Reflection # 4: Girl

This week we read two new stories, Eveline and Girl, the first written by James Joyce and the second by Jamaica Kincaid. Girl was a very strange story, because I never thought that a single sentence could be considered as a short story. It is a single sentence, a very extensive one. The whole story is about a mother who is speaking to her daughter telling her what she should do, how she should act and how to do everything. It is a story about how parents always are obligating you to do this, to do that, this is good and this is bad, you should do this and you shouldn’t do that. That’s funny because at least the half of what the mother told to her daughter we had heard that in a moment of our life. But what captured my attention was that the mother is very strict with her and is always telling her daughter that she has to do everything she said to not become a slut, as she expects her daughter to be.

In the story, the daughter spoke only two times because her mother was talking like a maniac. The most interesting part of the story is when the mother tells her daughter “this is how to squeeze a bread to make sure it’s fresh”. That’s erotic because she refers to the male sexual organ. The daughter later ask her “but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread” and the mother answered “you meant to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?”. I think the mother is trying to tell her daughter that she has to be sure that the man she choose is virgin and if she don’t do that, the consequence is that she would be treated as a slut. The story was interesting but I never thought that a single sentence could be considered a short story.