Hey, I'm Rebecca Balcarcel.
Let's talk about characters in Jamaica Kincaid's short story, "Girl."
There are two characters in this story: the one who talks a lot, and
the one who hardly talks at all.
The one who talks a lot is the mother, or maybe she's really a grandmother.
Uh, I've even thought maybe she's the voice of society,
telling women how they should behave, you know, what their role should be in the culture.
But let's just refer to her as the mother.
Okay.
Well, when I try to analyze a character in a story, the first thing I
think of, uh, or the first thing I try to notice is: What are these person's traits?
What is this person like?
What's her personality?
Well, this mother is, I think, pretty bossy.
She's controlling.
She's keeping strict watch over her daughter, so I'd call her strict.
Um, and I think she's worried about appearances a bit, because I
see her giving her daughter all these instructions so that her daughter will appear to be a respectable
woman.
I think she wants her daughter to actually be a respectable
woman also, but she cares that she looks like a good mom, you know, that she has prepared
her daughter, uh, to be a- a proper woman and, so that she as a mother
looks like she's done her job.
So, caring about appearances is another trait, I think, that goes with this mother.
Now if I want to go a little deeper and analyze her
character, then it's not enough to just list her traits -- I'm gonna have to figure out
her motives.
Why does she do the things she does?
Why does she say the things she says, and give her daughter the particular instructions
that she does give?
Okay.
Well, I see her giving instructions for a couple of things.
She gives instructions for household, uh, duties: how to iron stuff, how to sweep, how
to set the table.
Well, I think her motive for giving her daughter these rules is so that her daughter's
well-prepared for life.
So, she's giving her daughter, uh, practical advice.
So, one of her motives is: I love my daughter, I want her to be prepared.
Okay.
Another one of her motives, I think, is to hand down the culture that she grew up in,
and she does this by, uh, giving advice that goes beyond just the housekeeping.
She talks about making a medicine to throw away a baby.
That's pretty serious stuff, and she's passing down this feminine
wisdom, or this feminine lore, uh, even for some very serious things like the question
of abortion.
Okay, what else is driving this woman?
Um, I mentioned before, she's trying to keep up appearances, and I think
that's one of her motives.
She wants to look good.
Uh, she doesn't want anyone to say, "You know, you did not raise your
daughter well, and now look at that trouble she's in.
It's your fault."
She wants to make sure, if her daughter gets in trouble, it's not because she as a mother
dropped the ball.
Okay, so she wants to keep up appearances.
Um, there's a word in the story that recurs three times, and that is, "slut."
Now this is troublesome to me, because I feel like the daughter is being
accused of being a slut, even though I don't see any data to support that accusation.
So that makes me really question: What's the mother doing here?
What's her motive for mentioning that word?
Why is she accusing her daughter, over and over, of being a slut?
Well, I think maybe there's a secret here.
The mother is actually worried that the daughter is going to turn out like her.
Maybe she made a few mistakes when she was young.
Maybe she went around with those wharf-rat boys more than she should
have.
Maybe she wishes that some adult had pulled her aside and said, "Honey, you need to, uh,
behave yourself, because if you don't, you're going to regret it."
Maybe the mother's reputation has been, you know, sullied or tarnished a little bit in
her own... in her own youth.
So, I think maybe Mom is acting partly out of guilt
or, um, regret about her own behavior as a young woman.
Okay, so there's the mom.
Alright, now the second character is the girl.
Now she get's the title, and she gets two lines of dialogue, and that's all she gets.
So, it's pretty hard to tell what kind of character she even is.
[sigh] We just don't have much to go on.
However, I think the two lines of dialogue do show us a few things.
For one, it shows that she doesn't have a lot of power in this
relationship with her mother.
She's pretty much the listener.
It also shows that she's kind of timid -- she's trying to behave.
She protests, "Wait, I'm not a slut!"
She doesn't say that.
She actually says, "I don't sing those songs you say I'm not supposed to sing, and, and
I don't hang around with those boys, and I-" She seems
to be defending herself.
Now if we believe her, if she's being truthful, then, uh, her character is really the victim
of this download of information.
She's the, uh, recipient of all this, uh, all these rules,
all these instructions, and her job is to just, uh, to try to cope with it all and to
try to learn it all, because being a woman is gonna be awfully complicated if
you have to learn all this stuff.
So, she doesn't really grow or change as a character.
She doesn't have a lot of underlying issues, like the mother does.
She's more of a flat character, which means that she doesn't have a huge amount of depth.
Mostly, we feel sorry for her, that she's, uh, you know, being put upon, uh, that
she may not have freedom to develop herself in other ways.
Mother hasn't told her, "Hey, you should go to college," or,
"Hey, you should prepare yourself, uh, for a career by learning some skills."
Instead she's being told all of this very, uh, maybe to us, old-fashioned, uh, advice
about how to be a woman, and I always feel sorry for her.
Like, gosh!
She may have to rebel to get out from under these ideas and these stereotypes.
Um, and maybe she will, but right now in the story, she's pretty much complying and trying
to do exactly what her mother says.
Uh, bless her heart.
Alright, so those are the two characters in "Girl."
And if you want to talk more about this story, uh, check out another one of the videos.