Naomi Tolentino
Professor Mongar
Ingl 3104 – 113
May 9, 2003
Hypertext Essay
“Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid
Parent’s lessons will create children’s feature.
Girl is a fiction story that seems to be a monologue. Mother teaching her daughter how to cook, clean, shops, and do laundry. She tells her daughter how to behave in social context, how to smile at people who she doesn’t like, and which type of boys to avoid
(libarts ). But, during the development of the story it becomes a dialogue, between the mother and her daughter. By the tone use by the mother and the title, it seems like the daughter is an adolescent and not a mature women who needs direction to live. Mother’s play a very important paper in girl’s life. They aren’t only teachers, they are their examples.
The tone in this story is imperative. Mother is telling her daughter what to do. The mother doesn’t ask her daughter what, she thinks, or if she likes it. She just tells her what to do. It gives the impression that she’s giving her daughter orders, but in occasions the girls respond. It also has a contradiction, untruthful and unkind tone. It reflect none a stable relationship between them. What kind of mother says: “prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming”
( Girl ). Hello! If a mother doesn’t want her daughter to become a slut, the last thing she should do is tell her daughter that she is going to be that, no matter what.

Jamaica Kincaid’s view about mother-daughters relationship was affected by her own experience with her mother. “She should never have had children”. “She loves us when we’re dying, not when we’re thriving, because then we don’t need her”
(
Kincaid’s
Biography ) . Those are Kincaid’s words about her mother, and reflect the way her mother was. Her mother has an emotional remoteness that affects Kincaid and is reflected in her works including Girl .
Kincaid was born in 1949, during the time that women were raised as house woman ( Kincaid’s Biography ) . So adding of Kincaid’s experience and the time that she was raised was born Girl. A combination of woman social status and motherdaughter relationship.
“If you love me, teach me to think some day without you, to be my own genesis”.
Those are words of Dinah in
“The Red Tent ”
. A mother role goes beyond giving birth.
It’s not fulfilling the material needs and take children to the places they want. It’s more than that. It’s teaches about life, take care of children and to be there when they need them. When Gods speaks about the woman in the Bible, he calls her guide and fountain of wisdom. Does this give the mother the role of creating her child life paths? No, because even if her role is guideness, each individually have to create our life paths. Life isn’t something that is imposed. The mother in Girl is not guiding or speaking with wisdom, she’s imposing knowing that this won’t give results.