Joys of Motherhood - Elizabeth Kelman

        Reading The Joys of Motherhood has been painful. Over the course of reading the first hundred and thirty pages, I had to physically put down and close the book dozens of times out of sheer emotional strain. Despite being mostly unfamiliar with the culture and environments described in this novel—any knowledge I do have came from reading Things Fall Apart in a postcolonial literature course in high school—I still felt a connection to the characters, especially the female ones, and was upset by all the travesties that befall them.

Perhaps more upsetting than the unfortunate events, however, are the social structures that I want to denounce but know that, as an outsider, I have no right to pass judgment on them. In particular, I repeatedly read that women are viewed as property in the societies described in The Joys of Motherhood. A woman is the property first of her father, and then of her husband. If her husband dies, her husband’s closest male relative inherits her and her children. Nnu Ego’s mother, Ona, belongsc to her father and was forbidden to marry. Nnu Ego belongs first to her father, then to her first husband (with whom she had no children), then to her father once more, and finally to her second husband, Nnaife. As her owners, these men could beat her, chastise her, and force her to do things against her will. She is expected to cook, clean, raise children and be respectful—even reverent—of her husband, father and male children. In return, she is provided with a home and access to food, clothing and other necessities.

When I read Things Fall Apart, there was a fair amount of discussion about the difference between the European dowry system and the African bride price custom. Whereas in the dowry system a bride’s family must pay the groom to marry their daughter, a bride price means that the groom’s family must pay for the privilege of marrying the bride. In both systems the woman is objectified, but we agreed that the bride price system was better because it seemed to value the female more than the dowry system, in which she is seen as a burden.

While reading about marriage in The Joys of Motherhood, I came to doubt this assumption. Emecheta presents the bride price as the purchase of a woman from her family, which entitles him to the many benefits that come with having a wife. Even Nnu Ego’s name reflects the way women are perceived as objects within an economy, to be traded from father to husband when the time is right; her father said “That should be her name, because she is a beauty and she is mine, Yes, ‘Nnu Ego’: twenty bags of cowries” (26). A woman’s value is based on her family’s social status, the number of children she bears, especially male children, and her youth/beauty. Men, on the other hand, “are never ugly” (75); “A woman may grow ugly and old but a man is never ugly and never old. He matures with age and is dignified” (71). To express his daughter’s value and his own wealth (which are intertwined) upon her first marriage, Nnu Ego’s father sends her off with an array of animals, people and objects. The practice of having a bride price affects the husband’s perception of his wife’s role. As Nnaife says to Nnu Ego early in their marriage, “Did I not pay your bride price? Am I not your owner?” (48). I squirmed with discomfort upon reading such dialogue, as well as less direct descriptions of this inferior position of women. Though for the most part the female characters seem to have internalized their oppressed status, there are occasions in the story when a female character (mostly Nnu Ego) challenges this role, and these few moments give me hope that perhaps the system will change—if not within her lifetime then for her daughters.