Construction of Women’s Identity through Language and Culture in Postcolonial African Literature: A Case Study of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Abstract

This paper investigates how Achebe constructed the female identity of Nigerian people through Language and culture. Achebe’s novel “Things Fall Apart” is a cultural study of Ibo society, full of local words, phrases, and proverbs. The Ibo male is masculine and dominates the women by using strong masculine words, and they even beat their women on a tiny issue. The researcher has studied the factors that are responsible for constructing women’s identity in the novel and how and in what ways are Language and culture responsible for constructing women’s identity in the novel Things Fall Apart. The researcher gets some help from the difference theory of Tannen (1990) and Stuart Hall’s theory (1997), which says that there is a strong relationship between Language, identity, and cultural difference. The researcher tries to prove that the Ibo society is traditional, a masculine culture, and women are considered tools to raise children and help their men earn bread and butter. The women of Nigeria are mute, calm, nice, polite, and gentle. They show the real traits of their gender. However, the male gender seems to be more dominant in every part of the world. In the novel, we find a huge kind of gender difference in the Language of men and women. Men are dominant, whereas women are deficient. It is qualitative research, and the source of the data is the text of the novel Things Fall Apart.