Amorous Materialism: Jousting with Courtly Love in Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters

TRACY ADAMS, Violent Passions: Managing Love in the Old French Verse Romance (Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures) NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. 311. ISBN: 1-4039-6294-4. $69.95. Tracy Adams's study of love in the twelfth-century Old French romance offers much of interest to Arthurian scholars. In addition to her analysis of Tristan et Iseut and two of Chretien de Troyes's romances, Adams's larger argument about the representation of love in twelfth-century romance clearly has the potential to infl uence studies of other Arthurian texts. The volume is divided into six chapters, with an introduction and conclusion, bibliography, and index. The main premise of Adams's argument is that, as portrayed in twelfth-century Old French romances, Love is neither an unreservedly positive force nor is it idealized or idealizing. Rather, she argues, the texts she considers attempt to grapple seriously with passionate love, depicting it as an overwhelming emotion, and as a personal and societal problem that requires solving by being channeled into an acceptable and productive form. As she puts it in her introduction, 'romances do not offer a distillable doctrine, but rather a wide array of different possibilities for recuperating sexual desire. Thus they should be seen as laboratories wherein passionate love is analyzed and different ways of integrating that emotion into a society that offi cially eschews it are tested' (p. 3). This summary of her view of romance presents two major facets of her argument: fi rst, that romance authors actively worked through the 'problem of love' in their texts and second, that passionate love was offi cially eschewed by both clerical and feudal culture-by clerical culture because of its ever-greater emphasis on celibacy, and by feudal culture because the politics of marriage left little or no space for passion. Both points are clearly debatable, but Adams's well-argued monograph does an extremely effective job of substantiating her position and challenging many of our received notions about 'courtly love' in romance. After a short introduction presenting her methodology, Chapter One lays out Adams's primary argument. The fi rst part of the chapter critiques earlier work on love in Old French verse romance, in particular the concept of courtly love, arguing that love episodes in the Old French verse romances of the late twelfth century 'should not be read as products of an idealizing discourse of courtly love, but rather as sophisticated responses to uncritical ecclesiastical condemnations of sexual desire' (p. 2). The bulk of the chapter then discusses the 'problem' of love in clerical writings, passing in rapid review Church teaching (from Augustine to the Gregorian reform to Anselm, among others) and medical writings. Chapter Two turns to the major alternate authoritative voice on love in the Middle Ages, that of Ovid. Here, Adams argues that medieval romance authors read Ovid as a serious neoplatonic philosopher of love as well as the magister amoris of the Amors, et. al. The combination of the two Ovidian voices Adams calls the 'super Ovid' (an un happy choice of terms), and this key fi gure becomes a dominant thread, structuring most of the book's readings of romance texts. Analyzing the lais reworked from Ovid's Metamorphoses (Pyramus et Tisbe, Narcisus, and Philomena et Procne), Adams demonstrates effectively that they represent love as a violent emotion, as one nearly impossible to control and thus in need of repression, yet they demonstrate simultaneously that this concept of love is not suffi cient in a secular context. Chapter Three continues laying out the philosophical and historical groundwork for Adams's thesis. 'Marriage and Amor' proposes reading the love-stricken romance hero as an almost direct response to imposed clerical celibacy, and the romance genre more generally as a 'safe' place in which to present the argument for passionate love. …

