Gender Roles in D. E. K. Krampah’s Mbofra Mfa Adwene: A Feminist Critique

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume V, Issue III, March 2021 | ISSN 2454–6186

Gender Roles in D. E. K. Krampah’s Mbofra Mfa Adwene: A Feminist Critique

Esther Asare¹, Ernest Nyamekye^2
1University of Cape Coast, Department of Ghanaian Languages and Linguistics
²University of Cape Coast, Department of Arts Education

Abstract: Literary writers have always been influenced by their environment. They consciously or subconsciously include society’s take on gender issues in their writings. In many societies, males and females are assigned different roles based on their gender, which they play in consonance with their age limits. Literary writers tend to hide behind language to portray gender stereotypes in literary works. For some time now, feminism has been a well-used literary criticism approach. It has been used as a tool to criticize gender roles, especially the representation of women in literary works in general. Feminist literary critics argue that the representation of women in most literary works shows a large equality gap between males and females. These inequalities are often measured in literature by diction, characterization, setting and other rhetorical devices. Substantial data in the literature show that whereas male writers often write to present the position of women in society and their social expectations, most of which are related to marriage, female writers accordingly, present the different female responses to these social norms and the objection of the position of women in society. Following these trends of analysis, this paper analyzes the kind of gender roles that some Akan male writers assign to their male and female characters to ascertain whether males and females are indeed presented as equals in literary texts. The paper adopts a radical feminist approach to literary criticism and analyses D. E. K. Krampah’s novel, Mbofra Mfa Adwene(1970).

Keywords: Gender, Feminism, Radical Feminism, Ghanaian Culture, Mbofra Mfa Adwene, Feminist literary criticism

I. INTRODUCTION

Background This section provides background information about some key terms that apply to the paper. Concepts like literature, gender and gender roles are conceptualized for the purpose of this paper.
There is no set-in stone definition of literature. To Culler (2007), literature has been defined variously to reflect what literature does in society as well as its contextual functions, and the genres of literature as opposed to other forms of writing. Arguing from the first approach to literature, literature has been described to have two antipodal functions. In one vein, literature is viewed as a medium through which hierarchical structures of society are communicated and learned, and in another, a medium through which societal ideologies are challenged and subverted. Culler (2007), like

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