Literary Analysis: Robbed of Usefulness – Rebecca Judy
Rebecca Judy is a junior majoring in English with a concentration in Technical and Professional Writing. She lives in Lafayette, Indiana. This literary analysis paper was written for Professor Laverne Nishihara’s ENG L383, Studies in British or Commonwealth Culture, in Fall 2020. Prof. Nishihara notes that Rebecca’s “Paper 2 on Buchi Emecheta’s novel is a sophisticated and satisfying analysis of protagonist Nnu Ego’s struggles with her changing society, arguing that both society and Nnu Ego herself bear responsibility for her life. This is excellent work that should be shared more widely!”
Robbed of Usefulness
The title of Buchi Emecheta’s novel The Joys of Motherhood is intended to be ironic, as the mother character, Nnu Ego, does not appear to receive any joy from her experiences as a mother. Interpretations of this work can differ greatly on what causes this disparity between Nnu Ego’s expectations of motherhood and the reality of her experiences; for instance, believing this is the result of a society with deeply unbalanced gender expectations (Akujobi 4) to the belief that Nnu Ego’s experiences stem from her own personal failings (Nnoromele 183). I believe it to be a combination of both, and the crux of this issue can be found in the way Nnu Ego rationalizes the death of her first child: “She had been trying to be traditional in a modern setting. It was because she wanted to be a woman of Ibuza in a town like Lagos that she lost her child” (Emecheta 81). Nnu Ego believes that by trying to be what she considers a traditional wife and mother in a modern city, she inadvertently caused her firstborn’s death, and her desire to never experience this again propels her to be what she considers a modern woman. To Nnu Ego, however, the definition of a modern woman is one who lives only on her husband’s own income, instead of helping to support the family. It is through this belief of what a modern woman is that Nnu Ego is robbed of her usefulness, and this in turn robs her of the joy she is expecting to find in motherhood and contributes to her struggling mental health for the rest of her life.
Nnu Ego is introduced as having strong views on what it means to be traditional even before she is married. Her father and his friends talk about the way she does not quite fit in even in the village, because she is too traditional, and Nnoromele states that Nnu Ego fails to change when her culture changes and “clings to failed institutions and beliefs” (184). Thus, placing the onus solely on Nnu Ego, but this leaves an important question that needs to be answered: where did Nnu Ego get these old-fashioned beliefs in the first place? Growing up without a mother and as the favorite daughter of her father, where else would she have learned them but from her beloved father. Nnoromele also makes a comparison to Ona and Nnu Ego. Nnu Ego is as traditional as Ona was nontraditional, but Nnoromele is wrong when she says that Ona is an example of someone who is the master of her own fate (185). It is true that Ona is fiercely independent and speaks her mind, but she does not simply refuse to marry Agbadi; she cannot marry him because of her status as her father’s male daughter (Emecheta 17-18). This, then, is the reason she tells Agbadi to make sure that their daughter is allowed to marry, not so her daughter can have the freedoms she has but so that her daughter can have the freedoms she does not have. So, while Ona refuses to let Agbadi rule over her, she knows that she does not have true freedom, and to hold her up as a supposed example of womanly independence for Nnu Ego is disingenuous.
In contrast to Ona, Nnu Ego is calm, staid, and traditional. Her father has lavished his love on her, and rather than seek independence, she wants to be loved and fulfill the most traditional role she can: that of a mother. Her first marriage ending without a child followed by the death of her first baby in her second marriage sends her into a spiraling depression, and she is in an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people and customs. Those around her dismiss her grief as taking too long and being unnatural and tell her she must move on. This is a stark contrast to what she pictures would have happened in Ibuza: there, the “old women would have comforted her with stories of the babies they themselves had lost” (Emecheta 72). Instead, she has the harsh comfort of strangers foiling her suicide attempt and has to go home and spend three long months without the comfort of close family or friends while she grieves. This contributes to her overall obsession with motherhood by exacerbating the emotional attachment she has to the role. Where Nnu Ego is possibly at fault is that she had placed her entire identity into that of being a mother, so that when “the child that told the world she was not barren” dies (Emecheta 62), she no longer knows who she is or what to do with herself. We can see this later on in her life as well, when she says that without the children, she would not know what to do or who to be. Because she is not allowed to grieve freely, she turns the emotional upheaval she feels into extreme focus on the right way to be a mother; she will do things right the second time around so as not to lose her child again.
Some critics have seen Nnu Ego’s attitudes throughout the book as indicative of what the ideal Ibo woman would believe, and her actions are a result of the burdens normally placed upon Ibo women (Rani 53). Both Remi Akujobi in “Motherhood in African Literature and Culture” and Rinku Rani in “Motherhood is Womanhood: Myth or Reality?” see the way Nnu Ego behaves as verifying their belief that in traditional African cultures, such as the Ibo people, motherhood is the highest calling, and the “valorisation of motherhood” (Rani 54) places an undue burden on women. To a certain extent, this is supported by the text; both in the focus on what a blessing having children is and the way her first husband will no longer have sex with her because he sees it as a waste when she will not get pregnant. It is also true that this so called valorization of motherhood “leave[s] no space mothers as women who feel pain, anger, frustration, or women drained by the responsibilities that accompany their roles as mothers” (Akujobi 5-6), and Nnu Ego is a textbook case of a woman who is angered, frustrated, and drained. But the deeper question here is whether this “valorisation of motherhood” is meant to be indicative of Ibo culture as a whole, or is it simply what Nnu Ego believes herself? There are many passages that point to the way Nnu Ego has taken this belief in the joys of motherhood and turned it into an obsession, turning what she considers a positive attribute into a character flaw. This is seen in the way Adaku, Naife’s second wife, tells Nnu Ego she is more traditional than the village itself, in the way Nnu Ego laments that she had not spent enough time cultivating female friendships, because she had spent so much time “building up her joys as a mother” (Emecheta 224), and also in the way she is branded as a wicked woman after death for not giving children to those who pray to her. In the Ibo culture, motherhood was truly revered, but Nnu Ego also denied large parts of her culture when she became obsessed with her role as a mother. She rejected female friendship, and she rejected some of the traditional Ibuza gender roles to be what she considers a modern woman in Lagos.
