things fall apart gender roles thesis

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Language and Gender Representation in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

English Language Teaching

This article examines the linguistic construction of gender in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. It shows how this reflects the social reality of the relationships between women and men in society, which is firstly structured in the unconscious mind. The examination of language use in constructing genders in the novel is important as it unveils the relationships between the male and the female in society. This is because gender representation is influenced by unconscious and hidden desires in man. This study specifically examines Achebe’s use of grammatical categories in the construction of the male and female genders in Things Fall Apart. To this end, it reflects the pre-colonial Igbo society in its socially stratified mode, which language served as the instrument for both exclusion and oppression of women. This article shows that the male and female genders dance unequal dance in a socially, politically and economically stratified society where the generic male gender wields unto...

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Shirin Zubair

Toyese Dahunsi

The early African writers have been accused of using negative portraitures to project African women in ways that subordinate them to their men counterpart. This study closely investigated this perception using the language of narratives as the object of analysis. It is a lexical analysis that adopts comparative frequency analysis of male and female characters and their pronominal referents; analysis of character’s identity projection patterns; and analysis of comparative masculine-feminine gender semantic prosodies. Five works of Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart, A Man of the People, Arrow of God, No Longer at Ease, and The Anthills of the Savannah were used for the study. The result shows that male characters are more frequently projected than female characters; the narrator consistently foregrounds the identities of male characters by presenting them mostly either by direct names or a combination of names with appositional information; whereas the identities of female characters a...

Andy Ukpong

The African people have varying behaviours, mannerisms, beliefs, thought patterns and way of interaction and all of these differences formed their culture and impacted their way of life. However, with the coming of the Europeans to Africa came cultural infiltration, pollution as well as alteration. This research analyses Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) from the angle of masculinity and culture clash (traditional vs. western) as brought about by westernisation. The method of investigation is analytical and descriptive, using the formalist approach: that is looking at the actions, events, sentences and interactions of the characters in order to identify and discuss how males are portrayed, paying attention to issues of cultural realism, behaviours, actions and statements of the characters. The findings of the research confirmed that African viewpoint of masculinity and culture tends to be opposed to that of the Europeans, as the actions and behaviours appropriate to a man in each society tend to differ. This led to different clashes from religious, cultural, ideological, to social beliefs. The research reached the conclusion that cultural clashes exist in the work and contributed to the final play-out of the story, where the traditional belief system had to make way for western ones; making things (cultural beliefs) fall apart. The research reveals that the male characters have both cultural and individual masculine idiosyncrasies and that the complexities of male roles confirm the pluralistic and slippery nature of masculinity.

Mikaela Anne Laxa

This paper will focus on analyzing one of the factors that contributed to the European’s success in taking over their society, which is the Igbo’s treatment of women. That is to say, I will be talking about the different kinds of injustices towards women in the novel, Things Fall Apart which are primarily: silencing, physical abuse, and removal of autonomy. These three things are the main elements that actively contributes to the marginalization of women, and I argue that precisely this marginalization of women becomes one of the catalysts in the whites’ colonization over their society. And so, this paper will first discuss those injustices, as well as where they are explicitly shown in the novel, and then explain how it influenced the process of subjugation of Okonkwo’s people by the missionaries.

Abdur-Rasheed Olayiwola

Elisabeth Horan

In Chinua Achebe's masterpiece of the destructive forces of colonial conquest in Africa, "Things Fall Apart", Okonkwo is driven to control his family and achieve power through fear and violence; using his masculinity to destroy any signs of femininity in his sons. Ironically, in the end, Okonkwo is reduced to a feminine status by the British colonizers that overthrow his power with fear and violence as well, leaving him stripped of power and his masculinity - transformed into what he feared most: of becoming effeminate and powerless like a woman and like his father -who he resented and was ashamed of.

Purwarno Purwarno

At first glance, the role of women in Chinua Achebe's " Things Fall Apart " may appear to be unfairly limited in terms of their authority and power. People have not paid much attention to it beyond going along with the assumption that this novel presents women as a sadly oppressed group with no power. This assumption may appear to be right, but upon delving beneath this deceiving surface, one can see that the women of the clan hold some very powerful positions. Thus, this article is an attempt to show the important role of women both in family and in African patriarchal society. The women's powerful positions in the clan deal with their functions, i.e. spiritually as the priestess, symbolically as the earth goddess, and literally as the nurturers of the Ibo people, the caretakers of the yam crops and the mothers and educators of the Ibo children.

Adegbite Tobalase

The African people are a unique race, different in colour, behaviour, mannerism, beliefs, thought patterns and way of interaction; all of these formed their culture and way of life. However, with the coming of the Europeans to Africa came cultural infiltration, pollution as well as alteration. This research analyses Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart from the angle of masculinity and culture clash (traditional vs. western) as brought about by westernisation. The African viewpoint of masculinity and culture tends to contrast that of the European, as the actions and behaviours appropriate to a man in each society tend to differ. This led to different clashes from religious, cultural, ideological, to social beliefs. The research reached the conclusion that cultural clashes exist in the work and contributed to the final play-out of the story, where the traditional belief system had to make way for western ones, making things (cultural beliefs) to fall apart.

Dr. Santosh Kumar Nayak

The paper tries to unveil the approaches of characterization of female characters in Paraja of Gopinath Mohanty and Things Fall part of Chinua Achebe, the two seminal works in the world of fiction. Names of almost all the characters are churned out and all the female characters are pointed out here. Focus has been made on the special features of the female characters of the two novels on the basis of two different themes, contexts and cultural matrices. Every character is an overall output of a culture and thus, all the masculine, feminine and other characters of the novels are the products of Igbo culture and Parajaa (Desiyaa) culture. The central protagonists or the victimized characters are mostly tribal and thus, they are far away from the so called sophisticated civilized world and their dirty politics and internal wills and faces under the mask. The female characters are characterized accordingly as per the cultural demand of the land. Since Paraja and Things Fall Apart are the chesty copies of the two different lands, cultures, societies and traditions, it is assumed that the female characters are depicted as per the smell of the soil. But technically we can conclude that the female characters are designed in such a way, so that the narrator can give justice to the central target and theme of the literary move.

Manish Kumar Gaurav

While going through the literary efforts of Post-colonial writers, especially, the writers of 1950's to 1960's, nation has become a project where these writers intend to reject the colonial impact and to reconstruct the identity of the nation without the frame of colonial portrayal. Resisting the Western imagination about the 'Third World Nations' as primitive, savage and uncultured, they assert that the pre-colonial condition was quite comfortable than the colonial trauma. They seek to reconstruct their nation in a new frame without the reference of the colonial masters .At the time of writing Things Fall Apart in 1950,s the young Chinua Achebe was deeply influenced by the growing Pan-Nigerian nationalist movement in the colony, a political sentiment that was shared by many of Nigeria's educated elite. As in many of the British colonies across West-Africa, Nigerian nationalists optimistically looked forward to the day when the country would become a self determining nation and gain its independence from British colonial rule.. Keywords: Discourse, Imperialism, Stereotype, Trauma, Demeaning Image, Resistance

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