Jamaica Kincaid

A detailed Summary of Jamaica Kincaid

Born in Antigua in 1949, Jamaica Kincaid moved to the United States to attend college. Her works are semi-autobiographical, and deal most frequently with two particular themes. The first theme deals with Antigua and island life in the Caribbean. Kincaid captures the essence of the island through realistic images and vivid descriptions. While all of her works treat this theme, her first nonfiction work, A Small Place, deals exclusively with Antigua and the lives and lifestyles of its inhabitants. The second theme Kincaid explores extensively is that of women and their relationships with each other, particularly the mother-daughter relationship. Kincaid writes of mothers and daughters in Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, and "Girl". The short piece, "Girl", is one of Kincaid's best representatives of the theme of a young woman's relationship with an older female relative, and of gender roles.

"Girl" was first published in 1983 in At the Bottom of the River, a collection of stories which won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Ac

The title of the piece, "Girl", is an integral part of the work itself. The title serves several purposes. First, the title represents the age of the daughter. She is not a woman, not yet on her own, but a girl, still dependent on another, still with much to learn. Second, the title represents the mother's perception of her daughter. She does not consider her a woman or a young lady, but a naive girl in need of constant instruction and supervision. A third purpose of the title is that it represents the daughter's struggle to find her own emerging identity in the shadow of her mother and the shadow of the identity her mother wants her to take on. She is not named in the piece, nor is her place defined; she is not "daughter", "sister", "mother", or "wife", but "girl".

ademy and Institute of Arts and Letters. "Girl" is a short piece that shows the dialogue between an older woman and a younger girl, probably a mother and her adolescent daughter. In the piece, the mother instructs her daughter on many subjects, from cooking and cleaning to social skills and

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Approximate Word count = 714
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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Jamaica Kincaid

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