Challenging the Status Quo in a Patriarchal World: A Critical Linguistic Appraisal of Masculine Framing in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1304.05Keywords:
critical discourse analysis, systemic functional linguistics, feminism, patriarchy, resistance, framingAbstract
The concern of this paper is to examine how masculinity is represented and resisted in Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. In a patriarchal society, male dominance is more or less a law, while resistance by females becomes a duty. The female gender has been variously constructed and derogatorily represented in male writings, and Adichie in her novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, makes bold to challenge this status quo. She creates female characters who are embodiment of beauty, intelligence, industry and courage. On the contrary, the male characters and their roles in the novel cast aspersion on patriarchal hegemony. Therefore, the characters in the novel suggest that the superiority of one gender over the other is a figment of society. This paper has adopted critical discourse analysis, systemic functional linguistics, and feminist theory in the analysis of the text under study.
References
Achebe, Chinua. (1991). Things Fall Apart. New York: Fawcett Crest.
Adeleke, J.A. (2006). Feminism, Black Feminism and the Dialectics of Womanism. Ibadan: AMD
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. (2006). Half of a Yellow Sun. Lagos: Kachifo Limited.
Alkali, Zaynab. (1987). The Virtuous Woman. Nigeria: Longman Nigeria Limited.
Behringer, Marrie. (2008). Gender in Contemporary Literature. New York: May and Baker.
Coupland, Nikolas and Adam, Jaworski. (1997). Sociolinguistics: A Reader and Coursebook. New York: Palgrave.
Hall, K. (2003). Exceptional speakers: Contested and Problematized Gender identities. Maiden M.A: Blackwell.
Ijem, B.U. and Agbo, I.I. (2019). Language and Gender Representation in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. English Language Teaching; Vol. 12, No. 11, pp. 55-62.
Ijem, B.U. (2021). Negative Depiction Of Women In Things Fall Apart. European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies Vol.9, No.5, pp.55-64, 2021
Moreblessings, Chitauro-Mawema. (2006). “Gender Sensitivity in Shonia Language Use. A Lexicographic and Corpus-based Study of Words in Context”. Ph. D Thesis. University of Zimbabwe and Oslo.
Smit, B. (1977). Towards a Black Feminist Criticism. New York: Out and Out Books.
Smyth, R. Jacobs, G & Rogers, H. (2003). “Male Voices and Perceived Sexual Orientation: An experimental and theoretical approach”. Language in Society vol. 32. Pp. 329-350.
Stralton, F. (1990). Critical Theory and African Literature, Vol. 21, p. 10. Ilorin: University of Ilorin Press.
Sylvester, T. (2005). Understanding the Writings of Nigerian Women. Otukpo: Edition Ehi International Publishers.
Zola, Welcome Peter. (2010). The Depiction of Female Characters by Male Writers in Selected Isixhosa Drama Works. Ph.D. Thesis.
