Expectations and Opportunities in "Girl"

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In her 1984 New York Times Book Review piece about Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River, Edith Milton singles out "Girl'' as " the most elegant and lucid piece of the collection,'' and observes that the mother's exhortations ‘‘define in a few paragraphs the expectations, the limitations, and the contents of an entire life.'' If this is an accurate assessment and I believe it is, what kind of life does it describe? What will the future hold for the girl is she follows her mother's suggestions?

Many of the instructions give purely practical advice for doing daily chores in a developing nation where running water and electricity are not common. Even in a society where people do not have many clothes, obtaining and maintaining them is hard work, and that work typically falls to women. "Girl" begins with laundry: ‘‘Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline.’’ Before the one-sentence story is done, the mother will come back to clothing many times, explaining how to buy fabric for a blouse, sew on a button and make a buttonhole, and hem a dress. And of course, women are also responsible for men's clothing, and the mother demonstrates ‘‘how you iron your father's khaki shirt so that it doesn't have a crease’’ and ‘‘how you iron your father's khaki pants so that they don't have a crease.''

Women are also providers of nourishment, and the mother explains how to grow and prepare different foods. In this family, the girl is expected to catch fish and to ‘‘soak salt fish overnight before you cook it.'' She learns to shop for bread, to grow okra and dasheen, a root vegetable, and to prepare pumpkin fritters, bread pudding, doukona (a cornmeal, banana and coconut pudding), and pepper pot, the staple of poor Caribbean families that involves reheating a large pot of greens with whatever fresh ingredients might be added on a given day. By preparing these humble dishes, a woman can "make ends meet.’’

The mother rounds out her list of womanly duties with guidance on cleaning (‘‘this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard’’), setting a table for any occasion, and making different kinds of ‘‘good medicine.’’ In a culture where there is a lot of work to be done, it is important that everyone do a fair share, and this is a woman's share.

Just as important, though, is that the girl learn how to behave in front of other people, especially men. Several of the instructions have to do with how one appears to others, such as the command to ‘‘always eat your food in such a way that it won't turn someone else's stomach.’’ A woman must learn to hide her true self, her true feelings, and wear the mask that is right for the occasion: "this is how you smile to someone you don't like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don't like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely.’’ Most of all, she must ‘‘try to walk like a lady and not like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming.’’ A woman may have thoughts of "sluttish behavior'' (by which is meant, I suppose, acting as though she wants or enjoys sex), but "this is how to behave in the presence of men who don't know you very well, and this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming.’’

Apparently the mother has learned to do all these things, and they are probably not beyond the girl's capacity either. But if she learns her lessons well, what will she have to look forward to, to be excited about? Where is the pleasure in this life? The litany of instructions in "Girl'' is a far cry from the advice given to women in today's popular women's magazines, which suggest that taking long aromatherapy baths to regenerate will make one a better mother, or advocate ‘‘making time for yourself.’’

Just as important as the advice the mother gives in "Girl" is what she leaves out. The advice is practical, ‘‘how to make ends meet.’’ There are no instructions for how to make beautiful things, or how to make oneself happy. The Caribbean is celebrated all around the world for its exuberant music, but the only reference to music in the story is to music that must not be made: "don't sing benna in Sunday school.’’ Tourists travel great distances to Antigua to admire its beautiful flowers and birds. In "Girl," the mother refers to flowers only once: ‘‘don't pick people's flowers you might catch something.’’ Her one mention of a bird is strangely cautionary: ‘‘don't throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all.’’

In an early essay in The New Yorker, Kincaid described the beauty of Antigua, and explained that Antiguans get up to begin their work very early in the morning, when the island is at its loveliest. In an interview, Kincaid remarked, ‘‘But it wasn't to admire any of these things that people got up so early. I had never, in all the time I lived there, heard anyone say, 'What a beautiful morning.' Once, just the way I read it in a book, I stretched and said to my mother, 'Oh, isn't it a really lovely morning?' She didn't reply to that at all.’’ People who live in the midst of rare beauty, it would appear, lose their ability to notice it, to find pleasure in it. A child relationship that concerns the mother could be taught to observe and enjoy the natural world for its beauty and elegance, but this daughter will not learn it from this mother.

There are no tender words in the mother's litany. She does not use "dear'' or any other terms of endearment, or even address the daughter by her name. 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.’’ The relationship that concerns the mother is the relationship between a man and a woman. If she derives any pleasure or pride from her own experiences with parenthood, she does not reveal it here.

