Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Girl, Woman, Other, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Diaspora, Culture, and Identity
Love, Sexuality, and Race
Home and Community
Contradiction, Complexity, and Intersectionality
Radical vs. Reformist Social Movements
Summary
Analysis
Grace’s mother, Daisy, tells her that her father, Wolde, was an Abyssinian seaman who she met while he was on a stopover in South Shields in 1895. Daisy, 16, gets pregnant and he doesn’t find out until she’s about to give birth. Daisy describes him as otherworldly because he’s unlike the boys in her town and had been all over the world. He doesn’t speak English, so their conversations are limited, but before he sails off he tells Daisy he’ll come back for her. Daisy promises that they’ll go looking for him one day to show him the daughter he left behind.
Daisy is attracted to Wolde because he represents a far-off culture and different way of life. Her naïve, youthful love leads to her teen pregnancy that will parallel her great-granddaughter, Hattie’s, own teen pregnancy years later. Daisy spends the rest of her life waiting for Wolde to come back and deliver on his promise to make a home and family with her.
Themes
Daisy gives birth in the tenement she shares with her large family. When her father sees that the baby is “a half-caste,” he’s furious and ashamed. He tells her to give it up, but unable to abandon her child, she moves out instead and cuts her mom off for not being strong enough to stand up to her father. Daisy gets a job at a factory and lives with another young woman who has a child. Daisy has little money but takes care of Grace the best she can. She promises to move to the countryside where Grace can run free and she can find a husband who will be a good father.
Daisy’s father reacts to her pregnancy in much the same way that Hattie’s will two generations into the future. He demands that she give the baby away in order to protect his own pride and reputation. This demand is compounded by his fury that the baby is mixed race. Both racism and sexism intersect here to drive Daisy out of her family and onto the streets. Having lost her first home, Daisy dreams of building a new one for herself and her daughter in the countryside.
Themes
Daisy is diagnosed with tuberculosis when Grace is eight. She’s put into quarantine, leaving Grace with the other young mother they live with. Not wanting to take care of Grace, Daisy’s roommate sends her to the girl’s home she herself had grown up in. In this unfamiliar home in the countryside, the other girls gawk at Grace’s brown skin and hair. She explains, proudly, that her dad was Abyssinian, remembering that her mother told her never to be ashamed of where he was from.
Like many of the working class and poor, Daisy falls victim to her harsh living and working conditions before she can escape poverty and make her dreams come true. In a cruel twist of fate, Grace makes it out to the countryside, like Daisy had dreamed, but to live alone in the care of strangers. When Grace arrives in the majority white countryside and girls home, she’s faced with her peers’ ignorance and racism. However, her mother, although she was a white woman, instilled in Grace a deep pride in her racial and ethnic identity that allows Grace to stay afloat in this new place. This pride will be lost generations later when Sonny and Ada Mae make desperate attempts to distance themselves from their Blackness.
Themes
Grace has nightmares that wake the others, who tell her she’ll adjust soon. She curls up in her blanket remembering her mother’s promises that she’d never leave her, remembers that her mother screamed out that she’d be back as she was dragged off to the sanatorium. Every time someone knocks on the door of the home, she hopes that it’s her mother, but eventually that hope fades. She starts dreaming that her father will come instead to take her away to his paradise.
Grace is haunted by the ghosts of her parents. The horrifying image of her mother’s forced departure is seared into her mind, a trauma that will follow her for the rest of her life. With her mother gone, she’s lost the only home and family she had. Her mysterious father becomes her only hope of ever having a home and family again. She was already intrigued by the mystery of her father’s identity, but now her desire to know him is even greater.
Themes
Get the entire Girl, Woman, Other LitChart as a printable PDF.
At the home, Grace learns how to cook, clean, sew, and garden alongside reading and math. They have the girls walk with books on their heads in deportment class and Grace imagines she’s from Abyssinia and walking on air. Her teacher tells her she has a natural elegance, which makes Grace proud. The girls in her dorm all become friends and each has their own special talents. Grace does the best impersonations and when she’s caught by Mrs. Langley is told she has too much personality, which is unattractive in a girl. Grace notices that she wasn’t the only one misbehaving but the only one who got caught. She’s scared while she’s being reprimanded because girls who misbehave can be kicked out.
The girls home begins to feel like a warm and supportive community that fills at least some of the void that her parents left behind. Grace continues to remain deeply proud of her Ethiopian heritage and mixed-race identity. Grace is targeted unfairly for discipline at school, like many Black children are in educational settings where white teachers stereotype and expect misbehavior from Black students. If she gets kicked out, Grace will be left homeless once more.