This book is an incisive intervention into the nature of what came to be called, in the late nineteenth century, courtly love. Rather than confronting the whole shaky apparatus of that phenomenon, Rüdiger Schnell sets out to examine just one crucial aspect: does desire die after sexual contact, and is desire therefore dependent upon non-satisfaction? Beginning with Leo Spitzer’s L’Amour lointain de Jaufré Rudel et le sens de la poésie des troubadours (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), a study so foundational that it set the terms for what has been the standard reading of the troubadour canso ever since, Schnell sets out to critique the assertion that achievement of sexual satisfaction in itself annihilates desire. Such a narrow focus is both the principal virtue of the study and its ultimate limitation. With painstaking attention to every aspect of the question — including generic considerations (tensos and partimens), the nature of possession and of obstacles, and socio-economic considerations — and in setting the work out like a scientific study, Schnell undermines convincingly Spitzer’s contention that a ‘paradoxe amoureux’ is at the base of the troubadours’ (and minnesingers’) conception of love and desire. Moving from ancient and medieval philosophy to the texts of individual poets, Schnell systematically demolishes what he considers the false reading of the troubadour cansos as being static, unchanging, and single-minded in their obsession with the incompatibility of love and sex. One of the great pleasures of reading this study is the open approach the author takes to recent studies of the corpus and his inclusion of the works of scholars outside the German/French/Italian sphere. He is attentive to the consideration of time and subjective time in different genres; insistent that no one genre can be seen as the porte-parole of a supposedly unified troubadour discourse; intent on defending a second paradox ‘performatif’, one that emerges through performance and interaction; and he produces evidence that counter-examples to the ‘paradoxe amoureux’ thesis far outweigh the evidence of the relatively few songs, at least in terms of percentage, which have bolstered such an overweening theory. As Schnell says, singing of personal dramas of unrequited love before an audience represents, above all else, the ‘autoprésentation d’un groupe social se comprenant comme l’élite et non de la traduction littéraire des états psychiques individuels des troubadours’ (p. 34). Yes and no, I would respond, to this observation and to the study as a whole. Admirable in conception and execution, it succeeds in its narrower goals but fails to go far enough to stand as the definitive statement that I think Schnell might have intended. While the point is proven beyond doubt, the proof itself, dependent as it is upon the presence/non-presence of imagined ladies, the values of an elite audience, and the maintenance of a sense of community, indicates the potential of a further deconstruction of the concept of courtly love, one that would emphasize a community of poet-musicians, working within the circumscribed arena of public taste, alluding to a subtext of secrecy, self-preservation, and self-advancement, and one that might have little to do, finally, with the petty dissatisfactions of heterosexual coupling.

The proposed research summarizes and interprets the ideas of the famous Swiss philosopher D. de Rougemont, regarding the genesis and hidden mystical meanings of the concept of courtly love in European culture, the most fully embodied, according to the researcher, in the myth of Tristan and Isolde, comprehensively analyzed by him in the work "Love and Western Culture". The purpose of the research is to expand the field of application of the scientistʼs methodological tools and extrapolate his theory to the ideological and aesthetic phenomenon of Petrarchism and, above all, to the Petrarchan concept of love and its rhetoric. The results of the investigation are as follows. It is established that the very first version of the Petrarchan love text – the lyrical collection of F. Petrarch "Canzoniere" still retained a rather noticeable connection with the doctrine of Catharism. F. Petrarch was well acquainted with the works of the Provençal troubadours – direct relayers of the principles of Catharism in medieval Europe – and borrowed from them the fundamental conventions of the concept of courtly love, which at the time of its birth was a religion in the full sense of the term, a historically determined Christian heresy. The heresy of the Cathars consisted in interpreting love as a push beyond the visible world, towards the divine, which alone deserves love, therefore love for an earthly being was perceived as unworthy and notoriously unhappy. F. Petrarch described his feelings for Laura exactly in this way, and only after her death he began to feel free, because only then the way to the Creator opened before him. On the other hand, in the works of F. Petrarchʼs followers, these mythical layers are already lost, so the researchers conclude that Petrarchism was inherited by the post-Renaissance poets not as a worldview system, but primarily as a language strategy. It is proved that the rhetoric of Petrarchan poetry in various national literatures and individual authorsʼ poetics remained unchanged, while its ideological and thematic content can sometimes vary to the point of direct denial of the fundamental postulates of the courtly concept of love, such as, for example, the unrequited and Platonic character of the love feeling (as in the poetry of J. Donne) or a protest against the institution of marriage (as in the lyrics of E. Spenser). It is also shown that the genetic kinship of courtly rhetoric and European mysticism, both of which are directly related to the medieval Christian heresies, led to the fact that the Petrarchan language became at the same time the language of the spiritual lyrics of the European poets.

