Why Compare Kincaids Girl and Olsens I Stand Here Ironing free essay sample

Stand Here Ironing† and Jamaica Kincaid’s â€Å"Girl† Daughter and mother relationship is an endless topic for many writers. They meant to share the bond of love and care for each other. Nevertheless, in the real world their relationship is not as successful as it ought to be. The stories â€Å"Girl† and â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing† are examples of this conflict. The author of the short story â€Å"Girl† Jamaica Kincaid was born and raised up to the age of seventeen in Antigua, a former colony of Great Britain. In her short story â€Å"Girl†, Kincaid presents the experience of being young and female in a poor country. The story is structured as a single sentence of advice that a mother gives to her daughter. The mother expresses her resents and worries about her daughter becoming a woman. The author of â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing† is Tillie Olsen, an American writer of Russian-Jewish descendent. Similarly her story portrays powerfully the economic domestic burdens a poor woman faced, as well as the responsibility and powerlessness she feels over her child’s life. Moreover, the woman is grieving about her daughters life and about the circumstances that shaped her own mothering. Both stories have many features in common. Not only do they explore the troubles that could exist in the relationship between mother and daughter, but also they raise questions about motherhood, especially when a mother lives on a shoestring, the stories explore the difficulties that a young mother has to endure while raising her child in poverty. Although the two stories refer to different place and time, they share the theme of poverty. On the one hand, â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing† is set in 1950s in the USA. However, it also gives some account of 1930s and 1940s as it follows the life of the author from birth till early adolescence. During this period the USA suffered one of its deepest crises and also participated in WWII. We can easily presume how poor the conditions of life in America were at that time. Furthermore, the story itself tells us a lot about the difficulties the young mother had to face while raising her daughter. â€Å"Girl† is probably set in 1960s, since we know Kincaid was born in 1949. The place of the story is Antigua, a country, part of the West Indies that had its independence in 1967. Similarly to the States during the time of the Great Depression, Antigua was under the pressure of abject poverty. The narrator in â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing† is not referred by name or described physically. The reader assumes her identity through the explanation she gives of her relationship with her eldest daughter, Emily. The narrator has endured a great deal of hardship in her life. At the age of nineteen, she was left by her husband. Besides at that time Emily was only about one year old. Furthermore, the narrator was left with no support from the father and she had to take care of her child during the worst time of the Great Depression. Due to the fact that the narrator had to work long hours, the raising of the daughter had been left with no sufficient attention. The narrator in â€Å"Girl† also is not referred by name or described physically. Throughout the story it seems obvious that all of commands and warnings are said by the mother to her daughter. The aim of all these instructions is to help the daughter learn all a woman should know. Although the mother does nearly all of the talking and there is no action or exposition, there is much that can be guessed about the relationship between the two. According to Rahakrishnan, there should be â€Å"a comparison between life worlds and ways of being† as well as knowledge about the characters’ world with its functioning and its particular representations. In â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing† the narrator is analysing her own mistakes throughout Emily’s life. She is reflecting where did she do wrong with the uprising of her daughter. On the other hand, in â€Å"Girl† the narrator gives no options to her listener, her daughter), there is no dialogue, just a catalogue of advice and warnings. The mother is completely determined and leaves no personal choices to her daughter. According to Davis-Yuval â€Å"intersectionality† refers to the interaction between gender, race, and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power. My aim is to analyse where gender, race, class and ethnicity are interconnected in both â€Å"Girl† and â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing† and what are the â€Å"outcomes† of these intersections. To do that I will have to analyse the question: how people experience subjectively their daily lives in terms of inclusion and exclusion; discrimination and disadvantage; specific aspirations and specific identities. Furthermore, I will have to pay attention to people’s â€Å"attitudes and prejudices towards others† as well as to the way they see themselves and their communities. I will present the images, symbols, texts and ideologies as their representations. Both stories explore the issues of inclusion and exclusion. On the one hand, the characters are members of ational societies, respectively the characters of â€Å"Girl† are members of the black Antiguan society and the characters of â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing† are members of the American society. They are included in these societies; however they suffer exclusion due to their, as Yuval-Davis calls that, â€Å"naturalized† social division. In â€Å"Girl† the mother and the daughter are born black and that predetermines their position in the superior-subordinate axis of colonialism. In other words, they are made to be subordinate because they are black, because of their race. Being a submissive leads to many other exclusions they will be subjected to worse education – a Sunday school; worse education will inevitably undermine their options of self-realisation in life. Moreover, being a woman in this marginalised society undermines your options even more. Not only you are submissive to the white race, but also you are submissive to male dominant. If you are born black woman in Antigua the chances that you will turn to be a â€Å"slut† are high, however, if you follow strictly the rules of how to be a respectable woman, you might escape the danger of being a slut. Hence, no matter how practical and deprived of affection the instructions and warnings may sound – they will save the girl from doom and failure. The mother understands a woman’s place and knows what a woman should know and do in order to become a respectful woman. She offers useful advice about laundry, sewing, ironing, sweeping, and setting a table for different occasions. Harsher admonitions warn the daughter against being careless with her sexuality, â€Å"so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming†. The exclusions due to race and gender are also obvious in â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing†. The mother in the story is a member of the American society that by definition requires equal rights for all of its members. However, being a Jewish emigrant might lead to many restrictions and exclusions; they are forced to settle for low-wage jobs and a lower class life in America. Furthermore, being a young woman complicates the situation even more. The mother in the story has to work long hours to make the ends meet. As a result she cannot pay enough attention to her child; her class, gender and race deprives her of being a normal mother. Instead, her concerns are about how to make a living. The mother describes numerous limitations she has had to confront: poverty, abandonment by her first husband, housework, and motherhood itself. The many hardships in her life seem to compound one another. Furthermore, the limited resources of the mother limit the daughter as well. The mother feels helpless to encourage her daughter’s talent as an actress. The mother seem to blame her own youth and distractedness for the fact that â€Å"little will come† of h