Girl

"Girl" depicts the mother-daughter relationship that appears when the daughter reaches adolescence, a time of great change in the relationship. The girl is hardly able to squeeze in a word, having only two brief sentences in the entire work. This is not even one speech by the mother, but a compilation of several bits of advice. To the daughter's ears, the overabundance of advice and rules her mother offers sounds like endless repetitive words. The …

…offered by the mother shows the role of women in the community. Women were in charge of domestic affairs and running the household, doing the cooking, cleaning, shopping, sewing, and laundry. The advice all deals with subjects that are stereotypically "women's work." As the girl struggles to find her own identity, she struggles and rebels against the role into which society trapped her mother, and into which it is trying to trap her as well.