The Department for Education recently administered new Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) guidance, one of the aims of which is to foster students’ ability to develop and maintain healthy romantic relationships in adulthood. However, while an education aimed at developing this capacity in young people is welcomed, the RSE guidance does not directly address conceptions of romantic love that shape how we actually conduct our love lives. Romantic love myths are a fundamental part of cultures across the world and greatly influence our behaviour and decision-making in romantic relationships. Belief in these myths is associated with negative relationship outcomes. Therefore, if we wish to improve students’ capacity to effectively negotiate future relationships, RSE must directly address conceptions of romantic love and its associated myths. This paper proposes five criteria against which to assess student beliefs to determine appropriate educational responses to them. Given love's complex nature, and the manner in which related beliefs are held, it is argued that addressing this topic through open philosophical exploration would be a prudent educational approach to adopt within the classroom. This may temper some of the potential harms of love myths while respecting the right of students to freely hold and pursue their own conceptions of love.

The concept of love, examined in various works from the classical ages onwards, gained an ethical meaning in the Middle Ages. Accordingly, love is not a sexual urge, but a virtue acquired by coping with some difficulties. The concept best reflecting the issue of love is “courtly love”. The term suggests the lovers to show earnestness and courtesy while it also offers them to avoid avarice and pride. It emphasises as well that lovers should suffer insomnia for their beloved person or object. Thus, one of the best examples for the medieval view of love is The Romance of the Rose by Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris. Andreas Capellanus’ doctrines in The Art of Court Love shape the work’s content, while Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy influences its form. So, this study will examine the courtly love in the joint poem in relation to the effects of continental literature.

This essay is not about what love is. It is about what self-ascriptions of love do. People typically self-ascribe romantic love when a nexus of feelings, beliefs, attitudes, values, commitments, experiences, and personal histories matches their conception of romantic love. But what shapes this conception? And (how) can we adjudicate amongst conflicting conceptions? Self-ascriptions of love do not merely describe the underlying nexus of attitudes and beliefs. They also change it. This essay describes how conceptions of love affect romantic experience. It limns distinctions between love and obsessive infatuation and explore ways language can cultivate queer romantic preferences. Since conceptions of love are shaped, often implicitly, by terms available in one’s linguistic community, the resulting nexus of concepts and conceptions manifests linguistic luck. This chapter suggests ways we might sculpt the language of love to better understand—and change—ourselves. Love can help us flourish and so can our “love” language.

This chapter concludes the historical exploration of romantic love around the world. It particularly focuses on different cultures’ conceptualizations of romantic love between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Within this time frame that precedes modern concepts of love, this chapter analyzes love differences among China, Japan, Europe, Latin America, Russia, and North America. As textual sources for this time period become more abundant, this chapter provides a very detailed analysis of the beliefs, experiences, expressions, and conceptualizations of love that the people of these particular cultures have.

This chapter discusses the concept of courtly love, and how it has become muddled and indistinguishable in recent years. Some scholars have argued that the original thesis is inherently untenable and, therefore, no longer of any use. The term "courtly love" was introduced in 1883 by a renowned French medievalist, Gaston Paris. He used the words amour courtois to refer to an attitude toward love that first manifested itself in twelfth-century French literature. Under Paris's influence, scholars began to talk about the concept as a "way of life," building upon a "system" of courtly love, with its own "code" and "body of rules." This is problematic because it deals with the social behavior of several countries within Europe, and there is no single code that pervades the entire European continent as a whole.

