Looking throughout The Next American Essay, I decided to choose and analyze Jamaica Kincaid’s Girl, especially its purpose as long-winded prose—a list of commands with little conversation—in a single sentence, punctuated with semi-colons alone. This makes a great introductory passage to apply Ozick’s model of the essay in “She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body.”

For instance, Ozick states that “Like a poem, a genuine essay is made out of language and character and mood and temperament and pluck and chance (151). For Girl, this essay does not have a finite introductory or disclosing piece to it, making it an interesting find to analyze. The first section of the essay is just a list of commands from a mother to a daughter back in the 1900s it seems: “Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil…” (Kincaid, 43).

The first section of the semi-colon can tell you that the setting takes place in a rural farmland area, since there are no advanced technological feats to do this work; everything is done by hand. It also gives you the days of the week to show the themes of instilled years of tradition and routine; it also revealed that it is a very gendered perspective, in which women have to do all the housework, while men work actual jobs in the real world. It definitely does hit upon a mother’s tough love toward her daughter. With Ozick in mind, the essay is almost like a poem with characters and a mood of innocence and childhood yet sternness and learning.

Ozick also states that “The genuine essay, in contrast, never thinks of us; the genuine essay may be the most self-centered (the politer word would be subjective) arena for human thought ever devised” (155). The objects here is the white clothes and the stone heap, which tell a story in itself. It makes you wonder and speculate who are the characters, where does it take place, why are they talking about washing clothes, and so much more unanswered questions. In this way, it is ambiguous and keeps the reader interested and wanting to know more.

Even more, Ozick says  that “the storyteller gathers up whatever is supplied and makes out of these random, unlikely, and disparate offerings a tale both logical and surprising” (155). So just using these list of commands, creates a mood and an entire story. What’s most interesting about the essay is the fact that the mother constantly keeps using the word “slut,” fearing that her daughter will become it at some point in her life and that she would be the kind of person that the baker would not let touch his bread. It makes for an interesting dynamic for a relationship with a mother and daughter.