Natasha Foxworth Spring -A 2012

“The Complications of the ‘Mother/ Daughter’ relationships”

Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (1978) is a short story; single sentence of advice a mother imparts to her daughter. Her daughter only twice interrupts the mother to ask a question and defend herself. The advice is meant to be useful but it is also demeaning. It seemed to be meant to help her daughter to have a productive life but also to scold her at the same time. In general, a mother tends to think highly of their daughters and wants to teach them all of the important aspects of life. The reality of the matter is that a Mother can only teach her child from her own experiences, weather the experiences are positive or negative. This is why I feel that “Girl”, shows the various ways that a relationship between a mother and daughter can be complicated. A mother’s womanhood, self-esteem, vulnerability and education all plays a major roles on how she instructs her daughter. The online resource enotes.com, “Girl: Introduction”, states that Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949. Native of Antigua, in the British West Indies, but changed her name when she started writing because her family disliked her career choice. She went to New York at the age of 17, taking a job as a nanny. During this time she met New Yorker columnist George S. Trow, who eventually helped her publish in the magazine. Much of Kincaid’s work deals with the ramifications of Antigua’s history as a colony of Great Britain. Like all of Kincaid’s fictions, “Girl,” deals with the experience of being a young female in a poor country and often portrays the complicated relationship with her mother. The main theme of “Girl” is the mother- daughter dynamic. In “Girl” the mother dispenses much practical and helpful advice that will help her daughter keep a house of her own some day. The mother instructs her to, “Wash the whit clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry” (306), “this is how to sew on a button;” (307) and ‘”this is how you make a good medicine for a cold” (307). All of which are essential skills for a mother to teach her daughter. The mother also tells the daughter to “don’t sing benna in Sunday school;” (307) and this is one of the two times the daughter speaks to defend herself, by saying, “I don’t sing benna on Sunday at all and never in Sunday school;” (307). This shows the mother’s lack of faith in her daughter’s decision making skills and the daughter speaking up to disagree. Her responses go unnoticed by the mother. At times the mother’s advice seems to be unusual, like, “be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit;” (307), “this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child;” (307) and “this is how you spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn’t fall on you;” (307). These quotes on one hand can seem weird for a mother to advise her daughter. But on the other hand, if you know more about Jamaica Kincaid’s childhood it makes more sense on why the mother advised in this manner. In the short story the mother’s advice comes along with a little verbal abuse. Three separate times the word “slut” was used towards the daughter. The first time she states, “on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming;” (307), then she says, “…so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming;” (307) and lastly she tells her, “and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming;” (307). It seems as if the mother fears that her daughter would follow in her foot step and the mother drastically warns her daughter not to be the very thing that she is. However, the mother’s advice seems caustic and castigating, out of fear that her daughter is already well on her way to becoming a “slut”. The biography, “Jamaica Kincaid- A literary Companion” (2008), written by Mary Ellen Snodgrass, tense to back up my argument. Snodgrass states that, “Because Kincaid was female and illegitimate, she knew in girlhood the anguish of living with an unloving, oral aggressive single parent who aborted her first pregnancies and did not aspire to motherhood” (7). Snodgrass breaks down the biography in several different categories, for instances, in injustice; it states, “The speaker’s suppositions about her daughter’s morals imply personal and moral distrust. To the girl’s denials of flirting with wharf rats and singing scandalous calypso benna tunes in Sunday school, the tight lipped mother moves on without pause. Multiple remarks about sluttish behavior and a recipe for an abortifacient imply that the mother has no faith in the girl’s future behaviors with men, especially bullies and rakes”(119). Another point that Snodgrass covers is parenthood, she explains, that “Girl’” wards off future suffering with warning about bullying males and dismissive lovers. In the part of the short story where the mother advises about freshness of bread Snodgrass claims that, “a competent shopper who, like her indomitable mother, squeezes bread for freshness while facing down a disapproving male baker. The image portrays the circumscribed live of women where they lay claim to limited powers, such as the freshness of baked goods and the carrying of their own embryos to term” (177). In conclusion, I feel that this short story reflects the complications of the relationships of a mother and daughter. The mother is living in poverty, uneducated and has low-self-esteem that doesn’t want or even fears her daughter being like her. This is why the advice that was given sometimes seems helpful but at other times scolding, which appears to be coming from a mother who has experienced all of the wrong ways of doing things and the only way she knows how to instill wisdom to her daughter is to refer back to her own self. One may say that the mother is wrong for calling her daughter a “slut” but the mother only can teach her daughter what she knows. This is why in every mother and daughter relationship the mother’s life experiences plays a major role on how she raises her daughter and what she feels is important for her to advise her daughter to do or not to do. As for me and my relationship with my mother, I have a better understanding of why she raised me the way that she did. I now know that she could only reveal to me the knowledge, understanding and wisdom that she inquired for her own life’s experiences. My mother had some education and no role models of her own so some advice she would give me seemed unusual but she did her very best to teach me how to be better than her.