Isolation and Inclusion: The Modulation of Limited and Plural Points of View in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother

Abstract

In Autobiography of My Mother, Jamaica Kincaid utilizes alternating points of view to portray the novel’s overarching narratological, spatio-temporal, and ideological concerns. Kincaid crafts her story’s postmodern narrative in interesting ways by implementing both first-person-singular and first-person-plural points of view as aging protagonist, Xuela Richardson, reviews her life and tells her complicated, coming-of-age tale involving her ongoing struggle against colonial racism and the oppression of women. Often, the narrator speaks alone to explore the quest she is undertaking, a journey in which she receives little help from potential mentors in her colonial island setting, and here Kincaid relies on the singular view. Alternately, Kincaid switches to the plural view to portray the possibility for camaraderie that Xuela pursues in alliances with others, namely, women who might serve as potential mother figures but fail. In some instances, the protagonist speaks together with both family and community members to present their common thoughts regarding their shared sense of subjugation in Dominica’s island setting, yet these acts of co-narration do not bring her the solace she seeks. As the narrator contemplates her identity, one affected by her mother’s death, her father’s abandonment of her, her rejection by her stepmother and stepsister, and her dismissal by teachers and classmates, Xuela attempts to tell her story both alone and with others. Finally, however, Xuela discovers that any capacity for self-knowledge lies beyond her in an alienating world, and she remains displaced within Dominica’s culture.

When I first saw the thick red fluid of my menstrual blood, I was not surprised and I was not afraid. I had never heard of it, I had not been expecting it, I was twelve years old, but its appearance, to my young mind, to my body and soul, had the force of a destiny foretold.

—Kincaid (1996, p. 57)

Some indigenous peoples have viewed menses as a holy time in which women remain alone for spiritual reasons, including the receiving of visions, and in Jamaica Kincaid’s (1996) The Autobiography of My Mother, the narrator does experience an epiphany concerning her future. Nevertheless, in an interview about the novel, Kincaid said that, culturally, a woman’s menses represents a “shame[ful]” event (Garner, 1996, p. 7). In many tribes, a woman’s cycle signals her temporary exile and categorization as untouchable. In Xuela Richardson’s case, the episodes of exile and alienation last longer. In addition, a woman’s menses indicates her initiation from childhood into womanhood, with its rigid existence: marrying, having children, and attending to household duties. In Autobiography, when the narrator receives her menses, she represents a 15-year-old, first-person narrator from Dominica, who is living in the early 20th century and faced with the aforementioned paradigms concerning women’s roles. She discusses the changes affecting her, both biologically and categorically, because of her menses. At one point, evaluating the circumstances of Lise LaBatte, a defeated woman with whom she resides, Xuela asks, “To want desperately to marry men, I have come to see, is not a mistake women make; it is only that, well, what is left for them to do?” (Kincaid, 1996, p. 64).

The image of a woman involved in menses, an occurrence signaling her adulthood, represents one of separateness, and often the narrator presents herself as a silent, solitary figure. Xuela finds herself alone for many reasons. Her mother is dead, and her father, an inconstant presence, does not care about her. The protagonist’s stepmother calls her a thief and turns her stepsiblings against her. Moreover, Xuela walks to school with classmates who, mistrustful of one another, are not her friends. She sleeps with a man who does not care for her, becomes pregnant by him, and briefly carries a baby for his wife, who has no children of her own but wishes to raise the one she hopes Xuela will provide. As the narrator defines herself via the first-person-limited view, she finds herself alone in her struggle for an identity unscripted by colonial, socioeconomic, or gendered maxims. Still, Xuela searches for interplay with others. In various instances, she attempts to relieve her isolation by temporarily uniting herself with multiple groups—males and females, Africans and Caucasians, children and adults, family and community members. The novel purports to be the narrator’s mother’s autobiography but represents Xuela’s own halting, fictional account of herself and community and reflects her “strained, equivocal relationship to language and the discursive frames it embodies” (Simon, 2005, p. 31). Kincaid narrates her protagonist’s tale via what Kincaid presents as a mixed genre, reinforcing Xuela’s attempt to dispel the confusion and ambivalence she experiences in rendering her identity in narrative form.

Kincaid’s narrative technique underscores the narrator’s dual stratagems for expressing herself as both a private figure and group member formulating her subjectivity. Kincaid mostly implements the first-person-limited-view to depict the protagonist’s remote nature and at other times forays into the first-person-plural to explore her potential for fellowship. Thus, Kincaid prevents Xuela’s first-person narrative from becoming too limited by modulating the voice and delving into the first-person-plural, in some instances, to illustrate the protagonist’s effort to join a collective consciousness. Kincaid’s reconfiguration of the limited view represents an expansion of its traditional use. Xuela, narrating her tale mostly alone, refuses to succumb to colonial stereotypes. Her entrance into womanhood becomes a catalyst to developing a worldview in conflict with the dominant schema. In undertaking a feminine quest, Xuela describes her birth, her early removal from home, her search for mentors beyond her home, which exerts a patriarchal influence on her, instances of disorientation, and interactions with and resistance to her colonial world. Through such milestones, the protagonist discovers a new awareness, giving her a voice and means to tell her own narrative rather than act as a player in others’ tales. Nevertheless, via Kincaid’s point of view, Xuela also calls attention to the manner in which spatio-temporal and ideological considerations affect storytelling, the nature of which remains problematic for her. ¹

Literature Review of Point-of-View Concerns

Various theorists from the 20th and 21st centuries have cultivated or expanded point-of-view theories, especially concerning the limited view. To plumb the ramifications of the first-person-limited, which Kincaid foregrounds in her novel, it is helpful to analyze Henry James’s theories. Disregarding both Romantic and utilitarian compositional notions, James (1881/1971) insists that the fiction’s purpose is to “attempt to represent life” (p. 389). Realists represent not only the ordinary and common but also the privately apprehended and perceived. ² For Realists, writers must generate distinctive material utilizing narrators with singular vantage points as opposed to revamping old myths involving community logic and played out by stock characters.

