“My past was my mother”- Mother as a Representation of the Colonial Past in Lucy
On Jamaica Kincaid’s ability to remove her Caribbean identity from her own, Henry Gates Jr. remarks, “she never feels the necessity of claiming the existence of a black world or a female sensibility. She assumes them both. I think it’s a distinct departure that she’s making, and I think that more and more black American writers will assume their world the way that she does” (qtd. in Leslie Garis). She responds to this in an interview with Allan Vorda, saying, “When I sit at my typewriter, I’m not a woman, I’m not from the Caribbean, I’m not black. I’m just this sort of unhappy person struggling to make something, struggling to be free. Yet the freedom isn’t a …show more content…
Kincaid draws on her experience as an au pair in New York (Garis) and her relationship with those around her as the premise of her novel. Her relationship with her mother, in particularly, has been the basis of inspiration for her characters. Kincaid described the early years of her relationship with her mother as a “love …show more content…
According to her model, mothering prepares the female child for domesticity, while the male child fits into the public domain (174). This concept is visible in the way Lucy’s mother expects her to become a nurse, while intends for her brothers to study in England become doctors or lawyers (130). Chodorow also argues that the process of becoming a woman entails “acceptance of ideology, meanings and expectations that go into being a gendered member of our society” (98). Furthermore, she remarks that daughters are expected to be “continuous” and “more like” their mothers (166). Lucy, turns these notions on their head as we are presented with a self-possessed teenage girl who challenges the ideas of societies and wants to break away from them. She constantly tries to re-invent her identity and be the opposite of what her mother expects her to be. Her mother, thus, is a human manifestation of the very society Lucy dislikes, and their separation is a metaphor for Lucy’s attempts to decolonize
On Jamaica Kincaid’s ability to remove her Caribbean identity from her own, Henry Gates Jr. remarks, “she never feels the necessity of claiming the existence of a black world or a female sensibility. She assumes them both. I think it’s a distinct departure that she’s making, and I think that more and more black American writers will assume their world the way that she does” (qtd. in Leslie Garis). She responds to this in an interview with Allan Vorda, saying, “When I sit at my typewriter, I’m not a woman, I’m not from the Caribbean, I’m not black. I’m just this sort of unhappy person struggling to make something, struggling to be free. Yet the freedom isn’t a …show more content…
Kincaid draws on her experience as an au pair in New York (Garis) and her relationship with those around her as the premise of her novel. Her relationship with her mother, in particularly, has been the basis of inspiration for her characters. Kincaid described the early years of her relationship with her mother as a “love …show more content…
According to her model, mothering prepares the female child for domesticity, while the male child fits into the public domain (174). This concept is visible in the way Lucy’s mother expects her to become a nurse, while intends for her brothers to study in England become doctors or lawyers (130). Chodorow also argues that the process of becoming a woman entails “acceptance of ideology, meanings and expectations that go into being a gendered member of our society” (98). Furthermore, she remarks that daughters are expected to be “continuous” and “more like” their mothers (166). Lucy, turns these notions on their head as we are presented with a self-possessed teenage girl who challenges the ideas of societies and wants to break away from them. She constantly tries to re-invent her identity and be the opposite of what her mother expects her to be. Her mother, thus, is a human manifestation of the very society Lucy dislikes, and their separation is a metaphor for Lucy’s attempts to decolonize