#imma free the drive but need somewhere to dump mah English homework don't mind me

[flamintango]

Taming the Shrew, Gaming the Rules: Domestic Space as a Site of Transgressional Mother-Daughter Homosociality in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”

Jamaica Kincaid’s "Girl" (1978) portrays the painstaking confines of domestic space for women in the Caribbeans in a tersely crafted short story. Despite the impression, I would argue,  the motherly narrator’s unending tirade signifies less a ruthless drill of patriarchal disciplines, but more an interwoven fabric of mother-daughter bond and female coalition. The idea of girlhood and mother-daughter homosociality of Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” has been the subject of widespread scholarly intrigue for decades. Adopting the approach of rhetorical features analysis, K. Jayasree’s “Linguistic-Literary Camouflage in Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Girl’” anchors its critical emphasis on the rebellious potential of the female homosocial subtext in the story. The essay maintains that “Girl” tactically utilizes the common textual format (i.e. the “oral tradition”) in which patriarchal values effectively disseminates in order to issue the “call to arms” (82) that likewise instills transgressive ideas into girls.

“Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk bare-head in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil;  . . . this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a buttonhole for the button you have just sewed on.” (320, italics added)

As the extract above illustrates, the lines roll rhythmically with a string of alliterations and unrelenting imperatives and structural repetitions, rendering the tone almost sermonic. The incessant use of colons in lieu of sentence-ending punctuations (e.g. periods) or meta-language represents the disciplining tone of the narrator who assumes a mother’s voice in a relentless mantra penetrating into the daughter’s head. “Girl”’s writing falls in line with the oral tradition not only for its conversational nature, speaking exclusively to the girl with the second-person “you,” but also for its quick-paced, fragmented sputter of sentences inflected in such a way that Rabea and Almahameed would call it “poetic” and “genre crossing” (157).

Denise De Caires Narain’s “Naming Same-Sex Desire in Caribbean Women's Texts: Toward a Creolizing Hermeneutics” aims to tap into the queer undertow of familial female homociality in Kincaid’s text . It laments the uncontested heterosexual norms in Caribbean literarures by female writers in the 1980s, despite their continuous effort to challenge the conservative male canon. In its analysis of  Lucy and The Autobiography of My Mother, on the one hand, the essay recognizes that Kincaid’s depiction of heterosexual sex as detrimental to women, and merely a tool for male to assert virility and dominance. On the other hand, it positions the mother-daughter tie prevalent in Kincaid’s theming  as a “strategically defensive one”  against men that “orbits around the heteronornmative,” and conceptualizes it in the form of mother’s control over “the girl-child’s life script” (204). The homosocial bond between mother and daughter equally courses through the thematic vein of “Girl” for its vehement, moralizing narrative. In the short story, the mother effectively micromanages her daughter’s existence down to the hairsplitting details of her day-to-day with sermonic mantras that seek to indoctrinate patriarchal, lady-like virtues into the girl at first glance. The girl’s day is arranged for her from “Monday” through “Sunday”, and her life is held to miscellaneous household duties, interpersonal interactions, and female etiquettes: “wash” the white and colored clothes on Mondays and Tuesdays; “cook” the pumpkin fritters; “walk like a lady” to reject “a slut that you’re bent on becoming”; never sing benna in “Sunday schools”; never speak to “wharf-rat boys” (Kincaid 320).

On the subject of the postcolonial context in Kincaid’s work, De Caires Narain notes that Kincaid exhibits a literary tendency to employ little to no Caribbean creole in her writing, which is executed mostly in standard English. Despite the linguistic choice, Kincaid still successfully communicates Caribbean specificity and postcoloniality through subtle sprinklage of cultural references. For instance, “benna” is a type of Antiguan folk song that largely features raunchy rumors in its lyrics, helpful in spreading folk news across the streets. In “Girl,” meanwhile, it is the same song that the mother cautioned the daughter against singing in the Christian Sunday school that symbolizes colonial heritage. The slut shaming of the female body that the mother casts derogatively onto the daughter here ties thematically with the baudy benna prohibited in the imported religion—the remains of colonial heritage from the West and the symbol of civility in public.