Through the limited view, narrators disclose their motives and portray their actions in a manner allowing readers to draw close to them while avoiding the artificiality of an intrusive, omniscient narratorial presence. In The Portrait of a Lady, James (1881/1971) discusses the boundless possibilities for sight via a limited view by invoking the metaphor of a house. This “house of fiction” offers countless windows from which one might peer. Characters gazing at the same tree, for instance, will have “impression[s] distinct from any other” (p. 52). Because one can conceive of multiple outcomes for any experience, Realists viewed perception, morality, and “truth” as relativistic and pluralistic, and James urged writers to implement a limited view in which narrators foregrounded their personal realities. ³

Today, narrative theorists are focusing on the growing number of perspectives that authors apply to render narrators’ complicated voices, Burkhard Niederhoff (2011, n.p.) finds, including “intermediate cases, embeddings, transgressions or unusual combinations” of points of view. ⁴ More recent theorists have also broadened discussions of perspective by foregrounding the first-person-plural view and adding ideological and spatio-temporal concerns to its conception. Wayne Booth (1961/1983) proposes that one must account not only for narrators’ positions but also for their mental landscapes and “privilege” in accessing story details (pp. 160-163). Similarly, Ansgar Nunning (2001) argues that narrators’ views are linked to their “psychological idiosyncrasies, attitudes, [and] norms and values” (p. 213), as opposed to being confined to a rendering of events, one supposedly devoid of moralizing, as it is for James (1908/1972), believing that focalizers represent “window[s]” and “mirror[s],” reflecting the story’s action without judgment (p. 249).

Like other contemporary narratologists, Susan Lanser (1981) finds point-of-view discussions to be complicated. For Lanser, this is because “[u]nlike such textual elements as character, plot, or imagery, point of view is essentially a relationship [between the seer and his or her object] rather than a concrete entity,” which can be difficult to pinpoint (p. 13). For Lanser, like Booth, a writer’s gender, socioeconomic standing, and values play a part in creating a work’s perspective. Wolf Schmid also recognizes multiple components as comprising point of view. According to Schmid, in each text, authors render relationships among point-of-view aspects differently, making conversations about it nebulous (Niederhoff, 2011, n.p.). Thus, newer theorists question the old divide between authors and narrators.

Since the Realists, rifts introduced into the limited view, and especially the first-person-limited, allow characters to experience potentially inclusionary instances. In some more recent, postmodern, fictional works, first-person narrators, telling stories, wish to unify themselves with others, despite the impossibility for total, sustained communion, and authors switch between first-person-limited and first-person-plural views. This “new” type of narration through the first-person-plural, via the pronoun “we,” represents a storytelling development, with narrators discovering that they are not the only ones experiencing social alienation. Post–World War I, when James was writing, and Modernism had emerged, many individuals felt separated from cultural standards. But by the 1990s, in a postmodern era, when Kincaid published Autobiography, differentiation from communal values represented the norm. Most characters, having become outsiders together, held an almost mythical nostalgia for the past. This change in perspective created perforations through which a narrator could speak with others via the first-personal-plural in attempted agreement, ⁵ even though utilization of the first-person-plural has remained sparse, according to Uri Margolin (1996), because of issues regarding narratorial authority, because one character must speak for others and access their thoughts.

The Novel’s First-Person-Limited Point of View

In Autobiography, Kincaid uses the first-person-limited to illuminate the narrator’s solitude, a condition that, traditionally, might have allowed her to reflect upon her circumstances as the text’s main feature. James recommends using the first-person-limited to portray narrators’ sense of isolation, and in Autobiography, Kincaid implements the first-person-limited to prompt Xuela to contemplate her own fractured identity based on age, gender, race, and socioeconomic factors. All first-person narrators are what Booth calls “unreliable,” because they cannot see beyond themselves to render a so-called objective view of a situation as an omniscient or otherwise removed narrator might do (1983, n.p.). Nonetheless, Xuela is further distinguished as being “unreliable” because, in some instances, such as at the novel’s beginning, she narrates from a child’s point of view, while, later, as an adult narrator, she is separated from her earlier self due to her increasing knowledge.

Bound by colonial confines, Xuela is involved in a “psychological” quest (Caton, 1996, p. 1) to discover her identity. Kincaid writes about young protagonists exhibiting cognitive awareness (Timothy, 1990) as they begin to understand their sexuality (Kenney, 1985) and familial ties (Niesen de Abruna, 1995). These women “gain self-awareness and a critical understanding of their social and cultural context through many contradictory relationships with the mother and the Mother Country: ones of love, rejection, education, loss, and emulation and disobedience” (Hughes, 1999, p. 14). In Autobiography, Kincaid mostly elects to utilize the limited view to depict such struggles as part of the narrator’s own silent, incomplete, or painful communications with mother figures, family and community members, and herself as she ages.

Because of spatio-temporal restrictions placed on narrating one’s yesteryear, Xuela, fitting Booth’s guidelines for the unreliable narrator, does not recall prior events in the same manner each time. She likens the experience of evaluating her memories to standing atop a hole and looking down at a dollhouse, where, depending on how the light hits, the scene’s aspects change. The first-person-limited supposedly allows readers to understand at least one main character intimately in a way that omniscient, removed narrators might not. However, Kincaid demonstrates that, oftentimes, a first-person narrator’s skills of critical analysis fall short: In Autobiography, the protagonist is unable to explain herself categorically, fragmenting any summation of her persona. In either speaking as a child and offering a so-called authenticity and simplicity in her storytelling, or communicating as an adult with insight and purpose, Xuela cannot provide readers with any life picture, despite Kincaid’s reliance on the limited view, which Realists believed suitable for this purpose.

As a further impediment to readers’ analysis of Xuela’s character, as well as to her own self-understanding, the protagonist speaks little with others, even though she can sometimes intuit their thoughts and vice versa. The book contains no dialogue and, thus, no means by which readers might hear and see Xuela’s interactions. Instead, foregrounding a first-person-limited view, Kincaid filters the narrative through the protagonist’s head to render the novel interior in nature. Although Xuela often refuses to talk with others, this does not mean that she does not have a story to tell involving happy moments and times of emotional deprivation. Early on, she states,

I spoke to myself because I grew to like the sound of my own voice . . . I was lonely and wished to see people in whose faces I could recognize something of myself. Because who was I? My mother was dead; I had not seen my father in a long time. (Kincaid, 1996, p. 16)

Beginning as a child, the narrator speaks to herself to formulate her history, even if it is a mythical one, as are all histories, and even if she is unreliable in Booth’s terms, as are all storytellers, Kincaid implies. Nevertheless, the protagonist is denied a positive self-concept because her supposed mother, Xuela Claudette, is dead, her father, Alfred, is apathetic toward her, and her stepfamily disdains her. Moreover, the protagonist boasts a mixed ethnicity, being half Carib and, thus, marginalized in a colonial setting.

