Gender (Dis) Placement in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and

Anthills of the Savannah

                                       Olumide Ogunrotimi

                       Department of English and Literary Studies

                    Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria.

                   E-mail: olumighty_2004@yahoo.com

Abstract

How do African literary texts project gender? Principally because human experience is gender distinct, male writers could possibly be ‘writing’ from the vantage position of the ‘superior’ gender, and the female writers, while not necessarily ‘writing’ from the position of the ‘oppressed’ gender, could possibly be more interested in writing about the experience of the female than the male writer is interested in the life of the male. That is, the works of most female writers are at their core, feminist oriented, while those of the men cannot be said to be masculinist. In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Anthills of the Savannah, a comparative exploration of gender configuration in the novels shows that the novelist, though neither a ‘masculinist’ nor a feminist, still finds it difficult to locate significant roles for his female characters. The male protagonists are caught in the vortex of phallocentrism and are destroyed by its values. The female characters are either socially invisible or made lethargic by patriarchal oppression. What we have then, is a sort of gender displacement, a compromise which encourages gender complementarity but to which the author could not give a solid foundation.