Jamaica Kincaid’S Main Female Protagonists, Their Personalities And Relationships In Novels Lucy And Annie John
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Jamaica Kincaid’s Main Female Protagonists, Their Personalities and Relationships in Novels Lucy and Annie John
Every person’s character is created and formed in background the person grows up in, and is influenced by everything that surrounds him or her, like friends, teachers, television and other media, and of course, family. And if our person is a female, the strongest influence always comes from her mother and their relationship, and this is clearly visible in Jamaica Kincaid’s novels, where mother daughter relationships are fundamental in heroines’ character development, their view of the world, and their life style. The mother operates not only as an embodiment of the personal sphere but also as a mediator of the political and ideological values present in childhood. Motherhood as an institution is universally major theme in writings by black women writers, and Kincaid’s novels are mainly personal narratives about the construction of one’s identity marked by colonial and family oppression. The mother-daughter relationships in her novels reflect the tension between colonialism and nativeness. Kincaid herself experienced cultural and familial displacement, and now neither can she identify with her mother, nor her country (Sklenkova, 6). And as Kincaid states “I write about myself for the most part, and about things that have happened to me. In my writing I suppose I am trying to understand how I got to be the person I am” (Kincaid, interview with Kay Bonnetti) her work Annie John is labeled a fictionalized autobiographical work (LeSeur, 154).
Both Annie and Lucy are described very well and developed naturally, mature, and both experience a change in relationships with their mothers, which take place when the girls see and experience other world than their mother country. Both of them grew up on the Caribbean island of Antigua during the British colonial rule. Both of them correspond to Kincaid’s real life path. And as she narrates them in the first person, the line between the author and the characters blurs, and they seem to be multiple identities of Jamaica Kincaid.
Characters of Annie and Lucy have few similar traits, and similar destinies. Both loved and adored their mothers and have ideal relationships with them, but only till some time, till Lucy’s ninth year of life and twelfth in Annie’s case. Then suddenly both girls claim that their mothers betrayed them, by which they mean that they do not love them as much as they should and the girls wish, so the girls start to, in their own words “hate” the mothers, but it is obviously just a dislike that is common in this age in girls. Another trait is their attitude towards education, both are very clever, but school seems to be a complicated issue for them. Education is very important for everybody, but was perhaps even more for the youth of this time in colonies. They got their chance to lead a “European” way of life, but needed to have proper education, which was not seen very positively by them. They were brought up to understand that English traditions were right and their traditions were wrong. This antagonism between the official traditions and the native elements; and the subordination of their people which put this system to work made Kincaid (and her characters) resent the colonial system. Annie once hears her mother saying about her father “the great man can no longer just get up and go” (Annie John, 78) and remembers the sentence. When she goes through her history book, she finds a picture illustrating a chapter about colonization. There is Columbus on the picture and he is in chains, taken back to Europe, his luck is gone after his great successes in overseas. As all of the colonized perceived Columbus as the one who “started” the slave trade and other horrors of the time, Annie did so, and commented the picture by writing the overheard sentence under it. Of course that was against the way of Empire’s education system, and Annie was punished, which was showed as an unfair punishment, by copying Milton’s Paradise Lost, and as the feelings in the book are autobiographical, it is obvious that Kincaid did not like the system at all. This growing awareness of the colonial atmosphere correlates with the loss of mother’s affection. The young girl loses the attention of the parent and so feels she is betrayed by her family, and at the same time she realizes the sudden confusion of her cultural belonging, which is endured by the colonial subordination. Both the mother and the girl are culturally alienated, but stand on the opposite sides of culture: the mother as an aspiring colonial woman and the daughter as a resentful native (Sklenkova, 17). Annie John is mainly about its heroine being on the brink of independence, trying to resist the domination of her mother and the culture in which she is growing up. Lucy, a sequel to Annie John, is about impossibility to escape the maternal sphere even when one is in a foreign country and thus the need to accommodate the trouble in the mother-daughter relationship.
Annie’s lifeline goes from an idyllic childhood to the beginning of adulthood, during which the author uncovers the painful relationship towards Annie’s mother. The idyllic relationship was destroyed when the puberty came, when the girl started to shape her individuality, and her mother suppresses her signs of doing so.
The story starts when Annie is ten years old, and ends when she is seeking an exile in England. Through the story there is graduating psychological change of Annie, at the end of the story, the girl stands there rejected by everything with she grew up. The relationship between Annie and the mother starts as a perfect union, Annie praises her. Till she was twelve, she always thought: “It was such a paradise that I lived in” (Annie John, 25) but later her mother informed her that she was “on the verge of becoming a young lady, so there were quite a few things I would have to do differently” (Annie John, 26). The first signs of the puberty coming transforms the idyllic state between the mother and daughter, primarily because: “Maturation is treated the mother as a kind of crime for which she (Annie) must be punished” (Annie John, 103). Puberty is crucial in developing one’s identity and it always threatens the mother who wants to shape her daughter’s individuality in harmony with colonial society’s rules and expectations. Annie feels betrayed and does not know how to cope with the situation; she even tries to evade any physical contact: “I