Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid

First published: 1990

Type of plot: Autobiographical

Time of work: The 1980’s

Locale: New York City and the Great Lakes

Principal Characters:

• Lucy, the novel’s narrator, who has come to New York from Antigua
• Mariah, Lucy’s well-meaning but insensitive white employer
• Lewis, Mariah’s husband, who falls in love with Mariah’s best friend Dinah
• Dinah, Mariah’s best friend, an insensitive woman to whom Lucy is “the girl”
• Hugh, Dinah’s brother, who briefly becomes Lucy’s lover
• Peggy, Lucy’s “bad” friend, who introduces her to the darker side of city life

The Novel

A roughly autobiographical novel, Lucy deals with the experiences of a young Antiguan woman who, like Jamaica Kincaid herself, comes to New York City to work as a nanny in an effort to escape her repressive family and the narrow island life in which she has grown up. Her experiences in the city disillusion her, but while she copes with her disillusionment, she must come to terms with her family back in Antigua.

The episodic action of the five chapters of Lucy is narrated by Lucy herself, beginning with her first morning on her new job in New York. Even when the family was driving her home from the airport and pointing out famous sights to her, Lucy recalls, her feelings were a sort of sadness. What she discovers is the difference between her romantic expectations and the gritty reality of the city. The difference is made even more powerful by her memory of warm, sunny Antigua, a place she had never expected to miss, for when she was at home she felt in constant conflict with her family. Now, however, she identifies this surprising sadness as homesickness for foods of home such as green figs and pink mullet, for a cousin, even for a favorite nightgown from her childhood.

The family she works for is kind to her, and Lucy admires their blonde good looks and happy informality. They recognize Lucy’s unhappiness, however, and Lewis, the husband, begins to call her “Visitor.” One night, Lucy tells the family a dream full of sexual images she dreamed about Lewis. Mariah and Lewis are obviously uncomfortable, but to Lucy, the dream simply indicates that she has made Mariah and Lewis important people in her life.

In early March, Mariah, knowing how Lucy longs for warm weather, describes the beauty of daffodils to her. The description makes Lucy remember how in school she had had to recite a poem about daffodils (evidently William Wordsworth’s famous “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”). She recited it perfectly, but underneath she was angry about the task and the poem, which to her represented Great Britain’s colonization of Antigua. Her anger emphasizes the gulf between Lucy and Mariah.

While Mariah plans a trip to her family home on the Great Lakes, Lucy is thinking about her own family. Her mother’s letters are filled with threats and warnings of the city’s dangers. This makes Lucy remember her mother’s disreputable friend Sylvie, a woman who had a scar on her cheek from a human bite and who had spent time in jail, a powerful contrast to Mariah’s inoffensive beauty. At the chapter’s end, the family has arrived at the family summer home at the Great Lakes. Lucy is unimpressed and is angered by Mariah’s claim that she is a good fisherwoman because she has Indian blood. To Lucy, the boast is the sort that only a victor can make, and she asks, “How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be the vanquished also?” Mariah, however, does not understand Lucy’s anger.

At about this time, Mariah’s best friend, Dinah, arrives at the lakes. Lucy dislikes Dinah, who clearly sees Lucy as only a servant. Lucy also sees that Dinah is a vain woman who is envious of Mariah’s possessions, even of her family.

Lucy is rather isolated while the family is at the lakes; she misses her disreputable friend Peggy, a young woman whose gaudy clothes, heavy smoking, and rebellious behavior have made Mariah forbid Lucy to bring her around the children. Loneliness makes Lucy interested in Dinah’s brother Hugh, an attractive and worldly man who sees Lucy as an individual and who soon becomes her lover.

While at the lakes, Mariah decides to write a children’s book about the environment. Lucy is rather amused at Mariah’s naïve inability to see any relationship between the threatened environment and her own high standard of living. At about this time, too, Lucy recognizes that Lewis has begun a love affair with Dinah.

Back in New York again, Lucy enters a period of change. She stops her nurse’s training. She takes a new lover, Paul; ironically, as she and Peggy grow apart, they begin to plan to find an apartment to share. Mariah asks Lewis to leave the household. Most important, Lucy receives a letter marked “urgent” from her mother. She ignores it as she has her mother’s previous letters, until at last a cousin comes to her in person to tell her that her father has died, leaving her mother destitute.

