Childhood Threats

I don’t know about you, but when I talk really fast without letting up, it’s usually means I’m scared.  And do you know what?  I think the narrator of Girl by Jamaica Kincaid might have the exact same problem.

Because let’s face it, sometimes kids are just plain threatening.

(Yes, that is a picture of me.)

So I’ve made a table of some of the threats that children seem to pose to society according to Girl and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (which I just started reading).

	GIRL	JANE EYRE
They probably have special access to the world of spirits, from whence they only recently arrived.	“Don’t throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all”	Jane throws such a terrifying tantrum that her caregivers suspect her of involvement with the late master of the house. (ch. 2 & 3)
They have bodies.	The narrator warns against “the slut you are so bent on becoming” three times.	At Jane’s school, the girls are expected to act as martyrs and suffer bodily deprivation in order to be right with God.  At one point, the schoolmaster cuts off a girls’ hair for being too curly, even though it curls naturally.  (“Naturally!  Yes, but we are not to conform to nature…”) (ch. 7)
Although they come into the world totally dependent, they are by no means mere products of their upbringings.	Hence, the frantic, desperate list of instructions that makes up most of the story, as well as the closing line: “you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?”	Jane speaks out against her childhood injustices.  She realizes that she is not who the world deems her to be.  “Speak I must: I had been trodden on severely…” (ch. 4)