Introduction: the article is devoted to the study of the concept sphere of Finno-Ugric literature. The subject of the analysis is the concept of love in the lyrics of M. I. Novjukhov. Objective: analysis of the concept of love in the individual author’s picture of the world of the Khanty poet Matvey Ivanovich Novjukhov. Research materials: the works of M. I. Novjukhov included in the book «With Hope For Happiness» (2012). Results and novelty of the research: the article analyzes for the first time the concept of love in the creative work of the Khanty poet. Attention of the work is focused on the presentation of the concept love in the individual author’s picture of the world by M. I. Novjukhov. The study of the author’s poetic heritage has shown that the concept of love is a complex formation consisting of different semantic components. The main meaning of the concept love was determined by the poet’s works with the theme of love. The semantic field of the concept also includes love for mother, love of neighbors, love for the motherland, love for nature, love for the people, and Christian love. The concept was supplemented by romantic and physical love; love that transforms the world; love as the basis of creative inspiration of poets. The concept of love in the works of M. I. Novyukhov is represented by direct nominations of the lexemes «love» and «to love».

As far as Shakespeare’s comedies are concerned, a recurring topic is the exploration of love via the portrayal of gender role transformations and the cross-dressing of female characters. This often involves the depiction of power dynamics between male and female characters, which may be seen as alluding to homoerotic relationships and transgressions of gender roles. Shakespeare, in his play As You Like It, reveals the reformulation and deconstruction of established and logocentric gender roles and sexuality, where female characters adopt trans-gendered bodies, queer identities, and homoeroticism through the concept of love and cross-dressing in many respects. Likewise, the play explores the issues of gender roles and sexuality, particularly via the portrayal of female characters who assume trans-gendered identities, engage in cross-dressing, and experience homoerotic love in various ways. It can also be stated that the identity of Shakespeare is never fixed but is constructed. The fluidity of identity, sexuality, and desire in the play indeed challenges and deconstructs any basic hetero/homo, masculine/feminine dichotomy. In this context, Shakespeare effectively challenges traditional gender roles and norms by subverting them through the portrayal of male and female characters. Specifically, the female characters deviate from their expected gender roles and boundaries, resulting in the depiction of a homoerotic love triangle involving Phebe, Orlando, and Rosalind/Ganymede. As in the play, the heterosexual love between Orlando and Rosalind is subverted to a homoerotic love between Orlando and Ganymede/Rosalind, and Phebe and Ganymede/Rosalind. As a result, it can be claimed that Shakespeare’s play features transgendered sexuality and a homoerotic love triangle between male and female characters. Hence, as it has been stated, Shakespeare suggests here that, as with the title of the play, one can construct his or her gender role as she or he likes or desires, even if this sex is different.

