English, Department of
First Advisor
Kwame Dawes
Date of this Version
5-2024
Citation
A thesis submitted to the faculty of the Graduate College at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
Major: Engliah
Lincoln, Nebraska, May 2024
Abstract
This study examines the thematic preoccupation of childbirth in the formative period of feminist discourse in African literature through a critical study of selected novels of Igbo women of southeastern Nigeria. The novels studied represent the earliest published African texts in English by women. The period under focus falls within the emerging stage of Nigerian literary tradition in its written form with a dominant presence of men. This study investigates the women novelists' perspective toward the failure of male authored works to represent women's childbirth experience. Through a critical reading of Flora Nwapa's Efuru and Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, this study demonstrates how women novelists deploy the experience of childbirth in fiction to address the problematic perspective of male novelists in the literary representation of human experience. In investigating the female perspective to this situation, the study finds that the experience of childbirth in the novels is represented in ways that convey cultural meaning by turning a moment of childbirth into a site of expression for women. This represents a completely different move from the typical consideration of childbirth as a means of patriarchal control of women in Africa. Following abundant textual evidence that illustrates how women engage in the enactment of self-making against inherited image of weakness, the study concludes that the failure to represent childbirth in the narratives of men undermines the agency women derive from the experience of childbirth. The study therefore properly locates a reformulation of the Nigerian literary tradition to account for such crucial experience as childbirth to the intervention of women novelists. The study also shows how this failure is a form of gendered power that undermines the voice-laden potential of childbirth as women's site of expression beyond the literal voice.
Advisor: Kwame Dawes
Included in
Africana Studies Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Maternal and Child Health Commons, Place and Environment Commons, Regional Sociology Commons, Women's Health Commons, Women's Studies Commons
Comments
Copyright 2024, Sunday Elliott Uguru. Used by permission