Jamaica Kinkaid’s short story/poem, “Girl” captures the unsettled, fault-finding, yet encouraging relationship between a young girl and her mother. Kinkaid shows all the tensions and all the household rituals that provide a formula for the young girl to grow and mature into womanhood the “right" way. In this essay we will discuss the strains that Kinkaid is capturing, are in largely retained by her equally stiff use of punctuation. For the relationship is premised on the mother’s dominant voice and the daughter’s ambivalent submission. Through the eccentric punctuation the reader feels the endless flow of the mother’s directions, advice, criticisms, but also care and love. This creates a push and pull in the reader that in many ways mirrors…show more content… When dividing a longer sentence in two, the author uses a comma. Kincaid’s use of a single, essentially full sentence adds an interesting quality to the piece that would not be there otherwise. The single continued sentence forces the reader to have minimal pauses in-between sentences. The reader reads the narration as a full, separated by an only partial pauses of the semi colon. This quality of the poem eliminates the traditional back and forth dialogue between two people. Instead, the single carried on sentence enhances the fact that the mother is the one speaking to her daughter, and the daughter does not formally reply in the text. The only evidence of the daughter’s natural personal voice appears italicized in the poem. For example, “…but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?;” Here, a question mark is used, yet is immediately followed by a semi colon. This too distinguishes the mother’s voice from the daughter’s. The only times when the daughter’s voice shines through…show more content… One can come to realize that for this mother the significance of appearance and reputation overtake her language as it also overtakes the way that she views her daughter. Though, behind her fascination of reputation is a kept education in the ways of the home, the ways of the world and the ways of all. The mother declares, for instance, "...this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming;…" This line is mainly crucial to the work as a whole, because it speaks completely to the fleshly and materialistic appearances, while the mother educating her daughter on how to protect herself as a woman. The mother distinguishes that no matter how old her daughter may be, the importance of her womanly appearance and obligations will never fade. Early on in the essay, the importance of domestic appearance emerges when the mother demonstrates how to properly iron a shirt and trousers, or how “cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil” at the drop of a hat. The way the piece is written also implies that the narrator is currently with her mother, thus is given the ability to see exactly how she might “behave in the presence of men who don't know [her] very well…” The daughter must learn that these household skills are crucial to her appearance of being a woman. Her knowing
