Woman in the Mirror: Redefining Female Body Image in Rimma Onoseta's How You Grow Wings

Female body image has received limited engagement in Nigerian literary scholarship despite increasing concerns about global beauty pressures, body surveillance, body dissatisfaction and harmful body enhancement practices in contemporary Nigerian cultural life. This paper addresses this gap by reading Rimma Onoseta’s novel, How You Grow Wings, as an apt literary representation of how contemporary Nigerian women and girls navigate body image. The paper adopts qualitative close reading and in-depth textual analysis, drawing on a feminist-psychoanalytic mirror framework that combines feminist perspectives of the gaze, embodiment and self-surveillance with psychoanalytic insights on reflection, misrecognition and fragmented selfhood. The analysis reveals that Onoseta presents the “mirror” as both a material object and a metaphoric cultural instrument through which female characters in the novel experience their bodies. It identifies body dissatisfaction as a generational problem defined by colourism, maternal low self-worth and overvaluation of Eurocentric beauty ideals. In the novel, Mama’s mirror rituals become events through which her daughters, Cheta and Zam, learn, internalise, question and resist the idea that a woman’s worth is tied to her body. The paper concludes that the novel functions as a counter-mirror that exposes harmful beauty norms while imagining self-reinvention beyond inherited body anxieties.

colourism, female body image, feminist-psychoanalytic mirror framework, Nigerian literature, Rimma Onoseta

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