FAMILY AND SOCIETY

FAMILY AND SOCIETY: A CASE STUDY OF THINGS FALL APART AND PURPLE HIBISCUS IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

CHAPITRE ONE

INTRODUCTION

Background information on the study

Many communities have deeply ingrained religious beliefs. Polygamy, polytheism, and patriarchy, or male rule, are examples of beliefs. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is one such culture. Polytheism and polygamy are common in the clan, and each family member’s position is clearly defined. The men are too overbearing. Women and children are mistreated and frequently beaten. Life in Achebe’s Umuofia would appear considerably different to a modern-day American (Wehrs, David, 2011: 10).

Despite some cultural differences, the primary role of a family in society is to provide an environment in which children can learn skills, morals, and values. Families offer children with early socialization that shapes their self-worth, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Families provide structure and stability to family members’ lives.Families provide a crucial support system for individuals not only throughout childhood but throughout life, and they provide society with a structure for passing down cultural norms from one generation to the next. Both of these roles are critical for a culture’s consistency over decades and centuries.When parents fail to create a system of support for their children, it is one of the more devastating events in their lives. The function of the family in society is equally important, because the family is the unit that transmits cultural values to the next generation. When people learn how to act and handle themselves appropriately at home, they are more likely to contribute effectively to society and live a happy, productive life. Families that do not instill these principles do society a disservice (Weiss, Brian, 2010: 23).

However, the family and its role in society are being questioned and investigated. According to specialists and others, this organization has evolving principles of structure and purpose. Like every other organization, the family has challenges and consequences. These repercussions might be both favorable and bad, as well as enormous or little. Contemporary families have an impact on communities and nations through moral and economic debates. Families, in turn, have an impact on the political community. Many political subtopics, such as marriage, abortion, violence, and economics, are viewed as distinct issues (Twyning, John. 2009: 13).

ChimamandaNgoziAdichie’s award-winning debut novel Purple Hibiscus, based on postcolonial literature and gender injustice, portrays women in Nigerian families. There are numerous works in which authors seek to discover whether the phrase “patriarchal society” refers to the absence of women’s rights and to what extent traditionalism, on the one hand, and the arrival of modernity, on the other, have an impact on the status of Nigerian women today. Adichie concentrates predominantly on Igbo women because she is of Igbo origin, and her novels and short stories are set primarily in Nigeria’s south-eastern region, where the Igbo ethnic group predominates, and in the United States, where the author fled when she was nineteen years old. The position of women in Nigerian culture has changed over time and is heavily influenced by the historical period (Ozioko, 2012:17).

The depiction of women’s political engagement and representation in the public domain is undeniably important because gender equality is the natural foundation for any democratic society, and both have a huge impact on the private sector as well. Regarding women, Adichie depicts primarily female characters who are educated, strong, emancipated, and fight for their rights whenever necessary, in contrast to the negative portrayals of suppressed and submissive women in Western literature. Adichie has discovered the potential of crafting stories about characters she can empathize with – genuine Nigerians – thanks to writers like Chinua Achebe, Adichie’s hero, who is considered the father of Nigerian literature. Adichie is a literary descendant of Achebe’s storytelling tradition, but unlike him, she prioritizes women and allows them to recount their stories from their own feminine viewpoints. Adichie’s work is a synthesis of tradition and modernity, paralleling Igbo traditional values and colonial and post-independence modernism. The author investigates how traditional and modern methods of living and thinking influence current Nigerien women (Oyewumi, Oyeronke, 2013).

By revolting against their patriarchal and dictatorial dads, both Achebe’s Nwoye and Adichie’s Jaja eventually abandon their childhood and familial identities. Though these two young men act in rebellion for different reasons and achieve slightly different outcomes, the situations are similar in theme and placement within the structure of each respective text. Furthermore, Nwoye and Jaja show how oppressive rule has a negative impact on individual development, family ties, and progressive futures. Masculinity conventions in the form of fathers eventually lead to social disintegration, since sons’ disobedience marks the point at which things come apart (Otagburuagu, 2014: 256).

Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart and Eugene in Purple Hibiscus both portray an extremely rigid masculinity in which evidence of flexibility and weakness are not only frowned upon, but entirely unaccepted. The two domineering fathers eventually inspire Nwoye and Jaja to defy their authority and, in a sense, walk away from their families and roots for introspection and self-development. After the exposure of British missionaries, Nwoye’s unsettling feelings and questions as an adolescent manifested into complete rebellion. White missionaries had visited several Ibo communities, preaching the Gospel and God’s love and faith for his people while also attempting to refute traditional Ibo superstition and pagan belief. Nwoye, who was already suspicious of Ibo customs, was charmed by the “poetry of the new religion” and the relief it “poured into his parched soul” (Achebe 104).

Nwoye “was happy to leave his father” and join other Christians at the missionary school in Umuofia after experiencing a childhood of unwarranted domestic abuse and severe authority institutions (Achebe 108). Nwoye abandoned every base of his existence, including traditional Ibo religion, his father’s authority, and conditioned masculinity, to seek answers elsewhere in this new cultural religion, despite having little comprehension of Christian theology or even the essentials of redemption. Nwoye’s conversion signaled a clear knowledge that things were breaking apart as the household sphere of tradition and normalcy was shattered, allowing for education, conversion, and a new type of oppression.