earticle

영어

Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy has been widely studied upon as postcolonial literature. Most scholarly works on Lucy examine the heroine, Lucy’s identity as a postcolonial figure and her task of severing relationships with her colonial past, represented through Lucy’s mother character left in the West Indies. Recognizing the danger of ghettoization of reading Lucy only as postcolonial literature, this study attempts to bring focus back to the very American nature of Lucy. By analyzing solidarity building attempts between Lucy and Mariah, the study examines Lucy as a narrative that reveals a history of continuing dilemma and obstacles of American women’s solidarity and coalition building attempts. Especially, the paper pays special attention in analyzing the white female character Mariah, who is unable to scrutinize her status as an affluent white female American in relation to the subordinations of the less privileged people like Lucy. Despite numerous attempts on the part of Mariah to build female bonding with Lucy, Mariah’s trials only reveal her impossibility to form solidarity with other women with differences in terms of race and class. Reading Lucy as a failed American female solidarity building narrative effectively exhibits obstacles American feminism and coalition movements have faced for more than half a century since the advent of second wave feminism.