Narrative Discourse and the Emergence of a New Rural Woman in Alobwed’Epie’s the Lady with a Beard

International Journal of Research and Scientific Innovation (IJRSI) | Volume VII, Issue VI, June 2020 | ISSN 2321–2705

Narrative Discourse and the Emergence of a New Rural Woman in Alobwed’Epie’s the Lady with a Beard

Ophilia Abianji-Menang
Department of English Language and Literature, University of Maroua

Abstract:- This paper explores narrative discourse and the emergence of a new rural woman in Alobwed’Epie’s the Lady With a Beard. The focus is to show how the text raises awareness on the predicaments of widows in the Cameroonian society. The novel presents some stereotypes of widows as depicted in the society from which it is written and the effects of these stereotypes on widows. However, events in the text show how Alobwed’Epie breaks away from dominant patriarchal ideologies about widows and presents a widow who questions patriarchal canons and overturns widowhood stereotypes. The text also challenges society’s opinion about widows by providing new perspectives from which widows should be viewed. The womanist perspectives of Mary E. Modupe Kolawale, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie and Chikwenye Ogunyemi are used to show that far from being a helpless class of women in society, widows can assert themselves, make choices, inherit, and manage land as well as partake in major socio-cultural, political and economic activities of their communities.

Keywords: narrative discourse, emergence, widowhood, stereotypes

I. INTRODUCTION

A lot of literary and critical material has been written on the subjugation of the woman from past century to the contemporary age. Many have viewed women as a second sex and some more have considered them as doubly or even triply “colonised”. While a lot of effort has been devoted and is still being put in place to emancipate the woman from outright suppression, little has been done to salvage the rural woman from the physical and psychological pangs of widowhood.
This paper sets out to evince widowhood not only as a traumatic experience for rural women, but also as a fourth level of female “colonisation” from which she struggles to liberate herself. Fourth level in that, as a postcolonial text, set in the context of a people who were earlier colonised, Alobwed’Epie’s the Lady with a Beard cannot be detached from the colonial experience which both men and women underwent as a colonised people. The woman who got married was further colonised by her husband, and at the third level by cultural dictates and so, becoming a widow takes her to the fourth level of colonisation. With the coming of colonisation, one would have expected a significant change to the woman’s status.

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