Xuela attempts to comprehend her “own subjectivity and capacity for agency” by telling her tale in a manner that centers and uplifts her position (Sherrard, 1999, p. 127), and Autobiography represents a “biomythography” or “a reenvisioning of a life experience which reveals multi-layered histories and collective memory” (p. 130). The narrator relies on history and memory to assemble the tersely rendered stories that Alfred may have told her, colonial accounts of the island’s people she learns at school, religion-based rhetoric and folklore, and family and community members’ tales to construct her and her community’s experiences. Still, these artifacts fail to provide Xuela with any holistic, meaningful account. In addition, because Kincaid relies on the first-person-limited, any information that the narrator amasses as a peripheral and, thus, unreliable figure, in Booth’s terms, is influenced by her liminal location.

In narrating Autobiography, the protagonist’s concern is understanding her mother’s life and Xuela’s place in it. Still, Kincaid selects a first-person-limited view that positions Xuela as the only character to ruminate on the woman’s past, even though Kincaid might have offered other characters’ accounts of the mother to enlarge readers’ comprehension. Kincaid’s book is called the narrator’s mother’s “autobiography,” yet, categorically, one must write one’s autobiography oneself. Although Autobiography problematizes genre classifications, writing about one’s own life does allow Caribbean autobiographers to recognize the “interculturative processes” affecting their views of their culture, race, and gender (Paquet, 2002, p. 4), and Sandra Paquet’s claim regarding the benefits of composing an autobiography for Caribbean writers might be extended to apply to autobiographers-as-narrators, such as Xuela, too. As the girl narrates her mother’s so-called autobiography, she discusses the forces at play, including colonialism, gender, and socioeconomic station, involved in constructing her own identity, even if, in postmodern terms, Kincaid’s narrator questions her ability to know or say anything.

In the novel, Xuela, narrating with an outsider’s voice, adopts a stance toward her audience that lends itself traditionally to the limited view. She muses on her mother’s identity, which the narrator constructs surreptitiously, and discusses it only via the first-person-limited view, because other characters do not share or will not admit to having experienced a similar grief to hers concerning a parent’s loss. In reconstructing her mother’s past, Xuela wishes to be cognizant of her lineage, yet she finds this outcome foreclosed. Her mother dies when Xuela is born supposedly, and so she never knows her, and “this loss represents a legacy of loss: in infancy her mother was abandoned and left at the gates of a convent, and her father was abandoned in his youth by his father” (West, 2003, p. 6). Just as Xuela’s own parents, orphaned or left behind, must have created visions of their predecessors, she invents her mother and father. Autobiography represents an example of how Kincaid’s “fiction circles round and round the troubled concept of motherhood, constantly replaying a situation of loss, longing, lack, and unanswerable desire” (Anatol, 2002, p. 938). Because Kincaid implements the first-person-limited in instances in which the narrator discusses her mother, Xuela asks herself the same questions concerning her mother’s identity and offers herself the identical answers, generating little feedback about her background, except from within her own psyche. ⁶

Sometime after her mother’s death, the protagonist goes to live with Alfred’s laundress, Ma Eunice, who also fails to fill Xuela’s mother’s place. Oftentimes, African American writers create mother figures “prominently featured in complex and multiple ways” (Hirsch, 1990, p. 415), and Eunice represents one such example, as a mother figure without the capacity to love Xuela or any of her children. Hélène Cixous (1976, n.p.) describes the presentient communication that a mother and her baby engage in as ecriture feminine, and in many societies, the female is linked with language because women, spending time with children during their formative years, teach them to speak. Nevertheless, one cannot locate the paradigm of the instructive, nurturing mother figure in Autobiography:

[T]he image of the beatific mother encouraging her children to speak historically did not apply to women of African descent in the Caribbean. The dominant colonial class portrayed enslaved women as actively lascivious temptresses, fickle wives, and apathetic mothers. These women could not reign in a domestic haven because they were compelled to work for their masters from sunrise to far past sundown. If their children were not sold to another plantation, they were typically cared for by others. (Anatol, 2002, p. 942)

Eunice, presumably a descendent of African slaves, continues her foremothers’ and their masters’ patterns by engaging in domestic labor, including washing others’ laundry, for little recompense. She considers child-rearing and washing laundry to be domestic labor tasks of an equal nature. Once Eunice feeds and clothes the narrator, Eunice seems to believe that she has met her responsibilities.

In Xuela’s early life, Eunice represents a central figure, but due to the distant, apathetic relationship they share, Kincaid never implements the first-person-plural view to ally them in thought or speech, just as the protagonist can never co-narrate with her mother. Indeed, Xuela does not talk to anyone until she is 4 years old and then only to ask for Alfred, a request showing that she only attempts to communicate with those who might love her. Even when the consequences are severe, such as when Eunice punishes the narrator for refusing to apologize for breaking Eunice’s plate, Xuela remains silent, barring a verbal dialogue between female characters. Later, when Eunice takes Xuela to school, Kincaid utilizes first-person-plural narration to represent the two walking together (Kincaid, 1996). Still, Kincaid does not invoke the first-person-plural to allow the characters to chat about the school. In light of gender and socioeconomic norms, Eunice probably never received an education, and neither do her children, so there is little common ground for the females to inhabit.

Nonetheless, the education that Xuela receives provides her with little benefit, and she does not know why she is attending school, only to learn European values rendering her a “subaltern” in colonial terms. As places linked to her racial background, the narrator studies European history without having been to Europe and gains little information about either her island’s history or Africa, “that place on the map, the one . . . that is a configuration of shapes and shades of yellow” (Kincaid, 1996, p. 50). Xuela is restricted by her education, as opposed to having her life broadened by it.

In Autobiography, Kincaid is concerned with the narrator’s search to identify her own purposes, idiom, and worldview, while coming to terms with an unresponsive father and unknown mother (Garner, 1996). Xuela’s mother is missing, but Alfred does not fulfill a guiding role in his daughter’s life either, even though she assumes his intentions toward her to be compassionate. Because Alfred, “her only living connection to her mother” (West, 2003, p. 4), allies himself with the colonizer’s patriarchal values, Xuela cannot question him about his attitudes, which leaves little room for them to speak together in any potential implementation of the plural view. “Having no mother and no functional father, Kincaid’s enigmatic heroine has no link to the past and no road to the future” (p. 4). Unable to formulate cause and effect relationships concerning her existence, the narrator does not grasp why Alfred leaves her with Eunice.

