The Bride Price Symbol Analysis

In Second Class Citizen, Adah’s novel manuscript The Bride Price represents her growing creative potential, both maternal and artistic, which she must leave her abusive husband Francis to fulfill. Adah begins writing the novel manuscript for The Bride Price after giving birth to her and Francis’s fourth child, their daughter Dada. Before having Dada, Adah parented her three children and worked to support the family without much help from Francis. After having Dada, Adah insists that Francis find a job and support their family so that Adah can stay home and take care of their four children. It is during the five months that Adah stays home and breastfeeds Dada that she recalls her aspiration to become a writer and begins composing the manuscript for The Bride Price in school exercise notebooks. The connection between Adah’s maternity with her artistic growth suggests that being a mother and being an artist are parallel creative pursuits. This parallel is strengthened when Adah shows The Bride Price to a supportive former coworker, Bill; when Adah mentions that she felt as fulfilled when she finished the manuscript as when she gave birth, Bill calls the novel her “brainchild.”

After Francis—who has been hitting Adah in front of their children—burns the manuscript on the pretext that his family wouldn’t like his wife writing such a thing, Adah feels as though Francis has murdered one of her children. Symbolically, Francis burning the manuscript represents not only the threat he poses to Adah’s free artistic expression but also to their children: Francis is a violent man and Adah realizes that she needs to leave him to protect her children as well as herself. By leaving Francis for burning her novel, then, Adah symbolically asserts her value as an artist and her judgment as a mother.