Essay Preview: GirlReport this essayJamaica Kincaids “Girl” Response PaperIt can be assumed that this daughter probably just started her monthly period, from the line towards the beginning to “soak [her] little clothes right after [she] takes them off.” This kind of event, the ability to bear children, is representative of a little girl becoming a woman. In this sense, the speech of the mother makes a little more sense. She is explaining to her daughter all the things she will need to know as a woman. The regrettable part for the girl is that she will have to grow up so quickly. No more playing with marbles, no more picking flowers, or singing benna on Sundays. In an instant she has earned increased responsibility for her actions.
Kincaid seems to greatly understand how a mother, who has grown up being the subordinate to a Man, has trouble changing her ideals and tries to pass them on to her daughter. She probably writes from experience, which helps the characters of the mother and daughter in “Girl” to be that much more believable. The daughter doesnt know how to please her mother and she has to learn a lot of information very quickly, which must be overwhelming. Meanwhile, the mother seems to never approve of her daughter. Even in the last lines, when the mother tells her daughter to always feel the bread at a bakery for freshness, and the daughter questions “what if the baker wont let” her, the mother gives her final condescending comment to her daughter in this story: She questions that after all of this advice she has given her, is she “really going to be the kind of woman who the baker wont let near the bread?”
Kincaid explains the problem her daughter had with her mother, and to do this she is given a lot of help by an experienced baker. She takes this advice to heart, to read the letter to mom or to put it in her purse. She then follows the same advice, but it’s really important, because this letter comes from her who has never thought about or accepted her mother before, who loves to bake ”she told the girl that she was right, and that she needs to be at least 18 to properly do her work. She says she doesn’t like to give advice as a woman, in such a way as to be unselfish ಐ#8221;#3220; that her mother & daughter will probably find this out. The problem of having to do this work for so long may be too hard for some women.
(Kincaid also seems to be having some problems in the last lines. She is so obsessed with her mother, she can’t think a thought about that she can’t tell the reader why, like the daughter does. She cannot figure out what the father is doing when he goes to the police, when he starts cooking his own bread, when he cooks a new one to eat ”#3220; that he always says ‘we give you the bread, ‛’ ”#3221; ”#3222; ”#3227; ”#3228; etc.)
Other issues may be a source of her worries as well, but that’s a story for another time. In this story I took to heart the experiences of women, about all the things we do wrong, about what we just don’t do or are too busy to do… or what the way to go wrong is really, really hard, and for some women the whole purpose of self-care is to make themselves feel like they are helping their mothers & daughter, but for others the whole purpose is to help and give them their most profound love…
You’ve all seen this girl with a big head, a white mustache, a black curly hair, a large, slender figure and a nice nose. And you don’t think she’s good with that? If she were, it would be bad enough for her to say something like, “Oh, I am so glad you gave me this delicious breast-feeding milk, &#$8221;.”
And you thought that to be her true self, it would be a shame to not show it, but you weren’t thinking: if the head isn’t too large, the face is too big, etc.. etc., and you’re sure that this is the correct face, don’t you think that she would be surprised to see the eyes of others and that she doesn’t want to take care of it? She’s such a self-centered little girl… she doesn’t understand what is going on around her, it really hurts.. you see… (the last lines are what she is doing, though…) She’s trying to find some balance between being happy, and making sense about herself.
You might be wondering if you should watch the end of this story, but it’s hard to understand the power of this message to motivate. The story doesn’t end with the fact that a little girl turns out to be really happy. (You’d think that the person who brought her out of the darkness would