When Nnu Ego resolves to be the modern woman in Lagos who lives solely on her husband’s income, she is not being intellectually honest in her assessment of the situation. In her village, it was common and necessary for women to work hard all day, in the fields and in the home. A mother in Ibuza would have a family support system in the village and would be able to leave her young children with grandparents or other relatives to go work in the fields. Her children would have benefitted from growing up with the love and care of several extended family members living in the same village. In Nnu Ego’s estimation, the city is different. A key point, however, is when she calls it a “white man’s world” (Emecheta 81), revealing that what she sees as modern is actually the effects of British colonization. She understands that in this world it is expected that the man provide for his family economically, but by clinging to this as the definition of modernity, she is dismissing the ways Lagos women have found to support each other and their families. Also, by refusing to build up the companionship of women, she misses out on a possible substitute for the village support system.
On first considering Nnu Ego’s situation, it may seem like in Lagos she simply does not have a support system, but as she herself laments in the last section of the book, it was there but she was always “too ashamed, too poor, or too busy” to take advantage of it. Instead of building relationships with the women around her, she relies on her children to be her sole emotional supports now and to support her in her old age, both emotionally and financially, and is astonished and heartbroken to find she is alone in her old age after all. It is a heavy burden on a child to be their mother’s emotional support, and the children in these changing times were realizing that they did not have to stay at home and support their aging parents; they could fulfill other dreams first. In the village community, a child would care for their parents and expect their parents to help with their own children, but Nnu Ego’s children have never lived in a village community and, instead, experience life on a global scale where this is not necessary.
By shutting herself off from networks of support, Nnu Ego both robs herself of her usefulness in her refusal to see the things she is doing to support their family while she is at the same time robbed by the way her culture has been affected by British colonization. Nnu Ego’s family cannot make it solely on Naife’s income, but Nnu Ego sees it as shameful that they have to go out and work to make up the difference. Naife spends his money on alcohol and gives very little for the children’s food. Susan Z. Andrade makes the claim that in the village economy, the cooking strike that Adaku and Nnu Ego attempted would actually have been quite successful. In Lagos, however, Naife is able to get his coworkers to feed him and so it is only punishing the women and the children, and therefore, “Traditional forms of women’s resistance are ineffective in this new context” (Andrade 103).
To judge Nnu Ego without attempting to understand the world she comes from would be short sighted and naive, but so also would be judging the world she comes from on the sole basis of Nnu Ego herself. She is deeply affected by the upbringing she has had in her traditional village by her traditional father, and she is deeply traumatized by her failed first marriage and the loss of her infant son. Both of these things combine to make a woman obsessed with doing everything right to keep her children so she can be the mother she believes she needs to be, but she is not a mother in isolation. She is mothering during a time of rapid changes for her country, and her hardships have made it incredibly difficult for her to keep up with these changes. She is affected by the devastating aftereffects of the British colonization of her country, as well as the increased globalization of the world. Were she a mother in her mother’s time, Nnu Ego would have been content and happy. She would have raised her children and done her part to support them economically by growing food in the village and happily utilizing the older women to care for her children and support her as she mothered. These women would have been a sounding board of what motherhood should look like as well as a support during times of trauma, such as the loss of a child. Instead, she is uprooted and placed in Lagos where she does not have a built-in support network, and whether through intentional neglect or emotional inability, she does not seek one out. Nnu Ego accepts that her method of mothering will have to be different in Lagos than in Ibuza, but she does not understand that this means her attitude toward it may need to change as well. Because she cannot do things the village way, she is robbed of her usefulness. And who can take joy in a life of feeling useless?
Works Cited
Akujobi, Remi. “Motherhood in African Literature and Culture.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 13, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1-7. EBSCOhost, doi:10.7771/1481-4374.1706.
Andrade, Susan Z. “Rewriting History, Motherhood, and Rebellion: Naming an African Women’s History Literary Tradition.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 21, no. 1, 1990, pp. 91–110. EBSCOhost, proxyeast.uits.iu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hgh&AN=15515719&site=ehost-live&scope=site
Emecheta, Buchi. The Joys of Motherhood. George Braziller, Inc, 1979.
Nnoromele, Salome C. “Representing the African Woman: Subjectivity and Self in The Joys of Motherhood.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 43, no. 2, 2002, pp. 178–190. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/00111610209602179.
Rani, Rinku. “Motherhood Is Womanhood: Myth or Reality? A Study of Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood.” Language in India, vol. 20, no. 2, 2020, pp. 52–57. EBSCOhost, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=cookie,geo,url,ip,guest&custid=s8475741&groupid=main&profile=eds&geocustid=s8475741&site=eds-live&scope=site&db=ufh&AN=141816463.