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Motherhood and Art
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Second Class Citizen, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Second Class Citizen shows how family life teaches children how to love; that is, people whose families taught them to love are capable of loving others as adults, while people who never learned to love from their families have great difficulty loving others in adulthood. This dynamic is clear in the marriage between protagonist Adah, a young Nigerian woman who immigrates to the UK in the early 1960s, and her abusive husband Francis. Though Adah grows up in a relatively misogynistic environment, her Pa is a loving and trustworthy father. And while Pa dies young, throwing Adah’s family into turmoil, she remembers his love and reliable character throughout her life; his memory makes it easier for her to trust, befriend, and potentially love men as an adult. By contrast, Francis learns to abuse women thanks to his early family life: his father beat his mother until Francis grew old enough to intervene, and Francis was never required to show his mother respect, let alone love. In his marriage to Adah, Francis repeats the behaviors he witnessed as a child: he beats Adah, exploits her labor, and constantly disrespects her. Despite Adah’s initial willingness to love Francis, his disrespect and abuse ultimately kills her love for him. Thus, the novel suggests both that early family experiences strongly condition people’s abilities to love, and that love requires respect and reciprocity to flourish.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Family and Love ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Family and Love appears in each chapter of Second Class Citizen. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Family and Love Quotes in Second Class Citizen
Below you will find the important quotes in Second Class Citizen related to the theme of Family and Love.
Chapter 2: Escape into Elitism
Quotes
Boy was now all alone. He had to work very hard to keep the family name going. Adah had dropped out of it. She had become an Obi instead of the Ofili she used to be. Boy had resented this, but his presence at the wharf showed that he had accepted the fact that in Africa, and among the Ibos in particular, a girl was little more than a piece of property.
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Chapter 5: An Expensive Lesson
Quotes
She told herself to stop being over-romantic and soft. No husband would have time to ask his pregnant wife how she was feeling so early in the morning. That only happened in True Stories and True Romances, not in real life, particularly not with Francis for that matter. But despite the hard talking to herself, she still yearned to be loved, to feel really married, to be cared for.
Chapter 8: Role Acceptance
Quotes
But the one thing Adah could not stand was when a group of people took a portion of the Bible, interpreted it the way that suited them and then asked her to swallow it like that, whole. She became suspicious. She did not mind it if Francis believed it, except when it disturbed his studies or if either of the children needed a blood transfusion and he refused.
Francis was so happy and was coming over to her cane chair, kissing her very, very softly, telling her how virtuous she was and how he now was the lord and master of several farms, miles and miles around. What more could a man want than a virtuous wife like her who had helped him achieve all this?
Chapter 9: Learning the Rules
Quotes
Her adoptive parents were good, she added quickly, too quickly for Adah, who could never guess how it could be possible for somebody else to love you as if you were their very own flesh and blood. They did love her, her adoptive parents, but she was determined to make a happy home for herself, where she would be loved, really loved, and where she would be free to love. She had been lucky. It seemed as if her dream was coming true.
“It is not coming true; it is true. You are now almost like a princess,” Adah said, wanting to cry.
When in Rome, do as Rome does. When in University College Hospital in Gower Street, do as they do in University College Hospital in Gower Street. Neat, that.