Angry with her mother for marrying an unfaithful man who cannot manage money, Lucy nevertheless sends her some of the money she has saved toward the apartment. Shortly after that, she quits her job with Mariah, takes work as a photographer’s assistant, and moves in with Peggy. At the novel’s end, Lucy seems to have severed almost all of her emotional ties to others; in the last scene, she writes her name in a new journal and records her longing to love someone, a statement that makes her feel overcome with shame.

The Characters

Lucy is the narrator and central character of the novel. Her voice and her sensibilities lead the reader through the book’s rambling episodes. The contradictions in Lucy’s character are the contradictions that adolescence seems to create. On one hand, Lucy is a keen and sometimes satiric observer of her new world. She laughs at American excesses and pities American provincialism. She also has insight into others’ motivations. She suspects the affair between Dinah and Lewis long before Mariah knows about it, and she understands her mother’s advice about siding with women rather than men to mean that she should never get involved with another woman’s husband. In many ways, Lucy understands herself. She knows that she will not be sorry to part with Hugh; she knows that she cannot tell Peggy about her artistic interest in photography. What she does not understand completely is her relationship with her mother. She does not see that although she may refuse to read her mother’s letters, may refuse all contact with her, she will always be her mother’s daughter, just as her mother predicted.

Mariah functions as the means by which Lucy is introduced to American life and ideas. In that way, like Peggy, she serves as a foil to Lucy. Wealthy, beautiful, naïve about the world outside her own sphere, she is the object both of Lucy’s admiration and of her scorn.

Dinah is scarcely developed as a character in the novel. She exists just fully enough to represent the sort of bigotry and ignorance that Lucy despises. She thinks of Lucy as “the girl who takes care of the children” and doesn’t even know where she came from, referring to Antigua as “the islands.” That is enough to earn Lucy’s contempt, but Dinah also betrays her friend, an unforgivable act to Lucy. Peggy, Lucy’s dark self, is also a foil to her. Peggy’s flashy clothes, her sexy language, and her use of marijuana become means by which Lucy acts out her rebellion against her past, even while she sees through Peggy’s shallowness. Lucy knows herself well enough to recognize that their friendship is based on mutual convenience rather than any real affection.

Lucy’s two lovers, Hugh and Paul, both exist almost as stick figures in the novel. Neither has really engaged Lucy’s deeper emotions; both mainly serve her sexual appetites. The casualness with which they are introduced and dismissed suggests how little importance they carry for Lucy. The episodic, looping organization of the novel’s slender action and its heavy use of flashback may remind readers that this work really is a portrayal of Lucy’s character. No other character is developed with the depth and attention to detail that Lucy is given.

Critical Context

Lucy is an autobiographical novel, loosely representing the events of Jamaica Kincaid’s life during her first year in the United States: Like Lucy, she worked as an au pair for a wealthy family that split up; like Lucy, she started school and quit; and like Lucy, she developed an interest in photography. At the end of Lucy there are slender hints that Lucy is about to discover an interest in writing, just as Kincaid herself did.

Kincaid’s first novel, Annie John (1985), was also autobiographical, telling the story of a young girl growing up in Antigua. At the end of that novel, Annie John, having suffered a serious break with her mother, is leaving home, evidently forever. She is going to England, where she will go into nurse’s training. In that respect, Lucy seems to take up where Annie John left off. The two works also share themes concerning mother-daughter relationships, sexual awakenings, and the debilitating effects of British colonial rule on the former colony. The books also share the same narrative style; both are told in the first person by a narrator who is more interested in developing a series of pictures and anecdotes to create an atmosphere than in telling a conventional linear story, Kincaid’s essay about Antigua, A Small Place, was published in 1988. It is reflective of the political anger that forms a theme of Lucy. In A Small Place, Kincaid details the ruinous effects of British rule on Antigua, attributing to colonialism a legacy of political corruption, racism, poverty, and ignorance. That same indictment forms a thematic element of Lucy. Just as Lucy must recognize herself as inevitable inheritor of some of her mother’s being, so she is also heir to the island that gave her birth, to its beauty as well as to its pain.

Bibliography

Als, Hilton. “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” The Nation 252 (February 18, 1991): 207-209. Als is particularly interested in Lucy in reference to Kincaid’s position as a black writer from a Third World country. He understands Lucy as a budding artist, and he understands her at the end of the novel to be on the verge of interpreting the Antiguan people she loves. He gives some discussion to A Small Place.