Finally, there are no words in the mother's speech about possibilities beyond home and family. She does not speak of school or books, nor of travel, nor of a career. She offers the daughter what she has to offer: a set of instructions for a successful life as the mother understands it and lives it. That Kincaid wanted more is evident. She left Antigua and found a different sort of life for herself, as she explained in an interview with Kay Bonetti in The Missouri Review, "I did not know what would happen to me. I was just leaving, with great bitterness in my heart towards everyone I've ever known, but I could not have articulated why. I knew that I wanted something, but I did not know what. I knew I did not want convention. I wanted to risk something.’’

The story ends before we find out what happens to the girl. Does she heed all her mother's advice and become a competent homemaker? Does she follow Kincaid's lead and find something else? If she stays, is her life as joyless as her mother's? If she leaves, can she find a way to create a new family and a new home? What of the mother? If her life is as joyless as it seems, what sense of responsibility compels her to train her daughter for the same life? Kincaid might say that these questions and their answers are irrelevant, that she is revealing a truth about a moment and that should be enough. In an interview with Marilyn Snell in Mother Jones, she complains that Americans want pleasant solutions. "Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending. Perversely, I will not give the happy ending. I think life is difficult and that's that.’’

Source: Cynthia Bily, for Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2000.
Bily teaches English at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan.

Use of Language and the Mother-Daughter Relationship

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The mother/daughter relationship
Jamaica Kincaid's short story "Girl" is the opening piece in a collection entitled At the Bottom of the River. Critics have noted that the use of language in "Girl,’’ as well as in the other stories of this collection, is one of its most notable features. "Girl'' is unusual in that it is a short story written in the "second person'' voice, meaning that the narrator addresses the reader as "you.'' The narrator here is a mother giving advice to her daughter, who is the "you" in the story. Kincaid's use of language in this story is key to understanding the nature of the mother/daughter relationship which it conveys. Grammatically, the entire story is a single sentence, which reads like a list or string of statements made by the mother to her daughter. The use of repetition and rhythm renders the mother's words almost hypnotic. In her article "The Rhythm of Reality in the Works of Jamaica Kincaid,’’ Diane Simmons explains that, ‘‘in the long, seemingly artless, list-like sentences, the reader is mesmerized into Kincaid's world.’’ She goes on to say that ‘‘like the girl to whom the mother speaks, the reader is lulled and drawn in by the chant of motherly admonitions.’’

The central theme of "Girl," as in many of Kincaid's stories, is the mother/daughter relationship. An important element of the use of language in this story is the sense that the mother's ‘‘chant of information and advice’’ (as Simmons calls it) threatens to completely engulf the girl, leaving her no language with which to formulate her own sense of identity as separate from her mother. Simmons has pointed out that the use of rhythm and repetition in the mother's words ‘‘enfolds and ensnares the daughter, rendering the girl nearly helpless before the mother's transforming will.’’ It is as if the mother's incantatory speech pattern is so all-enveloping that it prevents the daughter from asserting any individuality, opinion or will outside of the narrowly defined world of advice and warning her mother has created through her speech. In the two instances in which the girl does attempt to either question her mother's advice or defend herself against her mother's judgement, the rhythm and repetition of the mother's voice only works to overwhelm and engulf this meek voice of dissent.

The power of the mother's words to envelop the daughter within the strict confines of her own set of values and expectations is most apparent in terms of her references to sexuality. What is striking in this piece is the power of the mother's words to impose upon the girl a "sluttish" sexuality which must always be contained and hidden. The mother's "advice'' comes in the form of a condemnation for behavior or tendencies the girl herself might not even have considered: "On Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming.'' The power of this condemnation of the girl's sexuality, perhaps before it has even formed, comes in part from the way in which the mother integrates references to sexuality into advice on even the most mundane tasks: "this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming.'' The insistence of the mother's repetition of this condemnation gives it all the more power: ‘‘this is how to behave in the presence of men who don't know you very well, and this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming.''

The sense that this restricted definition of sexuality which the mother imposes upon the daughter is all-encompassing is most strongly emphasized in the closing lines. What begins as another mundane and harmless piece of advice ‘‘always squeeze bread to make sure it's fresh’’ becomes, upon the daughter's questioning, yet again an opportunity to condemn the girl to the inevitability of becoming a ‘‘slut,'' despite all these warnings. When the daughter, with good reason, asks "but what if the baker won't let me feel the bread?’’ the mother replies, "you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread?’’ As this closing line suggests, the mother's words create a world so all-encompassing that the daughter is unable to escape its judgements.

