Jamaica Kincaid

There are a lot of ways of reading this novel. It could be read, somewhat conventionally, with focus on Lucy, people and places. But if we look into the deep, we’ll see well-marked psychological picture of the young woman, her everyday struggle with herself.

In “Lucy”, Jamaica Kincaid challenges the idea of passive/pathological sexuality in women. Lucy’s deepest conflicts and her greatest anger arise from her relationships with her mother and then with her substitute mother, Mariah. Her own family seems fragmented, and in some sense her island community does, as well. The novel itself, however, does seem to connect mother and motherland–the island. That may explain somewhat the intensity of her anger and feeling of suffocation. Her rage against her mother is not simply psychological, an especially strong version of the usual parent-child conflict.

Lucy’s relationship to her mother is highly complex; she has very ambivalent feelings about her. She is cruel to her, but also loves her deeply; she hates her and admires her at the same time. Although Lucy constantly discusses her anger toward her mother and Annie’s inadequacy and failure as a mother, she also peppers the novel with tender stories of their interactions. “I reminded her that my whole upbringing had been devoted to preventing me from becoming a slut.”

it is one lesson, which mother gave to Lucy. Lucy describes her mother’s large hands, and her love of plants; she tells us of Annie’s lessons to Lucy about sex, men, and abortion, and of sitting on Annie’s lap as a child and caressing her face. Lucy also proudly shares stories of her mother’s life and her various triumphs. Despite Lucy’s anger toward her mother, she still feels a deep connection to her and identifies with her in many ways.

Until she was nineteen years old, Lucy Potter had not ventured from her own little world on the small island where she was born. Now she is living with a family and learning a culture that is very different from her own. Lewis and Mariah and their four daughters want Lucy to feel like she is part of the family but at first she finds it difficult to fit in. She just wants to do her duty and in her off-hours discovers a new world through her friend Peggy and sexuality through young men, Hugh and Paul.

Lucy often reflects on her life back on the island; the conflicts between she and her mother, and the British influence on the islanders. She remembers the time her mother showed her how to mix herbs that supposedly would cleanse a woman’s womb but what they both knew was an abortion remedy. Lucy knows what is expected of her, to study for a respectable job like a nurse and to honour her family. She finds out that the tidy, neat world of the family she has come to love is not all it purports to be and how silence is a universal language.

Lucy comes to North America to work as an au pair for Lewis and Mariah and their four children. Lewis and Mariah are a thrice-blessed couple–handsome, rich, and seemingly happy. Yet, almost at once, Lucy begins to notice cracks in their beautiful facade. With mingled anger and compassion, Lucy scrutinizes the assumptions and verities of her employers’ world and compares them with the vivid realities of her native place.

Lucy has no illusions about her own past, but neither is she prepared to be deceived about where she presently is. At the same time that Lucy is coming to terms with Lewis’s and Mariah’s lives, she is also unravelling the mysteries of her own sexuality. Gradually a new person unfolds: passionate, forthright, and disarmingly honest.

Lucy leaves the novel crying with shame over her wish to “love someone so much that I would die from it.” Lucy does love someone that much, but she has thrown that love away because she could not adequately create a space for herself within it. When her mother tells her “You can run away, but you cannot escape the fact that I am your mother, my blood runs in you, I carried you for nine months inside me,”

Lucy interprets that as a prison sentence. “To myself I then began calling her Mrs. Judas, and I began to plan a separation from her that even then I suspected would never be complete.”  Yet this is a prison sentence that all human beings must face, and Lucy’s way of dealing with it leaves her empty and ashamed at the end of the novel. Indeed, she states, “I was now living a life I had always wanted to live. I was living apart from my family… The feeling of bliss, the feeling of happiness, the feeling of longing fulfilled that I had thought would come with this situation was nowhere to be found inside me.”

The short stories The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman and Girl by Jamaica Kincaid share the common theme of women who are portrayed as frail beings.  In both literary selections, women are depicted as dependent on men and other family members, and who must deal with so many restrictions.

Their limitations are deliberately foisted on them by their immediate kin or spouse. On the other hand, the women portrayed in the short stories also hurdle challenges they themselves have created or brought upon themselves.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, for example, the author presents the protagonist as weak or on the brink of a nervous breakdown. In the beginning of the story, when the protagonist is brought to a country home, she appears in control of her mental faculties.

She even opines, “Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good” (Gilman, 2008, p. 2).  Her husband, however, confines her to the upper story of the house and prohibits, albeit in his loving and gentle manner, anything that may tax her mentally. The woman’s craving for social interaction and stimulus becomes more pronounced as the days pass, yet she allows her husband to direct all her actions.

The woman’s  dismal future is reflected in the way she sees the wallpaper in the house where she is confined to recuperate: “It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in other” (Gilman, 2008, p. 5).

The woman then begins to imagine things and becomes neurotic. This emphasizes how, when placed under repressive circumstances, the fairer gender may fall apart. In an ironic twist at the end of the story, though, the husband’s fainting spell and the woman’s movement of creeping over him denotes that women can have the upper hand over her male counterpart if she wills it.

The other literary selection, Girl, Jamaica Kincaid, likewise illustrates how women are expected to follow so many rules and conform to what tradition and society dictate. Just like in The Yellow Wallpaper where the main character indicates a feeling of tiredness at being manipulated and repressed,  the protagonist in Girl who is a young girl receiving countless reminders answers back her mother for berating her every move, but ends up being castigated more.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, the husband-wife relation is amiable. In fact, the husband has the best intention for his wife, but the worst harm results from it unknowingly sends her spiraling out of control by confining her. In contrast, Girl uses the mother-daughter tandem to illustrate the common practice adopted by most cultures of ingraining good manners, blind obedience, and prescribed roles to female members of the family.

In Kincaid’s Girl, the daughter is admonished by her mother to move and behave in ladylike manner. Her movements – from the way she walks and carries herself, to the household chores she is expected to perform, to how to smile to certain people, to reacting to a man’s bullying and even  loving a man – are all dictated to her.

Offhand, it is a typical scene of a mother giving numerous pieces of advice to her daughter, but the story presents the parent treating the young girl with a condescending attitude.  The mother keeps interjecting that the girl is bound to become the slut she is “so bent on becoming” (Kincaid, 2005, p. 257) if the proper rules of conduct and self-control are not followed.

In a sense, the mother portrayed in the story is depicted as the judgmental type who does not allow her daughter free creative expression. Kincaid dwells on the singular theme of just how powerless women were centuries ago.

Women back then had no voice of their own and were confined to doing traditional tasks like keeping the home neat and orderly and being prim and proper or acting in a refined manner.  In both Girl and The Yellow Wallpaper, the suppressive societal attitude towards women of a bygone era – who are seen as meek and subservient individuals unable to chart their own destinies – is clearly presented.

Upon closer analysis of two different selections, readers find authors employing a variety of creative techniques that help them dissect different perspectives and gain much clearer understanding of the theme and other  key messages.

References

Gilman, C. (2008). The yellow wallpaper. Forgotten Books. Retrieved May 3, 2010, from http://www.amazon.com/Yellow-Wallpaper-Forgotten-Books/dp/1606802380.

Kincaid, J. (2005). Girl.  In  X.J. Kennedy & D. Gioia (Eds.), Backpack literature: an introduction to fiction, poetry & drama (p. 257). Pennsylvania: Pearson/Longman.