Gender Inequality and Power Relations in Achebe’s Novel Things Fall Apart

Abstract

This study aims at demonstrating how a close analysis of linguistic features can contribute to the comprehension of gender inequality, power relations, and ideological expressions in literary texts as depicted in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The analysis concentrates on the use of speech act, requests and power, and expressions of diverse lexical choices. These linguistic features have been chosen as primary tools for the analysis due to the fact that they are closely related to the three types of constrains, such as constrain in content or what is said, relations, the social relations people enter into in discourse, and subject or the subject positions people can occupy. The Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has been adopted in response to such problems; it is the main concern of (CDA) to study a minute detail of linguistic structures in light of social and historical situations of a literary text to display consciousness, the beliefs, and values which are embedded in the language. This study also adopted the content analysis as a method of collecting data from the narrative; two tables have been designed, one for gender inequality and power relationsandthe other for the expressions of ideology. The findings revealed that 100% of linguistic expressions used by Okonkwo are in favour of the male while 0% of linguistic expressions are in favour of female. However, Chielo the priest of Agbala used 80% of the linguistic expressions in favour of female character (i.e. Chielo). This clearly signals that Chielo, the priest Agbala is more powerful than Okonkwo.