Metaphors of Painful Attachment and Loss of Self: Instructional Entrapment in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” and Harmful Union in Margaret Atwood’s “You Fit into Me”

Abstract

This paper offers a comparative analysis of Jamaica Kincaid’s prose poem “Girl, ” published in 1978 and Margaret Atwood’s four-line poem “You Fit into Me” published in 1971. This analysis examines how both works employ metaphors of painful connection and a gradual disintegration of the Self to represent different types of gendered relational violences. The prose poem “Girl” consists of one lengthy stream-of-consciousness monologue in which a mother delivers a list of instructions to her daughter. The instructions given address issues of decorum, housekeeping and women’s work and how to be a lady. However, in a tone that is at once commanding, the home and home life in “Girl” become an exercise in tropological entrapment. The list of instructions serves to delimit and define the daughter through the agency of the speaker. In the four-line poem “You Fit into Me” Atwood condenses the experience of a violent romantic union into one shocking metaphor. The condensed language of the poem takes the reader from the idea of an easy comfortable union between the speaker and her lover to the idea of a forceful one. For the analysis, the researchers have employed the terms and concepts of feminist literary theorists, postcolonial critics and the Lakoff and Johnson model of conceptual metaphor theory. These theoretical frameworks have been used to examine how each text employs metaphor to demonstrate the way that concepts of femininity are produced through the internalization of tropes. In “Girl” the production of the Self through tropological entrapment occurs through a slow process of accumulation. Through the exhaustive list of instructions which the speaker compiles, the daughter is literally shaped through the burden of the mother’s commands. In “You Fit into Me, ” the production of the Self occurs in a moment of shock. In the image of the fish hook and the eye, the metaphor of union is literalized. This literalization makes the violence of the union irrefutable. The researchers argue that although the two texts are radically different in terms of their formal characteristics, their length and their respective cultural contexts, both texts theorize femininity as the production of the Self through language. Specifically, in “Girl” and “You Fit into Me, ” the production of the Self occurs through a process of linguistic violence. The trope of union between the speaker and her lover in “You Fit into Me” and the speaker and her daughter in “Girl” illustrates the way in which a feminized Self is constructed and destroyed through the agency of the trope.