Decolonizing Culture:Toward a Theory for Postcolonial Women's Texts Ketu H. Katrak (bio) What is the critic's society? For whom does the critic write? For Mr. Dele Bus-Stop of Idi-Oro? Or for the Appointments and Promotions Committee and Learned Journals? Unquestionably there is an intellectual cop-out in the career of any critics who cover reams of paper with unceasing lament over the failure of this or that writer to write for the masses of the people, when they see themselves assiduously engage—with a remorseless exclusivity—only with the incestuous productivity of their own academic, bourgeois-situated literature. —Wole Soyinka I begin with this quotation from Wole Soyinka's essay, "The Critic and Society; Barthes, Leftocracy, and Other Mythologies," because the concept of social responsibility, not only for postcolonial writers but also for critics/theorists, is central to my concern. Social responsibility must be the basis of any theorizing on postcolonial literature as well as the root of the creative work of the writers themselves. Whereas writers commonly respond seriously to the many urgent issues of their societies, critics/ theorists of this literature often do not. What theoretical models will be appropriate for this task? How can theory be an integral part of the struggle of these writers as presented in their novels, poems, dramas, essays, letters, and testimonies? How can [End Page 157] we make our theory and interpretation of postcolonial texts challenge the hegemony of the Western canon? How can we, within a dominant Eurocentric discourse, make our study of postcolonial texts itself a mode of resistance? And, most significantly, what theoretical models will be most constructive for the development of this literature? It is useful within a postcolonial context to think of theory, as Barbara Harlow suggests, as strategy, to consider certain integral and dialectical relationships between theory and practice. I wish to propose certain theoretical models for a study of women writers that will expand a narrow academic conceptualization of theory and that can be expressed in a language lucid enough to inspire people to struggle and to achieve social change. I. Decolonizing Postcolonial Theory I would like first to examine several disconcerting trends in the recent production and consumption of postcolonial theory in general in order to decolonize this terrain and then to propose a historically situated method of approaching the work of women writers. One finds 1) little theoretical production of postcolonial writers given the serious attention it deserves, or that it is dismissed as not theoretical enough by Western standards; 2) the increasing phenomenon of using postcolonial texts as raw material for the theory producers and consumers of Western academia; 3) theoretical production as an end in itself, confined to the consumption of other theorists who speak the same privileged language in which obscurity is regularly mistaken for profundity. A new hegemony is being established in contemporary theory that can with impunity ignore or exclude postcolonial writers' essays, interviews, and other cultural productions while endlessly discussing concepts of the "Other," of "difference," and so on. Soyinka's words in his Preface to Myth, Literature and the African World still ring true: We black Africans have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonialism—this time by a universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social neuroses and their value systems. Another more subtly insidious trend in recent postcolonial theory is the critic's attempt to engage with certain fashionable theoretical models in order 1) to validate postcolonial literature, even to prove its value through the use of complicated Eurocentric models or 2) to succumb to the lure of engaging in a hegemonic discourse of Western theory given that it is "difficult" or "challenging," often for the sole purpose of demonstrating its shortcomings for an interpretation of postcolonial texts. [End Page 158] The intellectual traps in such theoretical gymnastics are many: for instance, a questioning of the canon and a simultaneous appropriating and tokenizing of postcolonial literary texts or an attempt to get away from narrowly anthropological readings of these texts and thereby interpreting them primarily as "acts...

Romantic love is a concept that is foreign to few cultures. However, romantic love has largely been overlooked within the social scientific and crosscultural academic literature in the Arab world. While there is a rich literary and artistic tradition concerning love in the region, contemporary feelings, manifestations, and conceptualizations, as well as the perceived value and utility of love remains unclear and undocumented. This is problematic because love, often connected to many social institutions and concepts, is becoming increasingly desired, and the region is bombarded with external cultural narratives and discourses of love and romantic relationships due to forces such as globalization and ubiquitous transnational mass media. This chapter addresses the cultural characteristics and intercultural tensions related to romance and love in the Arab world, and explores the features of the Arab romantic narrative and the contentious nature of love in Arab culture. This study also seeks to generate knowledge of how love is defined and valued using a sample of students from the American University of Beirut (AUB). The results reveal that romantic love is desired. Additionally, the participants’ conceptualizations of love were diverse and vibrant. The results also reveal that cultural narratives surrounding love and marriage are often confusing and contradictory, and a sample of Arab youth are incorporating alternative narratives into their conceptualization of love. Implications include the convergence and globalization of local and external romantic narratives, and the seeds of renegotiating how romantic relationships function and the redefinition of marriage and courtship.

