Jamaica Kincaid’s Girl is a story about the suppression of women. The story’s message is told by a strict and close-minded mother who teaches her daughter what it means to be a woman. The tasks and knowledge the mother provides are getting increasingly more cruel and stigmatic throughout the story. This post aims to discuss the topic and audience addressed in the story and its relevance in modern times.
The story displays the teachings on the types of attitudes of women. The stigmatic core qualities of any good woman are washing, cooking, ironing, and overall righteousness. Such freedom derivative teachings also include abortion instruction, “how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child” (Kincaid). It shows the extent of the classical women’s behavior model and how it harms the youth.
The central concept is relevant today because the fight for women’s rights is still on-going. The rules which the mother uses to represses the girl are applicable in modern society. The story’s themes, like abortion, are a hot topic of debate to this day, as they prevent females from having control over their bodies. Although women have more freedom, stereotypical thinking about what they can and cannot do still exists.
Jamaica Kincaid’s story is a perfect example of using people whose thinking is driven by wrong assumptions as examples of society’s repression. Women have been fighting for their rights for hundreds of years, and still, the stereotyping prevails in the community. The author displayed how harmful and incorrect the thinking pattern of a repressed woman can be. This post discussed the story’s central theme, audience, and relevancy in modern society.
Work Cited
Kincaid, Jamaica. “Girl.”The New Yorker, 1978, Web.