Growing up female
A good portion of the "chant of information'' the mother passes onto the daughter is made up of specific directions on how to carry out the domestic work for which the girl is clearly being trained. The mother's advice concerns such ‘‘woman's work’’ as washing clothes (‘‘Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry’’); sewing (‘‘this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a button-hole for the button you have sewed on’’); and cleaning house (‘‘this is how to sweep the house; this is how to sweep the yard’’), as well as setting the table, ironing and buying fabric. The use of repetition here is suggestive of the repetitive nature of the endless domestic chores which the girl seems condemned to spend her life performing: "this is how you set the table for tea; this is how you set the table for dinner; this is how you set the table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set the table for breakfast.’’ The tedium implied by this simple repetition mimics the tedium and dullness of the domestic duties the girl is expected to take on.

In addition to the repetitive daily domestic work for which she is training her daughter, the mother also includes messages which assume a role of subservience to a man: "this is how you iron your father's khaki shirt so that it doesn't have a crease; this is how you iron your father's khaki pants so that they don't have a crease.'' The messages which the mother gives her daughter about relationships with men also include warnings which suggest the potential for violence: "this is how you bully a man; this is how a man bullies you.’’ The potential hazards of sexual relationships with men are also indicated in terms of reference to unwanted pregnancy: "this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it becomes a child.’’ And, despite all the warnings about not being a "slut,’’ the mother also instructs the girl in ‘‘how to love a man.’’

A simple instruction by the mother, toward the end of the story, is suggestive of her underlying motivation in passing on such specific instructions to her daughter. One of the items on her list of instruction is: ‘‘this is how to make ends meet.’’ This statement by the mother in some ways clinches all of her previous statements. The underlying message which the mother imparts to her daughter, through all of these detailed instructions, is a message about how to survive as an African-Carribean woman in a harsh world with limited resources.

Christianity and African heritage
The mother's litany of advice, warning, and condemnation in "Girl" also contains a string of confusing and contradictory messages about the daughter's relationship to her African heritage and culture. On the one hand, the mother insists on warning the daughter against integrating African folk culture into her Christian education. ‘‘Is it true you sing benna songs in Church?’’ the mother asks. As benna songs are African folk songs, the mother's question is designed to warn the daughter against maintaining cultural practices derived from her African heritage.

Yet, on the other hand, the mother's list of advice contains rich elements of this African heritage, which she clearly intends to pass on to her daughter. Thus, while warning against mixing African traditional songs with the Western practice of Christianity, the mother is sure to pass on information based on folk beliefs derived from African culture. As Helen Pyne Timothy explains, in her article ‘‘Adolescent Rebellion and Gender Relations in At the Bottom of the River and Annie John" "when dealing with the real problems of life,’’ the mother's advice ‘‘falls back on the belief in folk wisdom, myth, African systems of healing and bush medicine, the mysteries of good and evil spirits inhabiting the perceived world of nature.’’ Thus, the mother's advice includes such folk beliefs as ‘‘don't throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all,’’ or ‘‘this is how to throw back a fish you don't like, and that way something bad won't fall on you.’’ She also includes references to folk medicines or remedies, such as "this is how to make a good medicine for a cold.’’

A rich African-Carribean cultural heritage is also passed on from mother to daughter through the importance of advice and directions concerning food preparation. These elements of the mother's litany add an important element of warmth and nurturing to her warnings and condemnations. Food preparation is described in cookbook style, matter-of-fact detail, such as ‘‘cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil,’’ and ‘‘soak salt fish over night before you cook it.'' Other references to food evoke strong sensory associations, such as "this is how to make bread pudding’’ and ‘‘this is how to make pepper pot.’’ In these instances, the mother's insistence on conveying such an overwhelming ‘‘chant of information'' to her daughter takes on a deeper significance in terms of the role of the mother-daughter relationship in the context of African-Carribean cultural heritage. In "Mothers and Daughters: Jamaica Kincaids' Pre-Oedipal Narrative,’’ critic Roni Natov explains that, "Jamaica Kincaid' s fiction focuses on the importance of continuity and community as they are preserved and kept alive by mothers, through their stories and through their connection with their daughters.’’ In this way, the mother is maintaining an oral tradition whereby cultural traditions and survival skills are passed down from mother to daughter, and from generation to generation, by way of a rhythmic flow of words such as that conveyed in this story.

Source: Liz Brent, for Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2000.
Brent has a Ph.D. in American Culture, with a specialization in cinema studies, from the University of Michigan. She is a freelance writer and teaches courses in American cinema.

