Jamaica Kincaid Research Paper

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Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson on May 25, 1949, on the British-ruled Caribbean island of Antigua. She changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid in 1973 because her family did not approve her writing career ….. Some saw that, at an early age, she was going to be very intelligent but Kincaid received very little encouragement from those around her. Kincaid was raised by her mother, who was a homemaker, and her step-father, who was a carpenter. She attended a public like school system. Kincaid and her teachers had a difficult relationship, and she was often chastised for being sassy and disobedient during school hours. Kincaid’s mother, a book lover, taught her how to read at the age of three and gave her an Oxford Dictionary for…show more content…
It somewhat clarifies the style of Kincaid’s earlier work but she uses less repetition and surrealism than in her previous work. Lucy, like most of Kincaid’s writing, has a strong autobiographical base because this was Kincaid’s way of expressing her suppressed feelings that she had toward her mother and society as a whole. For example, the novel’s heroine, Lucy Josephine Potter, shares one of Kincaid’s given names and her birthday. Also just as Kincaid, Lucy leaves Antigua to become an au pair in a large American city. Then at the age of nineteen, Lucy who is older than Kincaid’s previous heroines, causes the book to take on a more mature and cynical perspective than any of her previous work. However, Lucy is suffering from homesickness and unresolved feelings about her mother. Which comes as a surprise because she believes that she is destined to get away from that lifestyle that she once knew. In my opinion, the cause for the mixed emotions is due solely on the fact that she has never lived on her own or much less been giving the opportunity to travel the world. “With plenty of room for growth, Lucy’s journey takes the form of a bildungsroman, a novel in which a young protagonist makes the transition to
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