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
Two days away from her 80th birthday, Penelope is traveling first-class on the train and reading a review of a new play at the National, her favorite theater in London. It’s a play about African Amazons and despite its five-star review she definitely won’t be seeing it. She’s surrounded by loud and rowdy passengers that she assumes upgraded their seats last minute and wants to yell at them to shut up but fears they might attack her. In her old age, she notices she has less tolerance for people other than her partner, Jeremy. She’s finally happily “co-dependent with a lovely man.”
The National, a symbol of England’s enduring white supremacist legacy, is unsurprisingly Penelope’s favorite theater because it caters to, and represents, the white middle and upper classes like her. In her mind, Amma’s play doesn’t fit her vision and version of the National. Penelope’s classism is evident on the train when she is bothered by the other passengers who she assumes are in first class on a fluke because they are rowdy, a characteristic that white supremacist society assigns to the lower classes. She fully believes in and perpetuates harmful stereotypes when she assumes that they are violent and would want to attack an upper-class woman like herself. Her fear highlights how fearmongering itself is a tactic for preserving white supremacist ideologies. In her old age, Penelope’s become less strict about her feminist beliefs. Whereas she was once staunchly against being co-dependent with a man, now she enjoys it.
Themes
At the suggestion of her doctor—a woman who retired and was replaced “sadly” by a Nigerian man— Penelope takes Tai Chi classes, and that’s where she met Jeremy. He is a divorcee, a few years older than her, and she quickly won him over by turning herself into a “Fun Person.” She does all the things she’d usually find bothersome: she buys him gifts, they go on dates to operas and cricket matches, and she listens to him attentively. Jeremy explains that his ex-wife transformed from a “well-behaved” wife and mother in the fifties to a “manhating feminist” who hung out with unfeminine women. One day he found her having sex with another woman in their house. Penelope agrees that “feminism has a lot to answer for,” quick to betray her feminist beliefs to be with Jeremy. In general, Penelope and Jeremy agree on their right of center politics.
Penelope’s racism seeps into all aspects of her life. When she meets Jeremy she changes herself in order to win him over, trading her feminist principles for the comfort and security of a home and relationship she’s been yearning for her whole life. Jeremy’s ex-wife had a feminist awakening similar to Penelope’s. Both felt called to action by the second wave feminist movement, but now in her old age that ideology is less important to her. Penelope is desperate to be rid of her loneliness, even if it means being with a sexist man. It’s easier for Penelope to overlook his sexism because they share otherwise conservative political views.
Themes
Penelope waited 18 months to be physically intimate with Jeremy. She was self-conscious of how her body looked when she was naked now that she’s older. When they do finally have sex, she realizes that Jeremy loves her body as it is. Penelope moves into his house and though she dislikes its interior design that’s unlike her own eclectic style, she doesn’t try to change anything about it. They both love to read, and when Jeremy reveals that he could never get past even the first chapter of a book written by a woman, Penelope says nothing. Their life is comfortable, and she believes that the secret to their easy relationship is that she never stirs the pot.
Penelope’s relationship with Jeremy is physically freeing. She’s comfortable with herself and in her body despite its age. However, she continues to defer to Jeremy, even in matters of interior design, concessions she wouldn’t have made for any man years earlier. That Penelope is willing to settle for a man who can’t bear to read a book by a woman highlights how thoroughly she’s abandoned her feminist beliefs for the comfort and stability of this relationship. After years of failing to maintain a relationship with a man, she believes abandoning her feminist principles and resigning herself to the role of an agreeable and obedient woman is the only way to stay partnered at this point. In Penelope’s eyes at this point, the only way for a woman to be happy in this life is to finally give in to what society prescribes and enforces on women.
Themes
A cancer scare renews Penelope’s curiosity about her birth parents. At Sarah’s suggestion, Penelope orders an Ancestry DNA kit and when the results finally arrive she’s shocked. The science brings the reality of who she is crashing into who she expected she might be when it reveals that she’s 16 percent Jewish and that 13 percent of her DNA comes from Africa, with 4 percent coming from Ethiopia. She gets drunk, thinking she could’ve handled being Jewish but being African on top of that was too much. She conjures up images of her ancestors “attired in loincloths running around the African savannah spearing lions, at the same time wearing yarmulkes.” She wonders if she should get a “dreadlock wig,” become a Rastafarian, and start selling drugs to match her new identity.
