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 Academy 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 love. Despite its brevity, "Girl" is a
work which accurately and intimately portrays a mother-daughter relationship and
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".
"Girl" depicts the mother-daughter relationship that appears when the daughter
reaches adolescence, a time of great change in the relationship. Kincaid uses
Caribbean idioms and speech patterns to lend realism to the dialogue. The
dialogue borders on monologue on the part of the mother. The girl is hardly able
to squeeze in a word, having only two brief sentences in the entire work. Very
likely, however, this is not even one speech by the mother, but a compilation of
several bits of advice. To the daughter's ears, the plethora of advice and rules
...