Jamaica Kincaid has largely depicted troubled mother-daughter relationships throughout her work, but her 1978 story "Girl," taken from his first collection of short stories At the Bottom of the River, remains his most succinct representation of this theme. Her strained relationship with her own mother, Annie Richardson, undoubtedly fueled Kincaid's preoccupation with mothers, daughters, and their often contentious connections. Kincaid admits of his mother: “[T]he way I became a writer was that my mother wrote my life for me and told it to me. I can't help but think that this got me interested in the idea of ​​myself. an object” (quoted in Kenney 6). Thus, the mother figure in "Girl" is likely a fictionalized representation of Kincaid's own mother, like most of Kincaid's works, "Girl" addresses the acculturating influence of mothers on their daughters. in this sense, “Girl” seems to be a story of disempowerment. However, if we assume that the narrator of the story represents Kincaid's mother, the subversive nature of "Girl" becomes evident. Kincaid emancipates himself from the mother's tyranny by recovering his voice and diverting it from its original purpose. What was initially intended as a tool of acculturation and colonization becomes, in Kincaid's hands, a nuanced but unflinching critique of these same practices. In this sense, “Girl” is ultimately a story of empowerment. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get an original essayA continuous monologue from the point of view of an unnamed narrator, presumably the mother of the titular girl, Kincaid's "Girl" se consists superficially of a stream of imperatives concerning domestic life. At first, the mother’s orders seem trivial: “Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone pile; wash colored clothes on Tuesday and hang them to dry on the clothesline; do not walk bareheaded under the scorching sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweetened oil” (306). Thus, says critic Diane Simmons, “'Girl' can be read as a kind of introduction to the manipulative art of rhythm and repetition. The story begins with the mother's voice giving […] simple, caring and utterly maternal advice” (467). The reader, like the young girl, “is lulled and attracted by the song of maternal remonstrances” (468). However, as the narrative progresses, the mother's advice becomes increasingly disconcerting, particularly her advice on "how to intimidate a man" and "how a man intimidates you" (Kincaid 307), as well as her instructions: “[T]his is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child” (307), which implies voluntary abortion. Meanwhile, the girl herself remains remarkably silent, except for two sentences of protest in italics, and her timid attempts at self-defense remain unnoticed by the mother, who, as we gradually see , is consumed by a single goal: to prevent her daughter from becoming “the slut [she] so wants to become” (306). Many of the mother's most questionable injunctions are directly related to sex. According to critic J. Brooks Bouson, "[T]he anonymous mother in 'Girl' exhorts her daughter to be a good and respectful daughter and to follow the mother's and society's rules of good behavior so that she does not become not the “girl”. “slut” that her mother repeatedly accuses her of being “so determined to become”” (25). The mother's speech both limits and controls the daughter's sexual inclinations: "[O]n Sunday, try to walk like a lady andnot like the slut you so want to become; […] you must not talk to the boys about the dock rats, not even to give them directions; don’t eat fruit in the street: the flies will follow you” (Kincaid 306). Although the girl's age is unclear, the mother's reminder to "soak her little clothes right after she takes them off" (306) suggests that the girl has at least started menstruating. Therefore , the implications of the mother's monologue are clear: the entire story, in essence, becomes a thinly veiled treatise on how to navigate the potentially perilous world of sexual adulthood. Bouson further states: “The essence of the mother's message is that the daughter must be a good and respectful daughter and must not bring shame to her family” (25). Shame, in this particular context, is omnipresent. For the mother, even the simple act of buying bread can be complicated by the woman's sexual history. When the girl asks, “But what happens if the baker doesn’t let me touch the bread?” » the mother replies: "Are you saying that after all, you are really going to be the kind of woman the baker doesn't let near the bread? » (Kincaid 307). Shame then becomes both a crucial element of control in the mother's discourse and a regulating force in the daughter's life. In addition to circumscribing the daughter's sexuality, the mother's discourse also reinforces traditional gender roles. “This is how you iron your father's khaki shirt so that it doesn't have a crease,” said the mother, and “this is how you iron your father's khaki pants so that it has no fold” (306-307). ). In this case, the mother is implying that a woman's job is to take care of the men in her life, down to the most mundane details. Likewise, the mother dictates how a respectable daughter should behave, especially in the presence of an eligible bachelor: “This is how you smile at someone you don't really like; this is how you smile at someone you don't like at all; that’s how you smile at someone you don’t fully smile at” (307). The message is clear: a girl should always be outwardly affable and pleasant, even to people she hates. Herself from a former British colony, Kincaid tacitly invokes a comparison between the dominant voice of the mother and colonial discourse. Just like the mother in “Girl,” “the colonial system, in pretending to nourish the child, is in fact stealing her from itself (Simmons 466). And much like Kincaid's own mother, the colonial tradition writes the lives of its subjects for them through the implementation of metanarratives, or overarching accounts or interpretations of events and circumstances, which provide a pattern or structure to people's beliefs and give meaning to their experiences. The rhetoric of “Girl” constitutes a kind of metanarrative of its own, in which young women devote their lives to cultivating the domestic sphere, maintain a façade of asexuality for the sake of public approval, quietly abort babies which they don't want, and certainly "don't sing bena in Sunday school" (Kincaid 307). Kincaid, however, combats the meta-narrative of the mother, and therefore the colonizer, through writing. Bouson states: "If the mother's internalized voice is a powerful force in the development of Kincaid's writing, Kincaid also finds her writing an effective way of responding to her mother, allowing her to have the last word in his ongoing internal conflict with her. mother” (26). In this case, Kincaid gets the "last word" by impersonating the mother's voice. After all, “Girl” is ultimately Kincaid’s story, not his mother’s. Seen from this angle, what at first glance seems. 2017.