First of all, I want to start by introducing the author who was born in Antigua in 1949. In my opinion, she is, with others, an incredibly talented novelist, essayist, and gardener. She currently lives in the United States, in Vermont. She has written about thirty books to date and...
First of all, I want to start by introducing the author who was born in Antigua in 1949. In my opinion, she is, with others, an incredibly talented novelist, essayist, and gardener. She currently lives in the United States, in Vermont. She has written about thirty books to date and has received several awards since 1984.
Her poem “The Girl” was written in 1978. It gives an insight into the relationship between a mother and her daughter. This little girl symbolically represents the author at her young age. In this work, the mother tries to teach the little girl how to act like what “we would expect from a female”. We can see that the character of the mother imposes this type of behavior on the young girl (that is Kincaid herself in this case). So, it is clear that this dominant conduct forces the girl to comply with this prescribed way of life, this is what creates the main unsaid tension.
Moreover, if we start from the cultural context of the writer\’s childhood, taking into account her past, we can see that it departs from the fact that in many cultural milieus, we see a descent of inherited cultural and sexual behaviors. Thus, this poem portrays this type of conversation between mother and daughter. We see the dominant mother describing the do\’s and don’ts, an old and conservationist view of gender roles that are imposed on many people nowadays as well by overbearing on children. This relationship of domination is well illustrated in the poem since we do not see many of the girl\’s thoughts and opinions, but rather those of the mother. With this in mind, I, as the reader, wondered what she could be thinking about. This repressive domination (repressive, since we do not see the mother be interested in the child\’s thoughts) imposes conservative thoughts and stereotypes that repress both children and people in general because (in general) they may think that these rules can be the only ones and makes it even more difficult for those who try to think outside the box and create something that is more or less equality. These thoughts, which are also evoked by the mother, are discriminatory views of women and gender roles in modern society that entrench the known gap between genders.
In addition, the mother does not talk about the girl swatting and playing marbles like the boys, thus ignoring the social aspect of the girl\’s personality and life, which is a silent and passive way of discouraging such behavior. Personally, I think it is also a warning from the writer herself of the “danger” of overbearing children.
To sum up my interpretation, the mother in the poem represents the conservative parental figure who imposes the idea of an old Christian way of thinking that was also forcibly imposed on people, mainly during the aggressive domination of the Catholic Church. This idea includes the general concept that women should be at home, in the kitchen, a patriarchal concept to which Max Weber or Cristine Delphy, for example, were strongly opposed. In the sense that the mother continually calls her own daughter a “slut”, to me this represents this aggressive repression of the thoughts of the other, normally more vulnerable, in a derogatory way. Furthermore, I cannot blame the mother as she probably also experienced this type of discrimination at a younger age, so, for me, it represents the descending discrimination through the generations that I previously mentioned.
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