Essay on Literary Analysis of the Girl by Jamaica Kincaid

Feminist View of â€Å"Girl† Erin O’Brien South University Online Composition II/Literature November 3, 2011 Professor Chwala Feminist View of â€Å"Girl† In order to properly view a story from a feminist perspective, it is important that the reader fully understands what the feminist perspective entails. â€Å"There are many feminist perspectives, and each perspective uses different approaches to analyze and interpret texts. One is that gender is â€Å"socially constructed† and another is that power is distributed unequally on the basis of sex, race, and ethnicity, religion, national origin, age, ability, sexuality, and economic class status† (South University Online, 2011, para. 1). The story â€Å"Girl† is an outline of the things young girls†¦show more content†¦352). In today’s society there are no rules that prevent a person from doing all their laundry in the same day. A majority of people have probably learned from their parents or from experience that it doesn’t work so well if you wash whites and darks together; otherwise stating there are no instructions that come along with the ta sk of laundry. In Kincaid’s (2011) story â€Å"Girl† the reader gathers the idea from the tone of the text, as it is the women’s role to do the laundry; whereas, in today’s society it is not always the woman completing the task of laundry. In some families, more often than less the women and men share the responsibility of doing laundry. In viewing the story â€Å"Girl† from a feminist perspective, another occurrence of gender roles would be the narrator’s statement â€Å"soak salt water fish overnight before you cook it† (Kincaid, 2011, p. 352). In the society that the story takes place, it is the woman’s responsibility to cook, compared to the twentieth century family, the meals may be prepared by every member of the family. Prior to the feminist laws women were treated with little to no respect for the things that they were expected to accomplish on a daily basis. In the era the story is written, women were often wives, hous ekeepers, cooks, and teachers. â€Å"This is how you iron your father’s khaki shirt so that it doesn’t have a crease; this is how you iron your father’s khaki pants so that they don’t have a crease,† and â€Å"this is how you sweep aShow MoreRelatedA Literary Analysis Of Girl By Jamaica Kincaid1927 Words   |  8 PagesLanguage, Culture, and a Mother s’ Influence: A Literary Analysis of Girl by Jamaica Kincaid Girls, young women, and mature mothers. Society has consistently given women strict guidelines, rules and principles on how to be an appropriate member of a man’s society. These rules are set at a young age and enforced thoroughly into adulthood. When not followed accordingly, women often times too many face reprimanding through means of verbal abuse, physical abuse, or social exile. In the midst of allRead MoreLiterary Criticism : The Free Encyclopedia 7351 Words   |  30 Pages Bildungsroman From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search In literary criticism, a Bildungsroman (German pronunciation: [ˈbÉ ªldÊŠÅ‹s.Ê oËÅ'maË n]; German: novel of formation, education, culture),[a] novel of formation, novel of education,[2] or coming-of-age story (though it may also be known as a subset of the coming-of-age story) is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming of age),[3]