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''Annie John'', a novel written by
Jamaica Kincaid Jamaica Kincaid (; born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson on May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan–American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. Born in St. John's, the capital of Antigua and Barbuda, she now lives in North Bennington, ...
in 1985, details the growth of a girl in
Antigua Antigua ( ; ), also known as Waladli or Wadadli by the local population, is an island in the Lesser Antilles. It is one of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean region and the most populous island of the country of Antigua and Barbuda. Antigua ...
, an island in the
Caribbean The Caribbean ( , ; ; ; ) is a region in the middle of the Americas centered around the Caribbean Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, mostly overlapping with the West Indies. Bordered by North America to the north, Central America ...
. It covers issues as diverse as mother-daughter relationships, same-sex attraction, racism, clinical depression, poverty, education, and the struggle between medicine based on "scientific fact" and that based on "native superstitious know-how".


Plot summary

Annie John, the book's protagonist, starts as a young girl who worships her mother. She follows her everywhere and is shocked and hurt when she learns that she must someday live in a different house from her mother. While her mother tries to teach her to become a lady, Annie is sent to a new school where she must prove herself intellectually and make new friends. She then falls in love with a girl named Gwen. She promises Gwen that she will always love her. However, Annie later admires a girl she calls the "Red Girl." She admires this girl in all aspects of her life. This girl means freedom to Annie because she does not have to follow any daily hygienic routines like the other girls. Annie John is then moved to a higher class because of her intelligence. For this reason, Annie is drawn away from her best friend, Gwen, while alienating herself from her mother and the other adults. It later becomes clear that she also suffers from some mental depression, which distances her from both her family and her friends. The book ends with her physically distancing herself from all she knows and loves by leaving home for
nursing Nursing is a health care profession that "integrates the art and science of caring and focuses on the protection, promotion, and optimization of health and human functioning; prevention of illness and injury; facilitation of healing; and alle ...
school in England.


Publication history

The book's chapters were originally published separately in ''
The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...
'', before being combined and published as the novel ''Annie John'', the stories connected by Kincaid's use of Annie John as the narrator.


Major themes, symbolism, and style

Children growing apart from their parents while becoming adolescents is the major theme in the novel. Annie and her mother share common personalities and goals and even look exactly alike, though they grow apart through the narrative. Barbara Wiedemann writes that Kincaid's fiction is not specifically aimed at a young adult audience. Still, the readers will benefit from the insight evident in Kincaid's description of coming of age. ''Annie John'' has been noted to contain feminist views. Asked if the relationship between Annie and Gwen was meant to suggest "lesbian tendencies," Kincaid replied: "No…I think I am always surprised that people interpret it so literally." The relationship between Gwen and Annie is a practicing relationship. It's about how things work. It's like learning to walk. Always, there is the sense that they would go on to lead heterosexual lives. Whatever happened between them, homosexuality would not be a serious thing because it is just practicing" (Vorda 94). The story conveys the theme of
colonialism Colonialism is the control of another territory, natural resources and people by a foreign group. Colonizers control the political and tribal power of the colonised territory. While frequently an Imperialism, imperialist project, colonialism c ...
. England colonized Antigua and reconstructed its society. This is seen when the reader is introduced to Miss George and Miss Edward, teachers at Annie's school named after English kings. Annie, in return, strongly dislikes England for imposing its culture on Antigua. Water is consistently used throughout the novel to depict the separation between Annie John and her mother. Symbolic references to water (including the sea, rain, and other forms) illustrate Annie's development from childhood to maturity. Near the novel's start, the reader learns that Annie has a regular baby bottle and one shaped like a boat - and that is only the beginning of her water-connected choices in life. Kincaid's writing is not in the traditional paragraph form but in run-on sentences and paragraphs with little fragments. Jan Hall, a writer for Salem Press Master Plots, Fourth Edition book, states in an article about ''Annie John'' that "because the novel has no years, months, or dates, the story has a sense of timelessness."


Connections to other works

There are clear echoes of themes and events from Kincaid's books ''Lucy'' and ''My Brother''. ''My Brother'' is a non-fiction story, yet ''Annie John'' has some of the same events and facts placed in her own family as if Annie was Kincaid when she was younger. In ''My Brother'', Kincaid's father had to walk after he ate because he had an impaired digestive tract and heart; their family ate fish, bread, and butter, and a six-year-old died in her mother's arm going over the same bridge that her father had recently walked on after eating. The character of Miss Charlotte dies in both books. Lucy can be cited as a continuation of ''Annie John ''because Annie John has moved off of her Caribbean island of Antigua and is starting a new life in England, even though Lucy is in America because hypothetically, Annie John will have to learn how to adjust to England. Jan Hall writes: "the themes of ''Annie John'', Jamaica Kincaid’s first novel, are continued in ''Lucy'' (1990), a novel about a young woman’s experiences after leaving her Caribbean island."Hall, Jan. "Work Analysis." Masterplots, Fourth Edition 12.4 (2010): Print.


Bibliography

*Deborah E. Mistron. ''Understanding Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John: a student casebook to issues, sources, and historical documents''. Greenwood Publishing Group, (1999)


References

{{Reflist 1985 American novels Antigua and Barbuda novels African-American novels Novels set in the Caribbean Postcolonial literature Novels by Jamaica Kincaid