Later, when Afred believes that a male classmate has inflicted a wound upon his daughter and that she is defending the boy by hiding his name, Alfred sends her to Roseau to live with the family of a business associate, the childless LaBattes, and she is barred again from interpreting his purposes, which remain unspoken but resemble a financial transaction. Prevented from accessing her father’s mind-set, Xuela, narrating via Kincaid’s limited view, contends that she has never comprehended what Alfred “wanted” from her, even though she herself, refusing to explain her injury, also prevents conversation (Kincaid, 1996, p. 62). In this instance of the novel’s concerns regarding characters’ refusal to speak, Alfred’s countenance represents a “mask” that Xuela finds impossible to read (p. 39). She believes that the mask that Alfred wears and the jailer’s suit that he dons come to represent his true self, if such a thing as a “self” exists, a question Kincaid poses. Alfred “has adopted the colonizer’s tastes, his language, his religion, and his values” (Adams, 2006, p. 8), and the father figure in Kincaid’s work “is a man outside the woman’s world” (Dutton, 1989, p. 2), someone incomprehensible to the narrator, even as she herself dons costumes to “become” a schoolgirl, upper class housewife, and day laborer in the novel.

Although Kincaid mostly renders Autobiography via the first-person-limited, in a few scenes involving father and daughter, Kincaid expands Xuela’s purview, and the narrator uses the pronoun “we” to describe their shared actions, even if she and Alfred do not co-narrate through the first-person-plural. The first example occurs when Xuela, as a young child, writes letters to Alfred that she meant for her mother but never planned to send, which her teacher mails nonetheless. In this scene, the protagonist uses “we” to narrate her and Alfred’s journey back to his home and her new existence after he rescues her from Eunice’s house and the school. Xuela’s reference to her father and herself as “we,” on the journey to his house, implies that momentarily, she hopes to connect with Alfred and that, as with Eunice, walking her to school, the open road represents the only place that this sense of unity may be forged. Pursuing her quest journey, the protagonist is not confined in anyone else’s house at the moment, and if this were a typical plot, she might travel forward into a time where traditional roles no longer persist. In Autobiography, however, as with the walk Xuela and Eunice undertake, Kincaid neglects to move from the first-person-limited to the first-person-plural because in their colonial setting, the narrator does not perceive her father’s abode as hers, and Alfred’s breath “was not the breath of [her] life” (Kincaid, 1996, p. 24).

Only once in the novel does Xuela attempt to reach out to Alfred by utilizing the pronoun “we” in her speech. Nonetheless, Kincaid retains the limited view here, as the narrator discovers that Alfred’s household offers a sense of animosity. Xuela comments on the “hatred and isolation in which we all lived” (p. 50), states of being that cause her to want to leave his residence. Afterward, Alfred sends his daughter to live with the LaBattes so that she can become a schoolteacher. As in other instances, the characters do not to speak in common here, blocking any possibility for shared verbal discourse. Having developed a sense of “detachment” (Oczkowicz, 1996, p. 2) from their community and finding themselves located on the periphery, Kincaid’s protagonists often evaluate other characters’ mental states while going unnoticed themselves (Simmons, 1998, p. 5), as in these passages concerning Xuela’s observations about her father.

In a later instance of Kincaid’s reliance on the limited view, Alfred, via a hired man, sends the narrator a letter, requesting her to return home from her construction job, which she took after leaving the LaBattes, and she rejects the formal language and format her father chooses to compose it. In response to Xuela’s inclusion of Alfred in a shared worldview, he refuses to register the sense of sequestration that she describes, or else, in the book’s postmodern fashion, the veneer and the “real” have become one and the same for him. Throughout the novel, the protagonist has maintained limited contact with her father. Still, she hoped at various points that he would love and reveal himself to her. However, Alfred dies as an old man without the duo having connected. Although Xuela has reached middle age now, she describes herself as an orphan. She has lost all opportunities for speaking together with blood family members via Kincaid’s plural view. Nonetheless, within the novel’s course, speaking in unison with a favorable outcome was impossible anyway.

Although Xuela does not experience any belonging with her biological family, her connection with her stepfamily is worse, and she remains at cross purposes with members. To show her separation, the narrator refers to her father’s new wife, another of the novel’s failed mother figures, as “the woman who was not . . . [her] mother” (p. 52). In turn, Xuela’s stepmother claims that the girl represents a thief, who would steal away the stepchildren’s “inheritance” (p. 52), although what legacy that signifies is unknown, because Alfred demonstrates little affinity for any of the children, even his son, who mimics him. The stepmother, who Xuela terms, with remove, as her “father’s wife” (p. 32), hates her in a manner incomprehensible to the narrator and tries to kill her with a poison-laden necklace. The stepmother, who also values her son more highly than her blood daughter, ignores any supposed bonds between women altogether, seeking to end them, even by death, which would block any dialogue between stepmother and stepdaughter forever.

At only two points does Kincaid open the narrative to include the stepmother’s possible point of view in conjunction with Xuela’s to allow them to co-narrate, but the result is not positive regarding their ability to commiserate. One is when the stepmother, out of duty, teaches Xuela to wash herself, and the girl utilizes the pronoun “we” to contend that “[w]e would never love each other” (p. 33). By depicting the women’s shared hatred via the plural view, Kincaid represents them as dueling antagonists, as much as victims of their milieu, and limits the amount of sympathy readers might demonstrate for Xuela as protagonist. She and her stepmother face and often promote common strictures regarding their gender, race, and socioeconomic status, which they might discuss otherwise, because these schemas render them, as women, abject in a patriarchal regime. Yet, as Xuela claims generally, “To people like us, despising anything that was most like ourselves was almost a law of nature” (p. 52). Such scorn as her community members identify for themselves takes the force of nature’s law, but their mutually felt emotion is generated by colonial attitudes about race, class, and gender.