Themes
Grace is told that she’s not like the other girls and needs to be on her best behavior because her life will be hard and full of rejections by people who are “less enlightened” than the people at school. Mrs. Langley tells her to “tone down” her personality and exercise restraint. She threatens to kick her out onto the streets where she’ll be forced into prostitution. She threatens that if she doesn’t behave the school won’t be able to recommend her for employment as a maid. Grace commits to becoming restrained and decorous.
While the women at the school claim to be “enlightened,” they are perpetuating racism against Grace by singling her out and telling her that she needs to change her personality. These white women highlight how even those who believe they have good intentions can perpetuate harm. They think they’re helping Grace by trying to prepare her for adult life in a discriminatory world but are harming her emotionally in the process. At the end of the day, they see only two options for a Black girl in life: sex work or housekeeping. Their own biases keep them from fighting for any other future for her. Rather than encourage her to break barriers and dream big, they predetermine her future. Fearful of the material consequences she would face if kicked out, Grace gives in to behaving in a way that makes the white people around her feel comfortable.
Themes
Grace hoped to become an assistant at a department store, and breaks into tears when, instead, Mrs. Langley finds her a job as a maid for a baron who’d just returned to his family’s castle after years away running a plantation in India. The baron has Indian servants, an Indian mistress, and their two sons, so doesn’t have a problem having a “half-caste” maid. Years later she’s shopping in the department store, the last place she wants to be after a manager had shut the door on her when she asked for a job. Two girls from the home are working, and they complain about the job, enraging Grace who suffers harder conditions as a maid even though she was just as smart as the rest of the girls at school.
Grace dreamed of reforming society, breaking racial barriers in employment by working in a department store. Instead, she becomes a maid for a baron who made his wealth on the backs of people of color. Because he has two mixed-race children of his own, he takes Grace on, but it’s clear his racism runs deep. He has Indian servants and the mother of his children is his “mistress,” not his wife. When confronted with her two former classmates who are oblivious to their own privilege, Grace realizes that no matter how smart she is or how hard she works, some opportunities will be denied her no matter what on the basis of her race alone.
Themes
Grace finds the material she needs for her dress. She and the other maids are making themselves “risqué” dresses that fall below the knee. She’d seen the lady of the house and her rich friends modeling this look. Grace knows she’ll never look like them but is happy she’ll have a trendy dress for the rare special occasions she gets to enjoy. As she’s walking home through the busy town, a man approaches her and says she “must be the Lady of the Nile.” The man has bright red hair and blue eyes. He doesn’t ogle her the way other men do.
As Grace walks home from the store lost in her thoughts that she’ll never be rich and regal like the woman she works for, she’s intercepted by the man who will invite her into a life far more privileged than her current one. While this white man doesn’t look at her through a hypersexual gaze, he exoticizes her from the minute he meets her. While he intends his line about her being the Lady of the Nile as a compliment, he’s imposing a fantasy of otherness onto her. Grace, after all, is English and has never even left the country.
Themes
He introduces himself as Joseph Rydendale and, as he walks her across the street, tells her he’s just left the bank where he made a large deposit. Grace guesses he’s trying to impress her, something a man has never tried to do with her before, and she is impressed. Unlike the seedy men who call her a tease, he seems like a good man. Up until this point she’s been able to fend off advances from the types of men who assault women or leave them pregnant, once even suffering a close call with a guest who snuck into the servants’ quarters. She’d accepted that she’d likely be single her whole life because no man wanted a “mongrel” as she was often called.
Like Hattie will be years later, Grace is thrilled that a man is paying her positive attention. She’s used to going unnoticed or being excluded as a woman of color in this white, rural town. In Joseph she finds a man who not only respects her body but is attracted to her regardless of her race. It’s clear Joseph is rich, and his wealth plus his whiteness will give Grace access to privileges she’d be otherwise denied.
Themes
Joseph survived World War I unscathed, unlike many of his compatriots. He returned home to his family farm, Greenfields, and found it in disrepair. His father had gone senile and wandered the fields in his underwear searching for his long-dead wife. It takes him years to restore the farm and when he’s finished he’s ready for a wife. After years spent abroad, however, none of the girls back home attract him until he sees Grace on the street. Grace soon starts to fall in love with Joseph, who visits her at the estate where she works every Sunday. When Joseph proposes to her, Grace can’t believe that a man truly wants her. They marry and move to the farm.
Greenfields farm is an important family legacy that Joseph invites Grace to share in. Joseph devotes himself to rebuilding this home, and it provides Grace with the true home she’s been without since her mother’s death. Additionally, Grace makes her mother’s dream of a home and family in the countryside come true when she finds a good husband in Joseph and moves onto his farm in the idyllic countryside.
