Girl By Jamaica Kincaid Summary

Imagine being in a nursery school classroom full of all your friends. Your biggest problem is whether or not the kids around you, most likely the boys next to you have “cooties”. From my understanding, those were the best times of my life. I had no problems in the world or worries about anything. After all, boys go to Jupiter to get more stupid and girls go to college to get more knowledge. I would have never thought that the gender roles in this rhyme would have truth value or be the opposite. In today’s society, woman and girls are put under a lot of pressure to look a certain way, act a certain way, and to perform certain tasks. The balance between showing confidence with their bodies and promiscuity is very hard to achieve especially for
Gender roles are mainly based on culture so in the text, the gender roles are prominent to the Caribbean culture. Gender roles are important because it is a basic set of rules for a specific gender to follow that is a social norm. Moreover, this shows that sexual difference and structure is important to understanding the context of “Girl”. When we are taught about the elements of fiction, setting is always one of the first we learn because it is so crucial to the way the story is meant to be interpreted. The story “Girl” was likely set during Kincaid's childhood in the 1950s and 1960s, but definitely not in the United States. She was from the Caribbean where the gender roles of women were completely different from the modern United States readers. Back then, women in the United States were also expected to cook, clean, and stay home, but today’s society is completely different. In this case, the setting being a distant, unknown country to the United States, affected the way we look at the story. Setting sets the time period of “Girl” which also shows the point of view of the people in those times because everything is so different