Critical Response #1

Kelly Hanken

Critical Response #1

“Girl,” by Jamaica Kincaid, was a good read. I say that honestly, because it reads like a mix between stream-of-consciousness and a list, and you can practically hear the tired, exasperated, needling voice of the mother-figure the story is about. It’s all one huge run-on sentence, but it fits with what the story’s trying to convey about the relationship between a mother and a daughter.

You can feel the mother’s insistence of “this is how we do things around here” in every line. It’s something most any girl can relate to with an older mother, because they tend to insist on doing things the old-fashioned way and slight anything that might be less than traditional. This is really obvious in all the mentions of the daughter being a “slut” – it isn’t that the daughter actually is, but that she’s doing things that would have gotten her labeled as such when the mother was her age.

I really liked how the story moved from these things about how to wash clothes to mentions of the daughter singing, then saying “don’t sing” even though the daughter doesn’t. It’s an obvious miscommunication between the two characters. The occasional references to the daughter’s “sluttiness” just add build up to the last line, where the mother asks the daughter what kind of woman she’s going to be, if “the baker won’t let near the bread.” It’s all her way of turning the conversation around to “prove” to them both that the daughter isn’t going to be a reputable woman, and it’s done brilliantly with lots of circular logic.