Second Class Citizen

In the culmination of the novel, Adah finds freedom in writing and being away from Francis. Her struggle for birth control reflects the practices in England at the time, as her struggles likely take place before birth control became available to unmarried women. Adah once again relies on Francis to save herself from more pregnancies. The rash that another woman suffers from the birth control pill is likely not something that would have affected Adah, but it is sufficient to convince an already guilty Adah that she should not take the pills.

Adah is not alone in this struggle, nor is this the first time that she has needed her husband’s permission to access basic needs. Francis beats Adah for trying to get birth control to avoid claiming responsibility for the children they already have. Francis wants control over Adah more than he wants a higher standard of living, shown by his burning of Adah’s novel. The Bride Price is an actual book written by Emecheta, which highlights the connections between Adah and Emecheta and the novel as a semi-autobiography. Adah, as Emecheta, will likely go on to find success in writing.

Francis, standing in for Sylvester, Emecheta’s husband, is characterized as cruel for the sake of cruelty. The story Adah recounts about Francis killing his friend’s monkey adds to an already established pattern of violence and manipulation, in which Francis seems to hurt others for personal satisfaction. Adah muses that Francis wants others to be as miserable as himself, and that his actions seem to involve a desire for control over others. Beating Adah reinforces his position as the husband, just as killing his friend’s monkey established his feeling of control over others’ possessions, perhaps even over life and death.

Francis’s intrusion on the family reaffirms his desire for control. Throughout the novel, Francis is largely influenced by other Nigerian immigrants to control his wife and subjugate his family. In the end, he is no longer able to claim that he is married to Adah, as he argued that he was not married to her in court. He is also no longer able to claim fatherhood. Though this leaves him without family, he is still likely entwined with the Nigerian community to which he already belonged. Adah, it seems, is no longer a part of that community, and her interaction with her childhood friend at the end of the novel indicates that her marriage is a condition of entry into this community. Her friend only gives her a ride home “because he thought she was still with her husband” (182).

An important consideration in the final chapters is the mixed use of the term “child.” Adah comes to view her novel as her “brainchild.” She consistently puts more weight on her role as a mother over the course of the novel, resolving to provide for the children financially and then removing them from Francis altogether.

The novel explores The Complexities of Marriage and Raising Children. Adah desires both to be a wife and mother and to achieve something specific of her own; the novel seems to be the ultimate combination of these ambitions. Adah would prefer a husband like those she hears about in the hospital and in romances, but she has Francis. She has her children and loves them, but they are a large drain on her faculties, especially after Dada’s birth. Her children are her main focus for a long time; her goal, as seen in the grey bird episode, is for them to be better than the Nigerian people and culture she left behind and the English people and culture she has brought them into. Her novel is the product of her journey from one culture to the other, and her writing a development or progression toward the future that she envisions for herself and her children.