What advice does the mother give to the daughter in "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid?
Jamaica Kincaid writes about her native Antigua. “Girl” recreates a scene between an adolescent, Caribbean girl and her mother who is worried about the daughter’s behavior. The narration is first person point of view with the mother serving as the narrator. The narration is provided through a literary device called “stream of consciousness” which passes along the random thoughts and feelings of the narrator.
The story supplies a list of rules that the narrator's daughter should incorporate in her life. The mother accepts as true that a woman's reputation determines how she is treated in her surrounding.
The mother believes that domestic knowledge will not only save her daughter from a life of promiscuity but will also endow her as a productive citizen. There is anger in the mother’s tone. Her frustration comes from the daughter’s inappropriate behavior and the worry that she will or even has done...
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something that is illicit.
How does the mother teacher her daughter to behave like a proud Island woman?
The mother directs the daughter about important aspects of an Antiguan girl’s life. Believing that her daughter is already on the wrong path, she repeatedly suggests that the girl is promiscuous and may be on the way to becoming a “slut.” A girl has to be careful in her behavior.
The mother offers useful advice in three areas: clothing, cooking, and behavior:
- Clothing- specific instruction on how and when to wash clothes; how to sew a button on and a hem; how to iron clothes; and how to pick out cloth to sew her own clothes
- Cooking-how to cook fritters; how to prepare and cook fish; how and where to plant a garden; how to set a table; how to eat; etiquette at meals; how to squeeze the bread
- Behavior-do not act like a boy; do not sing inappropriate songs at church; do not speak to certain types of boys; how to smile; act to behave in front of men; what to do when a man bullies her; how to abort a child; how to love a man
The mother does not believe that the advice will make any difference.
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; be sure to wash every day…
Her fears for the girl actually bring up deeper anxieties of the perilous state of womanhood in this conventional Antiguan society.
The daughter only speaks twice in the story. She denies singing calypso music during church. The second time is when she asks a seemingly innocent question: “but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?”
This enrages the mother because to her the daughter must have reason to believe that the baker would not let her touch the bread. The mother tells the daughter that after all of the advice that she has given her she still is going to be a slut.
In "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid, what are the mother's main messages to her daughter and how does the daughter receive them?
Let's take two views of "Girl" here. Despite the brevity of the story, Kinkaid creates a variety of interpretive opportunities and we can consider more than one way to understand the intentions behind the mother's advice and the daughter's reception of that advice.
If we take an abstract view of the message(s) being conveyed from mother to daughter in "Girl," we might characterize the mother's concerns, advice and wisdom as mainly pointing to how a to be a respectable woman in a specific social/cultural world. There is an implicit accompanying message here as well, which is that in order to be a respectable woman one has to be competent and knowledgeable as well.
According to the mother, to be a respectable woman one must be knowledgeable of social mores and also know how to remain clean via practices of strategy and restraint. On the most basic level, this is a message about values. The mother's lessons might be read as a list of virtues, implied and coded, perhaps, but all pointedly moral in the sense that virtue is always a moral category.
The mother is teaching her daughter all of the individual, practical household lessons here -- "this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard" -- and she is also teaching the fine points of social carriage, one by one.
These more social pieces of advice are not limited to ways in which a person can show an understanding of etiquette or demonstrate that she is cultured. The social lessons extend to issues of power and desire and carry the weight of values as well.
"this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man; and if this doesn't work there are other ways, and if they don't work don't feel too bad about giving up"
Not only is the mother telling her daughter what is possible (in bullying and being bullied) and what is desired (love). She is also teaching her daughter about how much one should value love. There are limits, her message suggests, to how much one should pursue or suffer to attain love.
This notion is critical in light of the other advice regarding constraint the mother presents.
The repeated warning about becoming a slut is matched by advice about how to throw away a fish without getting dirty ("this is how to throw back a fish you don't like, and that way something bad won't fall on you") and why a person should not pick other people's flowers ("you might catch something"). The ethos of remaining clean through these practical strategies resonates with that of the overtly sexually-oriented reprimand repeated by the mother.
The daughter does not resist the claims about becoming a slut, but does deny the first claim the mother makes about singing benna at Sunday school. The girl's willingness to refrain from denying the mother's other claims is not explained, but we might wonder if she has already internalized the larger idea of showing restraint that underlines the mother's lessons.
Another way to generalize the mother's advice is to see her as giving power to the daughter. The lessons and advice may all be taken as ways to empower a woman in a household and on the streets, providing her with the necessary skills and knowledge to decide her own fate. Advice on how to avoid men and how to get them is presented along with advice on how to get the most out of money spent.
The daughter's response to this ethic of empowerment is expressed in her concern that the baker may not let her touch the bread to test it according to the mother's advice. What if she follows all the advice and makes all the right decisions of restraint and practical effectiveness yet still finds that her power to make decisions for herself fails to allow her to decide who she is in the world?