Summary
Narrated in the past tense by an unnamed third-person omniscient narrator, “Marriage is a Private Affair” opens with a conversation between a couple who live in Lagos, Nigeria. Nene asks her fiancé Nnaemeka if he has written to tell his father about their engagement. Nnaemeka says he thinks it is better to wait to tell his father in person in six weeks, during his leave from work.
Nene is confused about why Nnaemeka doesn’t want to share the happy news sooner. Nnaemeka shyly admits that his father will not be happy to hear they are getting married. Nene is surprised to hear this, and so Nnaemeka explains that because she has lived in Lagos for her whole life, she knows little about people in remote parts of the country. Nnaemeka says that such people are unhappy if an engagement is not arranged by them. In their case, the situation is even worse because Nene is not a member of the Ibo tribe like Nnaemeka is.
Nene is shocked into momentary speechlessness. As someone from the city, she has always thought it is something of a joke to think a person’s tribe can determine whom they marry. Nene says she always thought Ibos were kindly disposed to other people. Nnaemeka says they are, but marriage is a different matter.
Nnaemeka adds that other tribes are the same, and if Nene’s father were alive, he would have the same preference for arranged marriage as Nnaemeka’s father. Nene says she doesn’t know how true that is. She insists that Nnaemeka’s father is so fond of him that he will forgive Nnaemeka. She asks him again to send a letter, but Nnaemeka says it is not wise to break the news in writing.
As Nnaemeka walks home from Nene’s room at 16 Kasanga Street, he thinks about how to overcome his father’s opposition, which will be more difficult now that his father has found Nnaemeka a girl to marry. The narrator reveals that Nnaemeka had considered showing Nene his father’s letter but decided not to.
At home, Nnaemeka reads his father’s letter again. He smiles to himself because he remembers Ugoye, the woman his father wants him to marry. Ugoye, eldest daughter of their neighbor, Jacob Nweke, was “an Amazon of a girl” who used to beat up boys on the way to the village stream, and she was not smart in school.
In the letter, Nnaemeka’s father writes about Ugoye in positive terms, boasting about her Christian upbringing and suitability as a housewife. His father ends the letter saying they will begin negotiations with her family when Nnaemeka returns home in December.
The narrative jumps ahead in time to the second evening of Nnaemeka’s visit home. Nnaemeka and his father sit under a cassia tree, the father’s place of retreat from the December sun, where he reads his Bible. Nnaemeka says he has come to ask forgiveness. His father is confused, so Nnaemeka hesitantly begins to explain that it is impossible for him to marry Nweke’s daughter.
Analysis
The opening conversation between Nene and Nnaemeka introduces the central conflict of “Marriage is a Private Affair”: Nnaemeka’s father will not approve of Nene and Nnaemeka’s engagement because Nnaemeka’s father believes in the tradition of arranged marriage and Nene is not of the Ibo ethnicity.
During the conversation, Nene is surprised to learn that Nnaemeka’s father Okeke is so attached to ideas so out-dated as arranged marriage and marrying within one’s “tribe.” The narrator comments that Nene’s naivety results from having lived in the “cosmopolitan atmosphere” of Lagos, where she mixes with people from more diverse backgrounds than one encounters in rural Nigerian villages. She has always understood Ibo people to be “kindly disposed” toward others, but Nnaemeka explains that “marriage is a different matter,” foreshadowing the conflict between father and son to come. But Nnaemeka assures Nene that his father will come around and learn to accept their decision to marry for love. By introducing the tensions between arranged marriage and marrying for love, between tradition and modernity, and between life in cities versus life in villages, Achebe establishes the story’s major themes.
After leaving Nene’s, Nnaemeka reflects on his predicament, knowing that it will be especially difficult to break the news of his engagement now that his father has found a woman for Nnaemeka to marry. In this instance of dramatic irony, in which the reader knows more than Nene about the true depth of the issue, the narrator reveals how Nnaemeka is torn between his allegiances to his fiancée and to his father.
While it is clear that Nnaemeka loves Nene enough to risk upsetting his father, it is also evident that Nnaemeka is reluctant to tell her the full truth of his family’s customs, waiting until after they are engaged to explain how important arranged marriage is as a custom. Nnaemeka’s duplicity contributes to the themes of tradition vs. modernity and city vs. village: Concealing key information from both Nene and his father, Nnaemeka is divided between the Ibo identity of his village origin and the new identity he has developed in the modern city.
Nnaemeka’s dual allegiance is tested when he returns to his father’s village to break the news that he cannot marry Ugoye, a brutish woman he remembers from childhood and who he knows to be unsuitable, despite what his father may believe. Nnaemeka waits to tell his father until they are under the cassia tree where Okeke retreats to read his Bible in peace. Presumably Nnaemeka chooses the location because he knows it is where Okeke, a man prone to losing his temper, is most likely to be calm as he receives news of his son’s disobedience.