The Rhythm of Reality in the Works of Jamaica Kincaid

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Kincaid's "Girl'' may be read as a kind of primer in the manipulative art of rhythm and repetition. The story begins with the mother's voice giving such simple, benevolent, and appropriately maternal advice as "Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry.’’ Like the girl to whom the mother speaks, the reader is lulled and drawn in by the chant of motherly admonitions, which go on to advise about how to dress for the hot sun, how to cook pumpkin fritters, how to buy cloth for a blouse, and how to prepare fish. Seduced in only a few lines, readers, like the listening girl, are caught unaware by an admonition which sounds like the previous, benevolent advice but has in fact suddenly veered in a new direction, uniting the contradictions of nurture and condemnation: ‘‘... always eat your food in such a way that it won't turn someone else's stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming.’’ As the brief, one-sentence story progresses, we come to see that the mother's speech, inviting with nurturing advice on the one hand and repelling with condemnatory characterization on the other, not only manipulates the girl into receptivity to the mother's condemning view, but also teaches the art of manipulation. The mother incorporates into her indictment of the girl's impending sluttishness the task of teaching her how to hide that condition: ‘‘... this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming.’’ As the contradictions draw closer together—as nurture and manipulation become increasingly intertwined—the language seems to become even more rhythmic.

... this is how you smile to someone you don't like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don't like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how you behave in the presence of men who don'tknow you very well, and this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming....

In the last third of "Girl" the mother's voice continues the litany of domestic instruction, but added now is comment on a frighteningly contradictory world, one in which nothing is ever what it seems to be. The continued tone of motherly advice at first works to lighten the sinister nature of the information imparted and then, paradoxically, seems to make these disclosures even more frightening; eventually we see that, in a world in which a recipe for stew slides into a recipe for the death of a child, nothing is safe.

... don't pick people's flowers—you might catch something; don't throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; this is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don't like, and that way something bad won't fall on you.

Source: Diane Simmons, ‘‘The Rhythm of Reality in the Works of Jamaica Kincaid,’’ in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 3, Summer, 1994, pp. 466-72.

Twentieth-Century Women Writers from the English-Speaking Caribbean

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Some of the finest fiction from the West Indies has been written by Jamaica Kincaid. Her fiction, specifically her collection of short stories At the Bottom of the River, makes interesting use of dream visions and metaphor as the imaginative projections of family life and social structure in her West Indian society. In the short stories Kincaid explores the strong identification and rupture in the daughter-mother relationship between the narrator and her mother. The process is mediated through metaphor and, when it is threatening, through surrealistic dream visions.

Each of these stories demonstrates tensions in the daughter-narrator resulting from a prolonged period of symbiosis between mother and child, especially because the mother views her daughter as a narcissistic extension of herself. In "Wingless," the narrator dreams the story as a mirror of her own situation and then imagines herself as a wingless pupa waiting for growth. The narrator uses a dream vision to mediate her sense of helplessness as a child dependent on her mother's care and attention.

In this dream, the mother is perceived to be powerful, even more potent than the male who attempts to intimidate and humiliate her. Because the narrator still views her mother as powerful, an incident of potential sexual violence becomes instead an easy victory for the mother:

I could see that he wore clothes made of tree bark and sticks in his ears. He said things to her and I couldn't make them out, but he said them so forcefully that drops of water sprang from his mouth. The woman I love put her hands over her ears, shielding herself from the things he said.... Then, instead of removing her cutlass from the folds of her big and beautiful skirt and cutting the man in two at the waist, she only smiled—a red, red smile—and like a fly he dropped dead.

The strong mother is a potential threat of death to those who confront her. But there is also a wonderful parable here of the integrity of the woman who shields herself from assault by refusing to listen to the tree-satyr who is trying to assert his power over her.

The story that best demonstrates the daughter's ambivalent relationship with her mother is "Girl." The voice is the girl's repeating a series of the mother's admonitions:

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry ... on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming ... this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming... this is how to behave in the presence of men who don't know you very well, and this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming.

The first of the mother's many rules concerns housekeeping. Unlike the girl's father, who can lounge at the circus eating blood sausage and drinking ginger beer, the woman is restricted to household duties. The many rules, which make the father's circus-going a female impossibility, are experienced by the narrator as unnecessarily restrictive and hostile. The mother's aggression is clear in the warnings of the price a girl will pay for ignoring her mother's advice. The penalty is ostracism—one must become a slut, a fate for which the mother is ironically preparing the daughter. The mother's obsessive refrain indicates hostility toward her adolescent daughter, activated when the growing daughter is no longer an extension of the self but a young woman who engenders in the older woman feelings of competition and anger at losing control of her child. Her anger may also result from the pressures felt by every woman in the community to fulfill the restrictive roles created for women. Of the ten stories in the collection, "Girl'' is the only one told as interior monologue rather than as dream and thus seems to be the least distorted vision. The ambivalence of the mother-daughter relationship is presented here in its most direct form. The reasons for their mutual distrust are very clearly stated: resentment, envy, anger, love.

Source: Laura Niesen Abruna,"Twentieth-Century Women Writers from the English-Speaking Caribbean,’’ in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1, Spring, 1988, pp. 85-96.

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