I was pleasantly surprised by the ending of Girl, Woman Other which found a way to nicely tie up the number of individual stories going on within into a rather relaxed ending. Every character was related to another by some happenstance, by blood, social relation, or some other meeting. I was surprised to be given the only male perspective in this part of the book, which was told by Amma’s friend and father to her daughter Yazz. I was also pretty touched and surprised by the epilogue which answered one of my biggest questions about the only perspective of a white woman in the story: Penelope. I was very confused about why her perspective was included in a book which explicitly explored the experiences of many different black women. Evaristo generated a uniquely bitter-sweet irony by telling the story of how Penelope, an explicitly bigoted and racist woman, came to find that her birth mother is a black woman. Penelope’s reactions to her initial DNA results were disheartening as she attempted to imagine herself in connection to these offensive racial caricatures she describes, but when she comes face to face with her mother at the end, finding the one person she has longed for perhaps the last 70 years of her life, her hatred disappears. 70 years melt away and she becomes a child once again that can clearly recognize her mother when she sees her. It creates a unique question for the reader to chew on: Why does race no longer matter to Penelope when she is face to face with her mother? What is different between reading ancestry data and meeting a relative or ancestor that may reflect that data?
I had already read Goblin Market in my previous British Literature class, where we picked the poem apart, analyzing its rhyme scheme, meter, form, and content. From what I remember, it had a mixed reception after Rosetti had it published, with many critics not recognizing the clearly coded topics of sexual assault and lesbianism. Reading it for the second time, I was even more startled by hope blatantly suggestive the language and imagery of the poem was, and it makes me all the more surprised that literary critics of Rosetti’s time would be unable to identify any of the subtlety the poem had to offer.
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