Previous
Chapter 10: Applying the Rules
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Second Class Citizen, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Class, Gender, and Race
Culture vs. Individual Freedom
Motherhood and Art
Family and Love
Economics vs. Aspiration in Education
Summary
Analysis
Early one wet Monday morning in spring, Adah is walking to the public baths when she sees a gray bird singing and is struck by its beauty. She speculates that she wouldn’t have noticed the bird back home because Nigeria has more natural beauty. She wonders whether this phenomenon is what made white Europeans judge African people “lazy.” She resolves that she and her children will be proud Black people and that she will notice natural beauty like Wordsworth, whom she loves, even if she’ll never be “a famous poet” like him.
Adah is clearly bothered by Europeans’ anti-Black racist stereotypes about African people’s supposed “laziness.” This shows how a culture of discrimination can negatively impact even individualistic, relatively free-thinking people like Adah. William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was an English poet known for taking inspiration from nature; when Adah filters her experience of nature through her love of Wordsworth, it shows how her education and reading have enriched her perceptions, not just helped her job prospects.
Themes
Adah is planning to visit the Family Planning Clinic after her bath. When she told Francis she wanted contraception, he told her not to get any: he would “pour it away” outside of her. Adah decides guiltily to go to the clinic in secret. During a checkup for Bubu, Adah asked a nurse about birth control and received some literature, a form for her husband to sign, and information about the Family Planning Clinic’s hours. At home, while Francis was downstairs with Mr. Noble and Sue, Adah read the literature and decided the Pill is her best option, since the cap and the jelly seem too difficult or too easy for Francis to discover. Then, afraid she would die during another pregnancy, she forged Francis’s signature on the form.
When Francis claims that he can just “pour it away,” he means that he will pull out of Adah during sex and ejaculate elsewhere. Pulling out is a highly unreliable method of contraception: when Francis orders Adah to accept that rather than getting birth control from a medical clinic, it implies that he doesn’t want her to have access to effective birth control. Adah needs her husband’s signature on the forms to get birth control, illustrating that women’s freedoms were still curtailed in early-1960s England.
Themes
After the bath, Adah brings Bubu with her to the clinic; she told Francis that the clinic wanted to take a photo of Bubu. In the waiting room, she sits next to a West Indian mother who tells her that the Pill has given her an itchy rash all over her body. Adah decides that she can’t take the Pill after all. Since the jelly requires the husband to wait before sex, Adah thinks that she’ll gamble on the cap, even though Francis might feel it or notice her inserting it. Adah is so rigid with anxiety and guilt while the clinic staff are fitting her for the cap that they can’t fit it properly, but they send her home all the same.
Hormonal birth control methods, such as the birth-control pill, can cause rashes as a side effect. The pill became available in the UK in 1961, only shortly before the novel takes place. Adah’s anxiety and guilt over obtaining birth control suggests not only that she is afraid of the abusive Francis’s reaction to her actions, but also that she has internalized sexist cultural messages about needing her husband’s permission to obtain birth control.
Themes
At home, later that night, Francis and Adah have a fight and Adah confesses that she got contraception. Francis beats her, claiming that only “single women and harlots” use contraception and suggesting that Adah might commit adultery, since she got contraception without his knowledge. He calls all the neighbors to pay witness to Adah’s horrible behavior. Adah is actually happy when Mr. Noble appears, because his presence makes Francis stop beating her. She considers calling the police but realizes she has nowhere to go after leaving Francis.
When Francis claims that “only single women and harlots” use contraception, he is suggesting that faithful married women have no reason to avoid pregnancy. This suggestion ignores Adah’s near-death experience while giving birth to Bubu and thereby shows Francis’s utter failure to think about Adah’s safety or subjective experience. By calling in the neighbors to witness the fight, Francis reveals his assumption that their culture will lead them to accept domestic abuse but abhor contraception.
Themes
Get the entire Second Class Citizen LitChart as a printable PDF.
Francis announces that he’ll write to his parents about what Adah has done. Meanwhile, Adah thinks that she can’t stay married to him: he is too obviously an idiot, calling in witnesses to see that he is beating his wife mere weeks after she gave birth, even though her work supports their family. Mr. Noble intervenes, telling Francis that he shouldn’t hit Adah, who is unwell. Mr. Noble sends the onlookers away and announces that there’s nothing wrong with contraception, though Adah should have been honest with Francis. Adah decides not to explain that Francis’s idea of contraception is ejaculating on the floor. She plans to write to her brother Boy, who never liked Francis. The next week, Francis fails his exams and Adah realizes she’s pregnant again.
Mr. Noble intervenes in Francis’s attack on Adah because Adah is still recovering from her emergency C-section. His motive implies that, in the novel’s view, domestic violence is somewhat normal in mid-20th-century Nigerian culture but that Francis’s violence toward Adah goes beyond what is culturally acceptable. Mr. Noble’s claim that there is nothing wrong with contraception suggests that Francis is wrong that their landlord and neighbors would wholeheartedly take his side in the dispute—again indicating that Francis is abnormally controlling and abusive even relative to the sexist cultural norms of early-1960s Nigeria and England.
Themes
