Sample Solution

Girl” tells the story of a sad mother/daughter relationship and the pressure that young girls faced when sent out into society. Many elements of literature demonstrate this in the story. However, the theme strongly suggests that elder woman feel that there is a right and wrong way to be as a woman. Throughout the story, the mother repeatedly accuses the daughter of being determined to become a ‘slut.’ This suspicion doesn’t seem to be provoked by the girl’s behavior. The girl seems to be well behaved as indicated by her first line of input in the story, ‘but I don’t sing Benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school.’ This is a respond to her mother’s question on the girl’s singing of Benna, a music genre, in Sunday school, which was followed by instructions on not to sing Benna in Sunday school. The last line of the short story, ‘you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread’? could be interpreted as the mother again challenging the girl’s morals. But I think this is instead challenging the girl’s strength as a person. It seem ironic that the mother has harshly demand the girl to learn all of the mother’s habits and methods, not giving the girl much of a word in any of her decisions, and then expects her to have the strength of her mother. Strength that was learned through experience, not instruction. The subjective identity of the narrator is, in a sense, inextricable from the Girl, a ‘we’ of mother-daughter identity. The Girl’s minor presence ‘ two brief and seemingly inconsequential challenges ‘ suggests that perhaps it is the Girl who is narrating and working out her own identity through speaking, through recreating and re-enacting (with language) the complicated relationship with her mother, the complicated identity of learning to be a girl/woman, a (re)enactment through assembling the severe and protective and loving and damning instructions on how to be. The motives behind the sternness seem to be protecti