Daily, the stepmother, like other characters that foreground their negative interactions, while leaving opportunities for caring or even ambivalent speech unexplored, tells her own daughter that she does not love her. For this reason, Xuela feels sorry for her stepsister, even if the narrator dubs her “my father’s daughter.” Still, in portraying the stepsisters’ relationship, Kincaid rejects the potential of applying a plural view to allow them to cospeak about the pain they have experienced through a lack of parenting. In fact, Xuela is unable to cospeak in any sustained, mutually beneficial way with any female character in Autobiography. Instead, narrating through Kincaid’s limited view, the protagonist differentiates herself from the girl by commenting on her own so-called superior position: Xuela does not have to cope with the same type of betrayal her stepsister faces because the narrator’s mother is dead, a situation preventing any discourse between mother and daughter, for better or worse.

In discussing constructions of perspective, James (1881/1971) paints an instance of a character’s failure to identify with others that is similar to the one Xuela encounters with her stepfamily. In James’s scenario, the characters gaze upon the same scene, just as Kincaid’s characters look at Dominica’s common scenery. James describes cohorts, who together watch “the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small” (p. 7). Although the watchers study the same scene via the same medium, the panes of glass through which they peer differ enough for their interpretations of it to be radically opposed. Likewise, in Autobiography, the stepmother, her daughter, and Xuela all represent women trapped in a marginalized setting, but they cannot empathize in speech regarding their shared plight.

While Kincaid implements the limited view to illustrate the opposition Xuela faces in her relationships with family and community members and her ongoing sense of alienation from the world, Kincaid also chooses the limited to depict the isolation that the protagonist intuits is connected to her life stages, particularly puberty. Xuela finds it difficult to describe her “changing self” (Kincaid, 1996, p. 58), because, temporally, she cannot apply any understanding she has of the past to present circumstances. The narrator’s lack of perceived connection between events places her in a state of limbo—outside childhood’s bounds but not inside those of adulthood. In the novel’s beginning, Xuela neither possesses any aspirations, nor is she presented with any real choices when she arrives at the LaBatte household, where she becomes a concubine, to fulfill the couple’s wishes, and schoolgirl, to meet her father’s desires. In reaction to these imposed circumstances, she states, “I did not object, I could not object, I did not want to object; I did not know how to object openly” (p. 63). Without options or the possibility of making decisions, the protagonist, having no voice and no champion, narrates from Kincaid’s limited view. Just as Xuela has obeyed her father, stepmother, and Eunice, the narrator never thinks of refusing Lise anything, even being dispatched as a “gift” to her husband (p. 68). Still, Xuela never considers herself part of the LaBatte family and, thus, included in a larger community either. This social rejection on her part lends itself to Kincaid’s imposition of the limited view in portraying the narrator’s continuing sense of estrangement.

During the day, Xuela attends school, where she remains quiet because she is female, and at night, she has sexual relations with Jacques LaBatte, where she is also silent as he puts his hand over her mouth, and she realizes that her life is in “a state of upheaval” (p. 73). However, no one wants to hear the protagonist narrate her story, which is why Kincaid maintains it in the limited view here. Xuela has no one in whom to confide or to act as a model for her. She must act both as a child and woman, and Kincaid relies on the limited view to depict her as a character with both public and private personas, guises that the protagonist discovers do not coincide with each other. After losing her virginity, she states, “I was not the same person that I had been before” (p. 71) and expresses a schism in her self-concerned with both her changing physicality and experience. This split makes rendering any “clear,” continuous account of herself difficult, perhaps enough so to prohibit Xuela from entering into conversations with others via a plural view for their possible affirmation of her figure in these passages.

As her adult sensibilities emerge, the protagonist decides, without informing anyone, that she will not follow Lise’s plan involving Xuela’s having a baby by Jacques. For the narrator, having maintained an interior personality via Kincaid’s mostly limited-view narration, this resolve is simple. A schoolgirl prevented from having a voice, Xuela keeps her opinions to herself, even as her current mother figure, Lise, expects her to assume a surrogate’s role in birthing a baby instead of allowing Xuela to be a child. Kincaid writes in a style that is “spare” and “deceptively simple” (Garner, 1996, pp. 1-2), and this style seems appropriate, especially in scenes in which Kincaid describes Xuela’s adolescent state, about which she possesses an imperfect understanding. Via Kincaid’s limited view, the protagonist is occupied in narrating complicated options for herself, even if her evaluation of them seems opaque in complementing her youthful reasoning. It is not until Xuela becomes pregnant, undergoes an abortion, and faces the possibility of death that she declares, “I believed then that I would die, and perhaps because I no longer had a future I began to want one very much” (Kincaid, 1996, p. 82). Here, Kincaid utilizes the limited view to depict the narrator making resolutions for herself and by herself for a future in which she remains alone, never locating the community she seeks. Indeed, it is possible that Xuela becomes the mother of a daughter never introduced in the book.

Because Kincaid stays in the limited view for the novel’s greater part, Xuela’s confusion in navigating her experiences is heightened. When she first arrives in Roseau, all seems new and exciting, yet soon, her feelings of glee wane. The protagonist faces a spatio-temporal divide in narrating her life circumstances: She has left behind the familiar map of places, people, and events for shocking ones that leave her sometimes wiser but often numb. Xuela states, “I long now to feel fresh again, to feel I will never die, but that is not possible. I can only long for it; I can never be that way again” (p. 62). Because of the time and space divide, she finds it difficult to narrate her history, even if she believes it represents one that women in her community share and, as Kincaid implies, should have a language for disseminating. As Xuela grows, so does her world outlook. Nonetheless, because of Kincaid’s limited view, the narrator keeps her revelations to herself, as do the other voiceless women in their colonial society.

In addition to being set apart from those in her culture for numerous reasons, Xuela is also inhibited from claiming a voice and gaining possible self-agency because of her socioeconomic status, a factor pushing her toward her society’s periphery and making the limited view appropriate for her response. In Eunice’s as well as Alfred’s houses, and then in the LaBatte’s abode, the girl represents little more than a servant and perceives her life as being “small and limited” (p. 59), a situation blocking her ability to narrate greater self-possibilities. At the mission school, she has learned that her colonial milieu was constructed based on a “history of peoples” with whom she would never interact, namely, Caucasians (p. 199), and Xuela’s ideological and temporal sense of remove from the subjects she has studied impairs her potential to narrate from a place in which she might feature herself in a prominent, valued way within the dominant paradigms.