From an alternative angle on postcolonial discussions, Betty Joseph signals an invitation to problematize the subject from the globalization perspective in her essay, “Gendering Time in Globalization: The Belatedness of the Other Woman and Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy.” Joseph’s grounds the analysis on the notion of time-lag in cultural exchange due to “crony capitalism” (67), a geopolitical framework under which the social-cultural and economic capital is distributed in inequity across the globe due to geopolitical limitations. The essay admonishes Euroamerican feminist criticisms to diverge from their traditional view that evinces an “implicit discourse of progress” (69) of culturally diverse female subjects towards Western apotheosis.

Likewise, the Westerncentric feminist activism inspired attempt to read the mother as an idle mouthpiece and her preaches as patriarchal propaganda fails to account for the transgressive hints that the mothers slips into her teachings. Positioning the narrator as a mere fathering figurehead who indefatigably preaches female behavioral decorums is a tempting reading strategy. It may easily interpret the mother’s disciplining as instances of male oppression. Nonetheless, the expedient reading ignores the male-excluding feminine specificity that charged the story. It also disregards the transgenerational female alliance that is rendered accessible by the gendered lived experience produced in the domestic context, and relayed from mother to daughter. Any prominent masculine role is barely present in the story, barring a metonymic "father’s khaki shirt" that the girl is commanded to iron, the nameless "wharf-rat boys" from whom the girl is distanced, and the "men" to whom the mother alerts the girl about bullying (320-321). By dissolving male figures into the background, “Girl” places a major feminine accent on the inherited experience of womanhood yet to be shared across generations. For example, she holds the daughter to nurturing maternity by teaching her how to “make good medicine for a cold.” Even so, immediately in the next line, she effectively backpedals that didactic gospel by instructing her how to make “good medicine” to “throw away a child” (321), an act that stands in diametrical opposition not only to traditional Christian values, but also to conservative womanly virtues imbuing the ethos behind “Girl.”

The multidimensional tensions between the lines unfold with such linguistic, narrative, and social-realistic density, it renders the short story a suffocating yet complex depiction of Caribbean womanhood. The narrator’s character deepens and expands in multiple directions in a nonlinear fashion: she represents the seasoned woman in a conservative, male-dominant society; she embodies the voice that she may have been attuned to throughout her girlhood; she manifests protective maternity for the sake of the household that she has been maintaining, but for the girl against male aggression, to which she imparts motherly love and attendance. “Girl” is a woman’s bildungsroman in contemporary Antigua. It is a tender tale of a cross-generational sisterhood.

Works Cited

De Caires Narain, Denise. "Naming Same-Sex Desire in Caribbean Women's Texts: Toward a Creolizing Hermeneutics." Contemporary Women's Writing, vol. 6, no. 3, 2012, pp. 194-212, MLA International Bibliography, doi:10.1093/cww/vps027.

Joseph, Betty. "Gendering Time in Globalization: The Belatedness of the Other Woman and Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, vol. 21, no. 1, 2002, pp. 67-83, MLA International Bibliography, doi:10.2307/4149216.

Jayasree, K. "Linguistic-Literary Camouflage in Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl"." IUP Journal of English Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 2018, pp. 81-87, Humanities International Complete.

Kincaid Jamaica, “Girl.” The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. 6th Ed. Ed. Charters, Ann. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 320-321. Print.

Rabea, Reem Ahmad and Nusaiba Adel Almahameed. "Genre Crossing in Jamaica Kincaid's 'Girl': From Short Fiction to Poetry." Advances in Language and Literary Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, 2018, pp. 157-165, ERIC, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=eric&AN=EJ1185919&lang=zh-tw&site=ehost-live&custid=s5650286.