Themes
Joseph’s father, who died three months prior, never would have approved of their relationship. The day he brings her home on his horse cart, the townspeople stare at Grace, never having seen a Black person before and shocked that she was able to “steal” one of the most desired men in town. The townspeople eventually warm to her because her accent reveals that she’s “local-enough.” But she still faces racism. The grocer threw her change down on the counter rather than hand it to her, so she does the exact same thing when she goes to pay the next time. She walked away “with her Abyssinian nose in the air” thinking her mother would be proud.
Joseph and Grace’s relationship suffers the scrutiny that many interracial relationships do. Grace is spared having to confront racist in-laws, but their town is so rural their neighbors haven’t seen a Black person before. That she’s with Joseph makes them hate her even more, and she’s left with the burden of slowly gaining their acceptance. The racism she experiences in this town never shakes her pride. She’s not ashamed to be Black, just as her mother taught her.
Themes
Greenfields farmhouse was dirty and dark compared to the estate Grace had grown used to living on. Joseph had a maid who he said would do all the housework so Grace could do as she pleased, which she finds amusing both because she’d been a maid herself so recently and because the house was still filthy. Grace begins to act and speak like the rich people she served at the estate. She notices that the maid doesn’t take orders from her the way she does from Joseph, that she refuses to listen to “a half-caste, a negress.” Grace tells Joseph to fire the maid, which he does, and finds that she likes doing housework now that she’s doing it for herself.
With Grace’s new life comes a sudden role reversal. She adopts the behaviors of the rich people she spent years serving, and after years spent as a maid, she now has one of her own. Still, Grace’s new life and status don’t erase her race and the discrimination that comes with it. The maid Joseph hires, a white woman, refuses to work for a Black woman, a move that would go against the white supremacist hierarchy of English society. Grace has made it into the white, English elite, but even from the inside she’s met with discrimination. Tending to this house feels different now that she owns the property. It’s a source of pride and empowerment.
Themes
The house starts to come back to life and Grace convinces Joseph to refurbish the house in preparation for their future children. They fill the house with new furniture and jazz records. They dance into the night and read and talk for hours. Joseph loves her curls and she can’t believe he loves the thick hair she’d always been embarrassed by. The only part of the house she doesn’t clean is the cabinet in the library that Joseph says is full of important records that can’t be thrown out. He says he’ll deal with it eventually, but for now puts a lock on it.
Grace is creating the home of her dreams after losing so much in her youth. He still loves all of her features that made her unlovable in the eyes of most men. The cabinet in the library contains the secret of the farm’s origins that Hattie and Slim uncover years later. When Joseph puts the lock on his cabinet, it’s clear that he wants to hide his family’s involvement in the slave trade from Grace. He fears how this knowledge would impact her love for this new home she’s settling into.
Themes
When they have sex, Joseph calls Grace “his expedition into Africa.” He compares himself to Dr. Livingstone heading down the Nile. Grace reminds him she’s Abyssinian and Joseph responds: “whatever you say, Gracie.” Joseph wants ten sons, but Gracie thinks five children would be enough and wants at least two daughters. In their efforts she suffers two miscarriages. Then she gives birth to a boy who dies hours after delivery. Grace becomes severely depressed. She and Joseph can’t speak of the losses. Finally a daughter, Lily, arrives and survives for one year, two months, and four days before passing away in her sleep.
Although Joseph loves Grace, he continues to exoticize her. In their sex life, his Dr. Livingston fantasy reveals how he still views Grace through problematic, white supremacist lenses. Dr. Livingston was an “explorer” and missionary of colonial England. Joseph positions himself as colonial explorer, dominating and conquering Grace. When Grace tries to remind him that she’s actually Ethiopian he brushes her off, revealing that he loves her not so much because of who she really is, but because of the racialized fantasy he’s built up around her. Sex becomes another form of domination, another way of making Joseph’s dreams a reality, when they set out to try and have the sons he wants. However, death arrives and starts to break up Grace’s new, happy home, the way it did when her mother got sick and she lost her home for the first time.
Themes
Joseph doesn’t give Grace any time to grieve because he’s desperate for an heir to the 120-year-old family farm. Grace suddenly understands how much the farm means to him as his way of honoring his ancestors. Joseph starts drinking and is angry all the time. When they have sex he’s more a robot than a lover, concerned only with impregnating her. She endures the sex, committed to her role in helping him continue the family legacy. She’s afraid he’ll leave her if she can’t provide. They don’t read on the couch together anymore, instead sit across the room from one another as he reads National Geographic and she reads anything that gets her mind off her “body that [gives] birth to death.” They stop sleeping together at night.
Joseph puts his own desire for patrilineal legacy over his wife’s physical and mental well-being. He is determined to uphold patriarchal norms by handing power and privilege down to a male heir. Soon this series of devastating losses, along with Joseph’s unyielding obsession, ruins their relationship. Grace sacrifices herself to try and give him what he wants, even when it comes at the cost of her connection to her own body. Joseph’s love for National Geographic likewise symbolizes his exotification of people of color. He becomes a colonial explorer when lost in its pages, internalizing stereotypes that he then applies to his wife.