Interestingly, in an interview, Kincaid revealed that as a child, she was also made aware that she should strive to reach her potential, but her teachers and parents utilized English standards as success’s measurement, and she was not English (Pupello, 2012, n.p.). In Autobiography, Dominica’s European-based ideology influences Xuela to “feel humiliated, humbled, small” (Kincaid, 1996, p. 59), although it is the people of African descent themselves, including Alfred, who help to reinforce such continuing values and limit the options for narratives that can be spun and spoken together via a plural view.

Feeling confined by local precedents, as well as by the spaces in which she resides, the narrator argues that Roseau cannot be “called” a true city given to trade and the intermingling of ideas, a capitol in which “plots are hatched and the destinies of many are determined”; instead, it represents an “outpost” (p. 61). Moreover, the countryside also signifies a “false paradise” that is “beautiful, ugly, humble and proud; full of life, full of death” (p. 32). Describing the locations where she is given shelter by different families, Xuela feels restricted and shaped by her landscape and the shifting language available to depict it, and throughout the novel, she wonders how she can construct an open destiny for herself, because her locations predetermine it. As with Eunice’s broken plate depicting an English countryside labeled “heaven,” the protagonist discovers that there is no utopia to be attained, and that any narrative she creates for herself is either limited by her gender, socioeconomic status, and race, or is false.

At last, when Xuela finds that she has been unable to ascertain her identity or life purpose, Kincaid implies in the novel that with language’s failure to signify, all narratives that the characters render are false, leading to a collapse in meaning for any narrator or narrators speaking from either a limited or plural view. By the end, spatially, attempting to narrate her parents’ stories, the protagonist discovers that what she does not know is like a sea swallowing her (Kincaid, 1996). Similar to the “black room” of history that she perceives as an empty space for those of her culture and race (p. 3), this sea, no different from her island’s mountains and coastlines, represents a desolate, unnavigable landscape yielding no knowledge to depict.

Because of her early life circumstances, Xuela decides not to bear children, another context for which Kincaid might have implemented a first-person-plural view through which the protagonist could have discussed her and her children’s commonalities, because she “understands that she will never possess the self-knowledge, connectedness, or inheritances that parents impart to their children” (West, 2003, p. 7). Xuela, unable to narrate her past, cannot foresee her future, especially one involving children. The loss of her mother “has paralyzed Xuela with the notion that if she should have a child,” the result would be ruinous (Morris, 2002, p. 966). Besides Lise, no one in the novel demonstrates a definite love for Xuela, one she believes she must experience to return.

In literature representing African American and Caribbean women, the mother usually holds the place “of the matriarch—a nurturing, long suffering caregiver for whom sacrifice is second nature and without whom the child’s identity formation is either traumatized or unforgivably altered” (Sherrard, 1999, p. 126), and in Autobiography, Xuela, having no mother figure assuming a nurturer’s role, remains traumatized. The narrator’s rejection “of motherhood is ultimately a refusal of meaning, specifically a refusal of metaphor” (Cobham, 2002, p. 869), and in the book, as much as is possible in postmodern terms, Xuela defines her own landscape through Kincaid’s limited view to prevent others from imposing the identity of motherhood upon her, even if she remains haunted by it.

After committing an abortion and deciding not to become a mother, the acceptable role for a person of her gender, race, and status, Xuela retreats to live alone in a hut. There, she continues to tell her tale while totally removed from others. Speaking from this minimalized location, the narrator expounds on why she does not want to be a mother, schoolgirl, mistress, or housemaid. She does not want to suffer silently the fate of women, such as her old friend, who walks by silently without speaking and has aged dramatically. The linking of the “postcolonial with woman . . . almost inevitably leads to the simplicities that underlie unthinking celebrations of oppression, elevating the racially female voice into a metaphor for the ‘good’” (Suleri, 1995, p. 273), and throughout the novel, Xuela problematizes the metaphor of the celebrated mother by depicting how women’s available roles lead to their demoralization.

Abiding in the hut, the girl positions herself as an exile and outcast by rejecting women’s venues, either saintly or evil as constructed in colonial terms, and taking on the appearance and labor of a man by purchasing a dead man’s clothes, cutting her hair, and working on a construction site. Still, living alone as if in a tomb and digging and filling the same holes at the site, she identifies herself as “not a man, not a woman, not anything” (Kincaid, 1996, p. 102). Although Xuela, earning an income for the first time, expresses a sense of independence as a wage earner, she finds that the day laborer’s existence is not any superior to prior positions she has held. Rejecting roles associated with her race for both genders, the protagonist becomes a zombie, not dead but not alive to any purpose either, certainly not one of bringing a baby into the world, which someone must mother and teach to narrate its own tale.

As a result of Xuela’s campaign for independence, or perhaps because all people are alone in postmodern terms, as Kincaid implies, the girl forms no close relationships, a context leading Kincaid to remain mostly in the limited view for the novel’s course. Later in life, Xuela marries Philip, a Caucasian doctor resembling her father, a conqueror imposing his mark on the landscape, but, as Kincaid suggests, as much a pawn of his environment as anyone else. Despite the narrator’s marriage, a sacred bond fusing two people, she experiences no unity with either Caucasians or males, just as she has been unable to find female companionship. Once, Xuela and Philip may cospeak via the first-person-plural view, or she may be speaking for both of them simply, when, marrying, they explain that “we were very serious” about their vows, and that their “union was so palpable, so certain, we could almost feel it with our hands” (p. 214). Still, despite the moments in which they share an allied front on their wedding day, Xuela remains separated emotionally from her husband until his death (as well as afterward).

Meanwhile, the narrator does not form any relationships with those of aboriginal descent either, because the Caribs, her mother’s people with whom she would have liked to have associated, or so she thinks, have been decimated. The protagonist identifies her lover, Roland, a poor stevedore, as the only person about whom she has ever cared but finds that her liaison with him is fleeting, too. Xuela implements the pronoun “we” to describe a time with Roland in which “we were happy” (p. 166), but readers do not learn much about the couple’s hopes, probably because the two possess no future to co-narrate, as he is married. Although engaged in a quest, she “find[s] no community to provide her a meaningful sense of place and self—the self she ultimately constructs is defined by loss and isolation” (West, 2003, p. 3). Kincaid relies on the limited view to render Xuela a solitary being, discovering that she cannot identify with family members, women, or even potential children. Interactions with men and romantic partners of both African and Caucasian descent fail to provide camaraderie, too.

