Week 15 Analysis: Literary Analysis of "Girl"

For this week's literary analysis I decided to write about "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid. One literary devices I felt was worth paying attention to when reading "Girl" were diction. Throughout this very short piece of writing, Jamaica Kincaid lists all of the duties that are to be learned by a young girl. However, Kincaid does so in a way that feels like more of an insulting lecture than a lesson being taught. One of the things the narrator says to the girl is "on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming" (1145). Looking at the choice of diction used by Kincaid, we can see that the speaker is assuming that the girl is going to become a slut rather than simply telling her not to become one by specifying that she is "so bent on becoming" a slut (1145). I thought this was very significant because it completely changed the way that I read this story. The entire entry became less of "here's what you should do as a girl" and more of an accusation. Skipping through other chores that the girl is being taught how to do, like sewing, there's another point where Kincaid wrote "this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming" (1146). Again, with the exact same choice of diction, there is this heavy implication that the girl is already aiming to become a slut. This idea blows up even further when the speaker says "this is how to behave in the presence of men who don't know you very well, and this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned against you becoming" (1146). She says this is so they won't "recognize immediately the slut I have warned against you becoming" which at this point illustrates a shift in the way the speaker views the girl (1146). If the girl--at least in the eyes of the speaker--wasn't already a slut, then no one should be able to "recognize" her as a slut. They could suspect or think she might be a slut, but they can't recognize her as a slut unless she was already a slut. The girl is a slut in the eyes of the speaker and now the effort is no longer to teach her not to be a slut but rather how to hide the fact that she's a slut. The theme present throughout "Girl" is the oppression of women. I feel like it makes even more sense that this is the theme when we look at the bio about Jamaica Kincaid provided in our anthology. She "changed her name" because it "allowed her to evade her family, who opposed her writing" (1144). Her parents might have raised her in a such a way to convince her that she is a girl and nothing more. Maybe they opposed her writing because it wasn't part of the list of things that she was taught to do as a girl. Women, in the eyes of the parent in "Girl," shouldn't be doing anything other than their womanly duties and trying not to become a slut. Having dreams like seeking to become a writer isn't part of that picture. As far as I can tell from reading this story, women are oppressed even by their mothers and Jamaica Kincaid wanted to write something that would criticize this so that women who read "Girl" might see how unfair they are treated just for being women. She must have hoped that women would pursue their dreams just as she pursued hers.


Kincaid, Jamaica. "Girl." The Norton Anthology World Literature, edited by Martin Puchner, Third Edition, vol. D, W. W. Norton 2012, pp. 1144-1146