Phase 1: Everyday Use v Girl

Phase 1:  “Everyday Use” and “Girl”

Alice Walker's Everyday Use and Jamaica Kincaid's Girl are both short stories whose themes are narrowly similar, encompassing the mother-daughter relationships with respect to respective rearing and the young women’s coming of age.  However, the relationships reveal predominantly contrasting points of view of both mothers through the direct and indirect voices of the narrators, and the depth of the characters depicted in each regard. 

With regard to similarities of the motherhood roles, it is safe to assume that the mothers in both stories truly have their daughters’ best interests at heart. In Everyday Use, the opinionated and descriptive mother is single, having raised two daughters, taking on the roles of both mother and father: Dee, beautiful, strong-willed like her mother, with a zest for living and exploring; Maggie, scarred from a house fire, is humble, ignorant, in awe and envious of her sister, yet self-contained in the safety of her mother’s company and acceptance, sheltered from the outside world. Without a doubt, the married mother in Girl has unarguably the same best interest of her daughter. The reader is not provided any background or circumstantial evidence as to the character of the Girl, but to fulfill the embodiment or substance of her character, one must question whether the story might otherwise lack the intentional, run-on list of approximately fifty qualities accounted by the daughter, our narrator, her mother tried to instill for her daughter’s would-be betterment and survival, with the threat and fear of becoming deemed undesirable to men by way of inevitable promiscuousness.     

Consider the contrasting point of views of the mothers in the stories.  The mothers differ by way of conditional versus unconditional love. In Walker’s Everyday Use, the mother seems to portray a well-rounded sense of wisdom, loving and letting the two daughters become the women God intended them to be, as different in their appearance as their lifestyles.  Dee, the bold, entitled, explorer of the world, described by her mother, “At sixteen, she had a style of her own: and knew what style was.”  Maggie by contrast, scarred though equally loved by her mother, in the concluding paragraphs, when Dee wanted to take the family quilts and she cowered instead of fight for them, summed up by her mother “This was the way she knew God to work.” Kincaid’s Girl is told from the point of view of the daughter.  She passively recants her mother in second person instilling or brainwashing traditional socialization and domestication.  The Girl effectively comprises her mother’s list of conventional methods of conducting herself, specifically outlining what a woman’s duties are in the home as well as how a lady should behave.  Though the list essentially outlines duties and expectations socially, it lacks the nurturing aspects of developing a complete sense of maturity into womanhood, such as her sexuality.  The mother’s point of view on sexuality is stifled.  For the Girl, according to her mother, her sexual duties are to become as utilitarian as the chores themselves, listed as equally as the thirty-one ‘how to’ manners such as the sewing on of a button.. the sweeping the floor.. how to walk; how to set the table; how to catch a fish; as if to be punch-lined with contempt, “…not like the slut you are so bent on becoming” which the girl conveys three times in the passage, an obvious attempt to drive that point home to the reader. 

Although both the themes in Everyday Use and Girl point to undisputed motherly love for their daughters, the manner and tones in which their love is conveyed remains to be seen in Kincaid’s Girl. This may be attributed to Kincaid’s fragmented, underdeveloped scope of the relationship between mother and daughter open ended in the readers mind by contrast.