Essay Database

Girl" was first published in 1983 in At the Bottom of the River, a collection of stories which won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. "Girl" is a short piece that shows the dialogue between an older woman and a younger girl, probably a mother and her adolescent daughter. In the piece, the mother instructs her daughter on many subjects, from cooking and cleaning to social skills …

…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.