Braxton, Joanne, and Andrée Nicola McLaughlin, eds. Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Discusses the contributions of African American women writers, identifying Jamaica Kincaid as a leader in the field of contemporary Caribbean writers.

Chick, Nancy. “The Broken Clock: Time, Identity, and Autobiography in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy.” CLA Journal 40 (September, 1996): 90-103. Chick explores the relationship between Lucy’s faulty sense of time and her impaired sense of identity, symbolized by a broken clock. Because Lucy has a linear sense of time, she believes that by solely focusing on the future she can create a self that is independent of her past.

Cudjoe, Selwyn R. “Jamaica Kincaid and the Modernist Project: An Interview.” Callaloo 12 (Spring, 1989): 396-411. Cudjoe, the author of Resistance and Caribbean Literature (1980), interviewed Kincaid in 1987. The interview focuses on Kincaid’s background, her earlier work, and her affinity with modernism, which she views as much like her own version of reality. Of particular interest are the comments Kincaid makes about her mother and her mother’s influence on her career.

Emery, Mary Lou. “Refiguring the Postcolonial Imagination: Tropes of Visuality in Writing by Rhys, Kincaid, and Cliff.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 16 (Fall, 1997): 259-280. The relationship between European and postcolonial literature employing vision, image-making, and the imagination are examined through Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie, Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy, and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven.

Ferguson, Moira. “Lucy and the Mark of the Colonizer.” Modern Fiction Studies 39 (Summer, 1993): 237-259. Ferguson asserts that Kincaid’s novel focuses on the psychological implications of colonization of Antigua by Great Britain, which result in a false understanding of oneself and others. Like Kincaid’s earlier works Annie John and A Small Place, Lucy deconstructs the ruling culture.

Jaggi, Maya. “A Struggle for Independence.” The Times Literary Supplement (April 26, 1991): 20. Jaggi relates Lucy to Kincaid’s short-story collection At the Bottom of the River (1983) in its style and themes. Jaggi concentrates on analyzing Lucy’s relationship with her mother and says that the novel’s lack of linear narration weakens it.

McDowell, Deborah. “Reading Family Matters.” In Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl Wall. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. McDowell traces the debate about the role of the African American male in the works of contemporary African American women writers.

Mahlis, Kristen. “Gender and Exile: Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy.” Modern Fiction Studies 44 (Spring, 1998): 164-183. Dicusses the pain experienced by the main character in Lucy who loses her cultural identity when she emigrates from Antigua to the United States. Mahlis argues that the protagonist’s alienation from her language is a reflection of her break from her bond with her mother. She turns away from her mother and native country’s restrictive views on women’s place but cannot fully achieve her own liberation.

Mendelsohn, Jane. “Leaving Home: Jamaica Kincaid’s Voyage Round Her Mother.” Village Voice Literary Supplement 89 (October, 1990): 21. This positive review of Lucy notes the influence of Kincaid’s West Indian upbringing on her novels. Discusses the changes Kincaid’s writing has undergone since the 1970’s. Also gives a brief overview of her life and compares important incidents with their fictionalized counterparts. Contends that although Lucy was probably meant to stand alone, it will undoubtedly be read as a sequel to Annie John.

Ozkowicz, Edyta. “Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy: Cultural Translation’ as a Case of Creative Exploration of the Past.” MELUS 21 (Fall, 1996): 143-157. Ozkowicz demonstrates that Kincaid’s novel examines the protagonist’s struggle with independence and identity as well as her need to transcend the post colonial past and status as a female and a minority. As Lucy gains more independence and makes a life for herself in the United States, she is able to come to terms with both her past and her relationship with her mother.

Vorda, Allan. “An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid.” Mississippi Review 20 (1991): 7-26. Kincaid discusses her childhood in Antigua, her relationship with her mother, and her writing career. Focusing on Lucy, she remarks on the autobiographical elements of the work. She explains that Lucy would always identify with the oppressed, rather than the oppressor.

Wall, Cheryl. Introduction to Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Provides a helpful overview of the reception the work of contemporary African American women writers has received. Commenting on the rising interest of both the general public and literary scholars, Wall pays particular attention to writing of the 1970’s and later periods.