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Polygamy In Things Fall Apart

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Culture is what makes a group of people be unique from other people. A Tale of Two Cities is a book about a young woman, Lucie, who reencountered with her father who was announced to be ¨dead¨. After she met her father there were events that began to change the plot of the story. There was a trial held against Charles Darnay where Lucie and he met and began a love triangle between them and Sydney Carton. Throughout the story, there were also some conflicts between the lower and higher classes and the way they were treating each other. In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo is the main character who believes that men have to be strong and independent leaders. However, he is very disappointed in his son, Nwoye, who is very lazy and does not meet his father's …show more content…

Marriage is viewed as a live event that consists of two people who are in love and decided to make a commitment to stay with each other until death pulls them apart. However, in Things Fall Apart, marriage does not consist of two people, but it contains up to more than one wife in a single marriage. In “Polygamy in Iboland”, “Whereas monogamy is used to express the Christian conception of one man one wife, polygamy is used to express the opposite non-Christian conception of one man to many wives. In pre-Christian Iboland, polygamy was a universally accepted institution by both men and women, (1) and it was the ambition of every Ibo man to marry as many wives as possible” (Egboh). The expansion of Christianity was not in Nigeria yet, which caused the ways of polygamy to have men in Nigeria to have more than one wife. Polygamy was the practice that the Nigerian men followed when it came to women and their relationships with each other. In Things Fall Apart, "He was a wealthy farmer and had two barns full of yams, and had just married his third wife" (Achebe 8). Okonkwo's description shows how he has three wives and how him having more than one wife and having more children have led him to be a successful farmer with a good amount of money to sustain his family. In Things Fall Apart, "There was a wealthy man in Okonkwo's village who had three huge barns, nine wives and thirty …show more content…

Marriage in Europe in the late 1700s only consisted of two people who became married by the church. In A Tale of Two Cities, “The rest followed in another carriage and soon, in a neighbouring church, where no strange eye looked on, Charles Darnay and Lucie Manette were happily married” (Dickens 135). In the book, the main character, Lucie, got married to Darnay to the church and they later formed a family with children. This simple marriage between Charles and Lucie was the way marriage was supposed to look like in Europe in the 17th century. According to ¨Marriage in Seventeenth-Century England: The Woman’s Story¨, "A family centred around a married couple represented the basic social, economic and political unit. In the Stuart period, a husband’s “rule” over his wife, children and servants was seen as an analogy to the king’s reign over his people—a manifestation of a hierarchy constituted by God." (Brabcová). A family was created by marriage with only two parents and only children from those two parents. Not children from other wives, like in NIgeria. The marriage may had been formed by the parents of the female, but it was not caused to make a ¨family¨ that will help to expand their farm and have ¨workers¨. The difference between Nigeria and European cultures is the amount of people in the relationship that was formed by marriage and the reasons for the

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