Agglomerate nature of Igbo femininity in the selected novels of Chinua Achebe, Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo and Buchi Emecheta

Abstract

This essay interrogates Igbo femininity in Chinua Achebe, Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo and Buchi Emecheta‘s, Things Fall Apart, Last of the Strong Ones and Joys of Motherhood respectively. It reveals the agglomerate nature of Igbo femininity. Despite women‘s age-long struggle for freedom from the stranglehold of patriarchy, Igbo women still uphold some feminine ideals that perpetuate patriarchal control. Although literary inquiry has been carried out on Igbo femininity, the aspect of its agglomerate nature remains uncharted, hence the gap this essay is set out to bridge. The essay employs R. W Connell‘s emphasised femininity and Deniz Kanydioti‘s patriarchal bargain to the explication of data and synthesized the underlying principles of Igbo femininity. It explores Igbo normative and the eclipsing femininity, focusing on how Igbo women accept and reject socially constructed femininity. It establishes that cramped within the rigid roles and rules of emphasised femininity, Igbo women represented by the female characters in the texts refuse the scripted feminine ideals and reconstruct their individual femininity. Nonetheless, they uphold aspects of the culture-construct feminine ideals that is detrimental to femininity. The essay therefore, reinforces that, though the contemporary Igbo woman may exemplify aspects of social opposition to the gendered feminine norms; the competitive social regulations enforce their compliance to normative expectations of women. Thus, the budding Igbo femininity is a combination of the socio-cultural and individual construct feminine ideals. Therefore, agglomerate.