The Novel’s First-Person-Plural Point of View

Considering her protagonists, Kincaid deemed Xuela “more godlike” than other heroes she constructed previously (Ferguson, 1994, p. 187). Consequently, Kincaid’s reliance on the first-person-limited to render the novel in Xuela’s voice, language, and ideological framework seems fitting. Nevertheless, in various sustained instances, Kincaid keeps Autobiography from becoming too narrow by interjecting the first-person-plural as Xuela co-narrates with others, namely, children and women, sharing her context, even if they do not forge a collective consciousness. Kincaid’s use of the plural view allows the narrator to reach out to others and attempt to include them in her speech acts, even if these acts do not provide her with the community she requires.

In the first example of Kincaid’s application of the first-person-plural, as a child, Xuela is united in sentiment and purpose with her classmates as they walk to school during the time before Alfred sends her to Roseau. The students’ relationship is not characterized by friendship, however, but by mistrust and fear. Feeling part of a larger whole representing the island’s native inhabitants, but barred from exploring any commonalities, the girl states of the group, “We were never to trust one another . . . [even though] these people were ourselves, . . . [who] shared a common history of suffering and humiliation and enslavement and genocide” (Kincaid, 1996, pp. 47-48). Although Xuela and her classmates are at least partially of African descent, and many of their ancestors were enslaved, killed, or otherwise exterminated, the classmates believe that they do not possess any bond. Their parents, who do not speak in common in the novel either, reinforce this sentiment of mutual mistrust by telling them not to befriend one another.

In discussing Xuela’s and her classmates’ experiences with their teacher, an African woman, who despises her own racial and cultural heritage and teaches students to do the same, Kincaid once again implements the plural view to portray the students’ collective assessment of the woman, one based similarly on a mistrust of someone of their race and standing. Nevertheless, in this passage, Kincaid also includes the teacher’s voice within the first-person-plural viewpoint to reveal that the teacher and students hold reciprocating beliefs concerning their relationship’s nature. Full of self-loathing for her background, the teacher, according to the girl, “did not love us; we [Xuela and the students] did not love her; we [the teacher, Xuela, and the students] did not love one another” (p. 15).

The teacher and children are united in disregard for one another, yet their strategy for shared representation separates them and prevents constructive dialogue. Although Xuela’s “story is intensely private, avoiding mention of the island’s political affairs in favor of her thoughts and relationships, it is imbrued with the history of colonialism and slavery” (Schultheis, 2001, n.p.), and in this scene, the “facts” of their collective history, which the narrator and her community avoid discussing, continue to affect the students’ relationships with one another and their teacher. Despite Kincaid’s plural view, no one talks openly and jointly about the island’s history, a situation reinforcing a pattern of the inhabitants’ oppression through their inexpression of themselves.

Within this same time frame, Kincaid utilizes the first-person-plural to depict Xuela and the children united again in communicating a tale involving an apparition representing a nude, dark-skinned female, who, singing, draws one boy to swim to her in the river and drown. The children’s story, told by numerous witnesses among them, including the narrator, to both group members and their parents, is rejected by the adults, who consider their offspring untrustworthy and abject because of their sharing of mythical tales, with elements featured in native culture. Later, the children, excepting Xuela, dismiss the narrative, too, having absorbed the doubt that their parents exhibit for stories refuting European values and “truths.” Concerning the children’s failure to speak and be heard, despite their having presented a shared outlook via the first-person-plural view, she states,

Everything about us is held in doubt and we the defeated define all that is unreal, all that is not human, all that is without love, all that is without mercy. Our experience cannot be interpreted by us; we do not know the truth of it. (Kincaid, 1996, p. 37)

Having had their claims denied by their parents, who prohibit the children, including Xuela, from relating the drowning episode again, the children fail to identify and, thus, comprehend the horror they have witnessed in their friend’s disappearance, and all but the narrator discredit the event, a result rupturing their collective account. “Caribbean people, whose lived experience is framed by African-derived ways of seeing the world, often will disavow their own praxis to outsiders and to themselves” (Cobham, 2002, p. 869), and in Autobiography, Kincaid demonstrates how, through the vanishing boy’s example, in the future, the children’s stories may continue to separate them instead of unit them, despite Kincaid’s plural view here. By blocking speech concerning a missing community member, the townspeople prohibit his story’s sharing and, thus, its remembrance.

While Kincaid implements the first-person-plural so that Xuela may attempt to speak with her schoolmates by using a set of shared colonial values, Kincaid also applies the plural view in passages involving women, who, like the children, suffer a similar social subjection in the book. The greatest example occurs when the protagonist is sharing her days with Lise, with whom Xuela communicates silently, and who she understands in a way that she never does with anyone again. One day, Lise, imparting her life story, teaches the girl to make coffee for Jacques, with whom Xuela is having sexual relations, and the narrator states,

When we were alone we spoke to each other in French patois, the language of the captive, the illegitimate; we never spoke of what we were doing and we never spoke for long; we spoke of the things in front of us and then we were silent. (Kincaid, 1996, p. 74)

Lise and Xuela speak alone but together in this passage, where their words are not captured, and they talk not of larger socioeconomic circumstances, identities, or ideologies, as women who could assist each other might, but of casual topics, perhaps ones not worth exploring to their colonial society at all and, thus, not included in the narrative. Although the protagonist and Lise never openly discuss the situation involving their sharing of a man, this passage represents an instance in which the women, having a common representation in their milieu as captives and illegitimate people, exchange ideas, however slight, as Kincaid foregrounds their expressions via a plural view.

Later, Xuela and Lise also communicate nonverbally, and Kincaid implements the plural view again to depict this exchange, one that their society might not have thought worthy for them to render verbally either. The girl and Lise analyze each other as friends, contenders, and mother and daughter, silently, stating, “We sat on two chairs, not facing each other, speaking without words, exchanging thoughts” (p. 75). Although the novel’s focus remains on Xuela throughout, both women take the spotlight in these instances of shared conversation narrated through Kincaid’s plural view.

A third time in which Kincaid implements the plural view is to include not only the narrator and Lise but also Jacques in the narration’s collective rendering. Here, all three are involved in a love triangle about which none speaks verbally to the group. Underlying tension is created when Xuela explains that Lise listens to the girl and Jacques having sex but never mentions the encounters, and neither does anyone else. With feigned ignorance and even joyful acceptance of their shared position, Xuela states that, in this scene, they all know that the rain is falling outside the house, but that “we never heard it” (p. 76). In this passage, narrated via Kincaid’s plural view, the characters signal that no collective communication concerning their liaisons occurs, not even in a manner allowing the mention of something as trivial as the weather.

By refusing to speak and skirting chance meetings in the same room, the housemates avoid a direct confrontation concerning their tryst, one that might compel them to communicate about their state of affairs verbally. Xuela reveals, “We were never the three of us together; she saw him in one room, I saw him in another” (p. 77). Here, Kincaid begins with the plural view and returns to the limited one, with the protagonist noting the characters’ location, not their thoughts about such placements. The trio forgoes the possibility for exploring everyone’s desire via a shared point of view, an outcome preferable for all interests here, at least at the outset, Kincaid implies. Although Xuela participates in shared speech with the LaBattes in this scene, they never concern themselves with her motives or fate.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. states that Kincaid writes about a “self-contained world” (New York State Writer’s Institute, 1999, p. 1), and her implementation of a limited view in the novel, with some scenes punctured by instances of the first-person-plural, invokes characters’ sense of sequestration. When Xuela returns to the LaBattes’ house after aborting her child, she finds the couple on the steps, and Kincaid maintains the first-person limited as the protagonist describes the event, because the trio’s members hold no shared feelings to co-narrate. Xuela can comment only on everyone’s close proximity in location by stating, “We stood, the three of us, in a little triangle, a trinity, not made in heaven, not made in hell, a wordless trinity” (Kincaid, 1996, p. 93). Kincaid retains the limited view as the narrator describes the characters’ placement in the island’s setting, where they are united in a religious-like context but find no words to depict their formation’s relevance. The trinity’s members fail to speak together again before Xuela leaves the LaBattes’ house once and for all, where she has experienced her final instance of participating in the sharing of women’s speech via Kincaid’s plural view.

James (1881/1971) describes the house of fiction as having windows “of dissimilar shape and size, [that] hang so, all together, over the human scene” (p. 7). These windows should allow for more similarity in viewpoint, yet they are “mere holes in a dead wall” (p. 7), not shared markers. Likewise, even as Kincaid broadens point-of-view conceptions through communities of “we” comprised mostly of children and women in the novel, this plurality only reveals members’ collective distrust and indicates the type of constraints colonialism has placed on the narrator’s possible future encounters with others. Xuela, walking with her schoolmates and talking to Lise, discards her sense of solitariness via Kincaid’s limited impositions of the plural view, but only for a shared locus of fear and disappointment, a context rendering Xuela’s sense of alienation, as well as that of her fellow citizens, only greater.

This is Autobiography’s theme: Once one’s identity has been fractured, stolen, or altered, one’s stories become incoherent, implausible, and meaningless, too. The narrator’s mother represents the island’s original, mythic culture, which has been dismantled and denied. Meanwhile, Alfred, with his Scottish African background, assumes the colonizer’s stance toward his fellow natives but can offer no positive replacement for a culture that has been eradicated either. ⁷ Narrating alone or with others, Xuela attempts to understand her story and locate an empathetic or at least concerned listener, but when she either reveals her thoughts or shares the ideas and actions of others, such attempts to widen the narrative on her part to create meaning only portray how narrow the characters’ sense of themselves and their dimensions, limited by a colonial setting, are.

Conclusion

Autobiography is a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, but Xuela is hampered in her quest’s progress by the genre’s traditional framework because she possesses few role models for growth and rejects, as a source of enlightenment, education’s place, which focuses either on the colonizers and their imposition of Christianity, or island folklore, which features stories about nymphs that no one registers. Abandoning mentors and epistemological frameworks, the narrator creates her own book of values to conduct her life. She “represents the existential protagonist who seats herself at the center of her world, constructing codes of ethics and morality that originate in her own self-conceived and self-validated paradigms” (West, 2003, p. 8). Often, Caribbean women are portrayed as storytellers or lascivious mulattos, “living on the edges of urban communities belonging to no settled culture or tradition” (Nasta, 1993, p. 214). However, in Kincaid’s novel, Xuela adopts the storyteller’s role to confront her circumstances and question those who have stolen, distorted, or destroyed the island’s culture. Autobiography explores the “structures of domination, racism, sexism, and class exploitation” and shows the manner in which they “make it practically impossible for black women to survive if they do not engage in meaningful resistance” (West, 2003, p. 20), such as storytelling.

As yet another role, Caribbean women can adopt motherhood “as the antidote to paternal power” (Schultheis, 2001, n.p.). Still, this function, in many cases, “limits female sexuality and identity to procreation, thereby reinscribing the metaphor of the family” (n.p.) and is a paradigm Xuela rejects. The appearance of her menses provides her not only with the ability to bear children but also with the will to give her life meaning or mother herself. Repulsed by her island’s colonial standards and the oppression she has endured at family and community members’ hands, as defining act, Xuela commits an abortion after leaving the LaBattes to reject another’s life and provide her own with opportunities, whatever those might be. She states, “I had never had a mother, I had just recently refused to become one, and I knew then that this refusal would be complete” (Kincaid, 1996, pp. 96-97).

As readers interrogate Xuela’s subjectivity, they may expect that the tension between her sense of solitariness, depicted by a limited view, and her struggle to empathize with others, portrayed by the plural view, will result in the novel’s climax as she determines her position. In the end, the narrator discovers that she must speak alone, because everyone with whom she has attempted to forge relationships is dead or forever unavailable. The novel’s dramatizes Xuela’s hope for communication and realization that she does not have a worldview of interest or access to anyone in her impaired community.

However, at a few points, Kincaid, enlarging Xuela’s boundaries, transcends both the limited and plural views as the narrator addresses readers directly, as when she states, having performed her first abortion, “I knew things that you could only know if you had been through what I had just been through. I carried my life in my own hands” (p. 83). Although Xuela wants someone with whom to share her story, the tale finally becomes one about readers’ perception of the story’s subject itself. In Autobiography, Kincaid relies on a limited-view narration because the protagonist must undertake to understand and perceive herself. Xuela finds that her life is “limited” (Kincaid, 1996, p. 59), as is her ability to narrate her story, even with others’ assistance via the plural view. Yet, the protagonist considers that history has made her people “silent” (p. 62), and to remain quiet represents a “self-punishment” (p. 60) that she cannot endure.