Themes
Grace gives birth to another daughter. After three brutal days of labor, Grace refuses to name or breastfeed the girl, convinced that she’s doomed to die. Joseph names the baby Harriet after his grandmother who’d lived a long and healthy life. Joseph knows that Hattie will survive, that she’s “a fighter” even though she’s a girl. He stops talking to Grace, who views Harriet as a screaming demon unlike her peaceful baby Lily. Grace is severely depressed for months, unable to do anything. A nanny moves in to care for Harriet.
Grace is severely traumatized from the losses she suffered without being allowed to recover and heal. However, Hattie’s namesake imbues her with the power Joseph wanted her to inherit: she lives well into her 90s. From the minute she’s born, Joseph celebrates her strength, challenging gender norms of the time. Joseph’s insistence that Grace birth him an heir has not only broken their relationship, but Grace’s relationship with her newborn daughter, which is too painful for her to bear.
Themes
Grace becomes suicidal and one night Joseph catches her looking at the kitchen knives. He snatches one from her hand, warning her “don’t you dare.” She thinks about drowning herself in the nearby lake and Joseph threatens to take her to the asylum. She is too miserable to care. Their relationship is broken, the powerful love they shared is only a memory. When Joseph tries to force Grace to mother Harriet, she walks away refusing to even touch her. He calls her a “wicked woman” and says she’s failing at her duty.
Although their relationship is broken, Joseph doesn’t want to lose Grace or the life and home they’d built together. Joseph threatens to take her to the asylum, paralleling Grace’s separation from her own mother, Daisy, who was removed to an asylum where she died alone from tuberculosis. Grace is so depressed at this point that this near repeat of history doesn’t even register or scare her. In Joseph eyes, and society’s, there is nothing worse than a woman who won’t care for their child. Per traditional gender roles, a woman’s duty in life is to sacrifice herself and her own well-being for the sake of her child.
Themes
Grace feels as alone as she did when her mother was taken from her, and wishes she was here now to guide her. Harriet is 30 months old when Grace’s depression breaks suddenly one morning. She can see the world again the way it was before her dread settled down as a thick fog. She gets showered and dressed, then walks into the kitchen where Harriet and the nanny are eating breakfast. Grace looks like an entirely new person to Harriet, and Grace, really looking at Harriet for the first time, sees a healthy baby girl. Grace notices that Harriet and the nanny have grown too close. Grace sits close to Harriet and announces that everyone will call her Hattie now. Hattie sits on Grace’s lap only after the nanny urges her to, which hurts Grace. Later that day Grace reads to Hattie outside while Joseph looks on stunned.
Grace feels as rootless and homeless as she did when she was separated from her mother. The home she’d finally found with Joseph at Greenfield is slipping away. Grace’s depression lifts suddenly and without explanation. Perhaps the memory of her separation from her mother and the emotional fallout she suffered pushes her to make sure that her own daughter doesn’t grow up motherless. Harriet is two years old and has bonded with the nanny, hardly recognizing her mother in her post-depression state. Grace is hurt that her child hardly knows her, and bestowing her with a new nickname is her way of reclaiming the girl and starting to rebuild their relationship.
Themes
Grace carries out a conversation with her mother in her head. She tells her how she and Hattie found each other once her darkness lifted. She loved her and gave her everything she wanted. Hattie and Joseph were close, too, and he let her follow him around the farm, teaching her to work and not caring that she was a girl. Grace wishes her mother was there to be Hattie’s grandmother and see how strong she was. She mourns that her mother missed her own growing up and the love she shares with Joseph. She wishes that her mother could have met Hattie’s American husband Slim, and her grandchildren, Ada Mae and Sonny, that Grace herself only knew for a few years. She remembers how happy Joseph was when Sonny was born. Finally there was a boy to keep the family’s legacy alive.
Grace had never been able to find her mother and father, who both remained lost to her forever. She finds Hattie, and in the process rediscovers the home and family she’d created with Joseph, the home and family she’d been searching for since losing her parents all those years ago. The farm and the home and family it represents is meaningful to both Grace and Joseph, who instill that value in Hattie. As she grows up, they root her identity in the land that she lives and works on. Joseph has made peace with the fact that he doesn’t have a son, and instead allows Hattie to break traditional gender roles of the time, teaching her everything she needs to know to maintain the family farm and legacy. Hattie will later extend the same privileges to her gender-defiant granddaughter Morgan, showing how this piece of Joseph lives on in Hattie. Although he'd made peace with not having a son of his own, Joseph still believes the farm should return to male hands through his grandson, Sonny, but won’t live to see how little that legacy will mean to Sonny.
Themes
