kingston’s Aunt vilified and despised by villagers for her supposed immorality is described as a gentle happy woman, the apple of her father's eye, a loving woman, a mother who didn’t abandon her child. The men Sanders knew, who stole all the pleasures in the world, live with the privilege of hernias, finicky backs , missing fingers, bent backs, “hands tattooed with scars”. The poignancy of these characters comes from their reality as the antithesis of what society has labeled them as. It strikes the reader, makes them understand what the writers have being trying convey, an understanding of the vast inequity of these…

    • 939 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    In the satire of the sexes, Egalia’s Daughters by Gerd Brantenberg, there is put forth a society different from which has ever been present in modern times. This would be a society where women were at the forefront and did the decision making, worked and held governmental positions. The men were portrayed in the way females live in present society, though it was often exaggerated to make that point. Men were dominated and ruled by women and had to do their bidding and cook for them and take care of the children, so on and so forth. By taking a hard look at how sexuality is imagined and experienced on all analytical levels and picking apart the social construction of gender in Egalia’s Daughters, society itself in the present can start to be unraveled as well. What is found in this book can transfer over to a point and parallel itself with present experiences of women and their struggle for equality, recognition and acknowledgement.…

    • 1697 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Girl can best be analyzed by the Feminist perspective because it is about a girl who is being taught the “right” way to do things as a woman. Girl is written in the second person point of view, in which the reader is the girl that the speaker is speaking to and advising about how to behave. At the beginning of the short story, it seems that the girl is just being taught some basic rules and manners that one should always remember, but then the speaker throws in, “on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming;” (Kincaid Line 11). The girl the narrator is referring to is often told to not be “the slut you are so bent on becoming”.…

    • 505 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Kincaid By Thomas Hardy

    • 1235 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Therefore, there are different possibilities the reader could interpret, and there are multiple options that still support Kincaid’s writing. First, aligning with the nature of a list of commands, the narrator could be through the perspective of those that surround this young woman in her life, offering advice or demands to keep her within the confines of what a woman is supposed to be like. This is further supported by how the poem often breaks up from its flow, interruptions indicated by the use of italics: “…but I don’t sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school” (12-13). These interruptions could possibly be this young woman that is on the receiving end of these commands in an attempt to speak up and better her genuinely taxing position. Having the poetic narrator be a person or group of people who are significant to this girl’s life enforces the message of how women are often policed to act a certain way. Second, taking influence from the poem’s structure, the poem could be from the girl’s point of view. It is not a far-off idea to have the girl repeat this list of commands to herself. Taking this into account, it harkens back to the poem’s layout, eliminating line breaks, fitting a stream of consciousness on the narrator’s part. This makes the lines that refer to her dress being as if she were a slut…

    • 1235 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Jamaica Kincaid Girl

    • 889 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The mother in this story is such a cold and mean woman who is indifferent about her daughter’s emotional world. Cynthia Bily, who writes a literary criticism of “Girl”, points out that” She gives no advice about how to be a friend, or how to sense which women to confide in. There are no tips about changing a diaper or wiping a tear or nurturing a child in any way; she mentions children only when she shows’ how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child’” (Bily 2). Maybe the mother was also brought up in such a cruel family, then she does not have the awareness to consider her daughter’s emotion at all. Besides, the mother has a negative living attitude because she doesn’t care whether the world outside is beautiful. In the contrast, what she care is the right way that the girl should behave in front of people. Kincaid writes” don’t squat down to play marbles- you are not a boy, you know; don’t pick people’s flowers- you might catch something; don’t throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be blackbird at all” (Kincaid 259). All the statements concerning about the natural scene are prohibitions. She doesn’t teach her daughter how to enjoy such a beautiful living environment or how to make herself feel happy, however, all the suggestions are…

    • 889 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Cruelty Ai Poem

    • 682 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The girls are handed towels and soap and teaches them to bend over the proper way and wash their, “hairless entrances into themselves.” Ai’s use of language is very detailed and very alive. She puts me back in a place when I was a child. There is not much form to her poems as it all seems to be personal narratives and some longer poems that she refers to as fiction. They can be found in the part of the book titled, Fate which is a collection of poems about politics, eroticism, show business as tragic comedy performed by men and women banished to the bare stage of their obsessions.…

    • 682 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays