59 pages • 1 hour read
Jamaica KincaidAnnie John
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Misinterpreted Parental Love
Annie’s tendency to misinterpret demonstrations of her mother’s love as evidence of her mother’s duplicity and meanness is designed to represent conflicts that commonly occur in real life. There are many clues to suggest that Annie mistakes her mother’s attempts to teach Annie to be successful as deceitful or manipulative acts. Contrary to the girls’ convictions, it is an act of love for Annie’s mother to prepare the person with whom she feels she “could hardly live without” to leave the safety of the family home and begin a new life (133). Nonetheless, Annie misinterprets her mother’s love as hypocrisy, not realizing the emotional sacrifices involved in preparing a child to meet the challenges of the world.
Annie’s mother’s experiences have taught her to embody a decorous image both within and beyond the realm of marriage, and she is determined to teach Annie this lesson. For example, it is common, in Annie’s youth, for her mother to “suddenly grab [Annie] and […] and drag [her] along as if in a great hurry” as they pass the homes of the women with whom her father had children and did not marry (16). Her father ignores these women in public, and because he so thoroughly adheres to the standards of the English, others must do the same. Thus, these women are punished for their failure to abide by the community’s ethics, while Annie’s father is still respected and accepted despite his own promiscuity. While this inequality represents the double standard that exists in Antiguan society, Annie’s mother has no wish for her daughter to suffer similar ostracization, so she takes care to ensure that Annie’s moral character cannot be impugned. However, the danger that Annie might be labeled immoral only grows as Annie ages, and her early forays into a wider world result in frequent conflicts with her mother, whose harshness is often borne of her concern that her daughter must conform to the strictures of the English-dominated society of Antigua. For example, although she no more than speaks to Mineu in a public place, her mother accuses her of acting like a “slut.” Though Annie’s mother’s words are angry and hurtful, she is trying to compel Annie to behave in a way that will place her above suspicion and beyond reproach. Annie interprets interactions like this as attacks, but despite her mother’s alienating actions, she has always undertaken to raise Annie with love.
Even upon her departure, much of Annie’s willful misinterpretation remains, for despite the love that her parents have shown her by helping to prepare her belongings and give her a festive sendoff, Annie still feels that her mother is a hypocrite for insisting on her love for Annie while preparing for this separation. The mixture of happiness and sadness that Annie feels suggests that she is not unaware of her parents’ pride and love for her, but her desire to leave everything to do with them and with Antigua in the “dustheap” of her past suggests her continuing resentment. Even as she departs, Annie maintains her misinterpretations, thinking of her parents’ choices as an extension of their colonizers’ values rather than as the only way they know to prepare her for a world that will disrespect her for rejecting those values.
The Normalcy of Youthful Rebellion
The multiple examples of youthful rebellion against one’s community, and against one’s family as an extension of that community, intimate that such rebellion—especially among women in patriarchal societies—is common. Even Annie’s own mother, who now attempts to adhere to all aspects of British morality, once rebelled in her youth. At age 16, Annie’s mother fought with her father over her desire to live alone, and she ultimately “left [her father’s] house on Dominica and came to Antigua” (19). Unwilling to submit to her father’s demands that she remain obedient to him, Annie’s mother—still a child—abandoned her home and moved to an entirely different country several islands away. Faced with the strict expectations of young women in Antigua, she embraced those expectations as her best chance to live a peaceful, reputable life.
Ironically, while the image of Queen Victoria is held up in Antigua as the epitome of English virtue and marital fidelity, she rebelled against her mother’s authority in her youth and broke with many traditions during that time. By Annie’s lifetime, however, the now-deceased Victoria has become an exemplar for wives everywhere because, even as a queen regnant, she vowed obedience to her husband and maintained loyalty to him until her death some 40 years after his. In Annie’s childhood, the imposing Queen’s picture is rendered on notebooks, and her birthday is celebrated by all, “even though she has been dead a long time” (76), indicating how completely she is held up as an ideal for all women. The fact that she was rebellious in her youth is completely overshadowed by the fidelity and morality she showed in adulthood. Because the once-rebellious Queen Victoria became synonymous with staunch morality and obedience to one’s husband, her symbolic presence in the novel suggests that even the most unconventional of adolescents can be reformed into a model of social mores.
Annie’s broader rebellion against colonialization and its inherent racism and sexism also fuels her frequent attempts to rebel against her mother’s lessons on propriety. These cultural inequities are also exemplified within her parents’ relationship, as Annie’s mother, just like Queen Victoria, is fully committed to adhering to her husband’s will and maintaining complete loyalty to him despite his many flaws. Because the text ends before Annie reaches adulthood, it is impossible to know if she, like her mother and the late Queen Victoria, will eventually choose to comply with English moral and social standards. Taken together, however, these women provide varied examples of youthful rebellion, and the novel suggests that the conflicts that Annie experiences reflect a normal stage of development.
The Dangerous Effects of Oppression
Annie’s experience of coming of age as a colonized subject of England emphasizes many of the dangerous effects that oppression can have on the oppressed. These larger conflicts are exemplified within her personal life, for although Annie is clear on the history of slavery (specifically, who was in charge and who was disempowered), her English education has obscured the imbalance of power that still exists along a racial divide on the island. Her white teachers perpetuate the idea that she and other Black Antiguans are part of England and are therefore as valuable and valued as the white English citizens; however, the lack of Black teachers and the erasure of Caribbean and African histories in the English school’s textbooks tell a very different story, one of which Annie is only vaguely aware as she attends her latest history classes. Even so, she is aware enough of her society’s inherent inequities that she ironically ridicules the “Great[ness]” of Christopher Columbus by writing deprecating comments about him in Old English lettering, “a script [she] recently mastered” (78). Her mastery of the style symbolizes the simulation of an English identity to which she is permitted access, but her verbal irony in referring to Columbus as “Great” while jeering at his powerlessness illuminates her attempt to find a way to reconcile these conflicting impulses. With such a conflict at the core of her identity, she often finds herself frustrated and disillusioned by her life on the island.
The scene in which Annie washes, and destroys, her family’s photographs also reflects the damaging effects of oppression on the colonized community. Because of the island’s history as part of the slave trade, Annie’s ancestors were likely enslaved Black Africans. However, the pictures showcase the myriad ways in which Annie’s recent family members have adopted the English culture, customs, and religion. On the one hand, the perceived smell of the photographs is “unbearable” to the delirious Annie—recalling her dislike of how the British people smell—and, on the other hand, she dutifully tries to “straighten out the creases in Aunt Mary’s veil, trying, with not much success, to remove the dirt from the front of [her] father’s trousers” (120). In other words, in her fever, Annie perceives the pictures as avatars of British values, and her attempts to scrub away certain aspects of them represent her lifelong antipathy to these values. That the pictures are utterly ruined by her washing is symbolic of the dangers of oppression. When Annie tries to fulfill her socially prescribed role as a young lady—who is, in part, responsible for the laundering and orderliness of the family’s clothing—this action results in the elimination of the subjects’ identities. The people in the photos have literally lost their original cultural identities as a result of their acceptance of English colonial imposition, but Annie’s washing of the pictures renders them unrecognizable and incomplete, suggesting that they have not only sacrificed their own identities but are also unable to fully inhabit another. Rather than trading one identity for the other, the photos’ subjects have forfeited a real identity for a poor imitation of another identity that doesn’t confer any influence or authority.
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By Jamaica Kincaid