Penelope has created a new, longed-for home with Jeremy, but also realizes that the mystery of her birth parents is part of her yearning and search for a home. Her DNA results upend everything she’s ever known or understood about herself. With the realization that she is both Black and Jewish, Penelope suddenly belongs to the groups of people she’s spent her life hating. To come to terms with this new identity, to accept herself, she’ll need to unpack years’ worth of racist thinking. Her immediate reaction to this news is to conjure up grossly exaggerated stereotypes of her new identities.
Themes
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Penelope Skypes Sarah to break the news. Sarah looks at the results and realizes that she has over a hundred genetic relatives listed on the site including a parent. Penelope goes pale and breaks into tears. Sarah emails a person named Morgan who replies that “he/she(?)” is managing the account for their great-grandmother, Hattie Jackson. They’d been hoping to find out more about her mother, Grace, who they’d thought was half Ethiopian but discovered she had ancestry spread across Africa. Morgan never expected to find someone claiming to be Hattie’s daughter, because Hattie had only one daughter, Ada Mae. When Morgan tells Hattie, she’s shocked, but then explains that she’d given birth at 14 to a baby named Barbara who her father forcibly took away. Hattie had kept her daughter a secret her entire life but thought of her every single day. She’s thrilled to find out she’s still alive.
Morgan and Hattie complicate Penelope’s understanding of the world. She’s now suddenly related to people whose identities she’s spent her life maligning. Penelope was separated from her mother, and by extension her identity, because Hattie’s father exerted patriarchal control over Hattie’s body. That decision impacted not just one but two women’s lives. Hattie is thrilled her daughter is still alive, without yet understanding that her daughter was socialized to hate Black people and that this will dramatically impact their relationship.
Themes
Morgan emails Penelope to explain that her birth mother, Hattie, is still alive but old and in shock so she should come right away. Penelope gets off the train and into a cab driven by an African man who she is surprised to see so far outside the city. Two hours later they arrive in a deserted village and head up a hill to Greenfields. Penelope notices that the entire place looks wild and rundown. She gets out of the taxi, tipping the driver since “he’s practically a sixth cousin or something.” Hattie steps out of the farmhouse. She’s barefoot with wiry grey hair that stands up on her head and raggedy blue overalls. She’s old but still tall and strong with a fierceness that Penelope recognizes in herself. Hattie is ambiguously brown but inarguably brown. She could pass as being from any number of countries.
Penelope struggles to unlearn a lifetime of racist thinking. She calls herself out for being surprised to see a Black person, the cab driver, so far outside the city, but racist thinking permeates even her effort to correct herself with her problematic aside that he may as well be a distant cousin simply because he’s Black. On the one hand, Penelope judges what she finds at Greenfields. On the other hand, she recognizes herself in this place. Her mother is as fiercely feminist as she has been for most of her life, and Greenfields is her feminist legacy. Penelope tries to make sense of Hattie’s racial identity, which is ambiguous like her own.
Themes
Penelope realizes that “this metal-haired wild creature from the bush with the piercingly feral eyes is her mother.” Suddenly she no longer cares about her race and can’t understand why it once mattered to her so much. She’s overcome with the “pure and primal” connection between mother and daughter and feels them both becoming whole again. Her fear that she’d feel nothing is proven wrong as both are overwhelmed with emotion in this moment that is about nothing other than “being together.”
On one hand, Penelope describes her mother through what could be read as a stereotypical and dehumanizing lens. She assigns animalistic traits to Hattie (“wild creature,” “feral”). At the same time, she describes that something “pure and primal” is overtaking her, suggesting that the meeting and her description of Hattie may also be rooted in a feeling that this meeting is bringing out the fierce bond and connection that mothers and their young share in nature. It’s unclear where Penelope’s racism begins and ends. Even though meeting her mother and feeling this immediate connection prompts a major realization that she was wrong to have racist beliefs for all these years, it is also certain that her meeting Hattie won’t immediately eradicate the racist ideology that was passed down to her and developed over a lifetime of living as a white person. In that moment, however, their togetherness supersedes all else.
Themes