Reviewed by: Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature by Ato Quayson Mahruba T. Mowtushi Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature BY ATO QUAYSON Cambridge UP, 2021. 346 pp. ISBN 9781108921992 paper. Ato Quayson's Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature opens with lamentations for the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa by the Nigerian government in 1995 and ends with the murders of Treyvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman in 2012 and George Floyd by the American police in 2020. These events, separated by thousands of miles, and twenty-five years of social injustice, are not dissimilar in their tragic magnitudes for history repeats itself in real life as it does on stage and the pages of literature. The search for collective freedom and individual agency in the face of colonial hegemony, sociopolitical turmoil, and cultural oppression informs Ato Quayson's latest book. The volume reconsiders postcolonial writing vis-à-vis the history of literary tragedy from the Greek and Renaissance traditions to contemporary multicultural examples from around the world. In doing so, Quayson reassesses Western tragedy through a postcolonial paradigm. In order to comprehend Aristotelian anagnorisis, Quayson argues that we need to read Chinua Achebe and take into consideration the Akan concept of musuo, which translates as taboo or "harms to the soul." Quayson is concerned with examining questions on ethics by linking them to representations of pathos and suffering in postcolonial writing where suffering is defined as the experience of the impending annihilation of the self or the perception of imminent dangers to the self from external forces. Quayson arrives at a distinct hermeneutical interpretation of suffering, and thereby of tragedy, by way of an eclectic range of references from Eric J Castell's The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine, Cicero's Disputation on Grief, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, and to Akan musuo. In the second chapter on "Ethical Cosmopolitanism and Shakespeare's Othello," the author resorts to a "postcolonializing of Shakespeare" (44) that assesses how Elizabethan social ideas about race, cultural identity, and "cosmopolitan contradictions" (45) reflect on contemporary critical debates on multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonialism. The conditions of colonial modernity in Chinua Achebe's "rural narratives" (Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God) inform the third chapter that considers whether Okonkwo, a character imbued with ethical contradictions, is a tragic figure and if so, how does the reader evaluate ethical choice-making concerning his actions. The "dialectical assimilation of opposites" (115) in the tragic characters in Death and the King's Horseman and The Road informs [End Page 198] chapter four that interrogates elements reminiscent of ancient Greek tragedy such as anagnorisis in Wole Soyinka's dramaturgy. In Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, which is the focus of chapter five, Quayson identifies the novel's scrupulous intertextuality and "literary echoes" as enacting a mirroring effect with the tragic parameters that govern key texts in the Western literary canon. The "melancholic introjection" of Mustafa Sa'eed and his "self-authorship" (185) as a colonized self and subject enable Quayson to classify thematic and ideational parameters that make Salih's novel postcolonial but also tragic. Chapter six turns to the "terrible beauty" of Toni Morrison's Beloved where the "tragic vision" of Sethe killing her daughter incites a moment of "split anagnorisis" in the character of Baby Suggs (187). For Quayson, the rationale (if it can be called that) behind Sethe's terrible action should be interpreted in light of the novel's brutally honest delineation of the history of slavery in the United States. The case of infanticide in Beloved must be read alongside other literary examples of infanticide from sources as diverse as "the Bible, Aeschylus, Euripides, George Eliot, Eugene O'Neill, Sam Shepherd, Chinua Achebe," and others (187). The absolute certainty that governs the choices made by the tragic figures in Morrison, Soyinka, and Achebe is dissipated when one comes to J. M. Coetzee's fictional characters who, according to Quayson in chapter seven in the book, labor tragically under the constraints of ethical challenges and second thoughts, a situation that is both ontologically and epistemologically problematic. The torturous cogitations of the adult world of "Big Things" in Arundhati Roy's...

eminist readers have often dismissed the concept of courtly love as a 'problematic precursor of the highly misogynistic system of modern, Western romantic love. Staging vexed heterosexual liaisons between aristocratic couples within an idealized public sphere of refined court life in the High Middle Ages, courtly love has most often appeared to focus on men at the expense of women: it is men's feelings that are expressed and men's prowess and social standing that are at stake as men practice and profess the art of love even though the adored ladylove stands nominally at the center of the process. Certainly, this is the legacy of courtly love as it has been widely absorbed into American popular culture, attested variously in lovelorn laments of country-western song lyrics or in chivalrous valentines where beloved ladies are touted as having ultimate control over the male lover's delicate heartstrings. More disturbing, the courtly fantasy of an empowered and untouchable ladylove has been replayed forcefully in a recent self-help manual authored by two women, The Rules: Time-Tested Secretsfor Capturing the Heart of M Right (Fein and Schneider 1995). Marketed as a guidebook aimed largely at relatively affluent, professional women who want to succeed in getting a husband, this text offers a model of ideal feminine comportment that mimics, to a striking degree, what twelfth-century male authors decried as the haughty and unresponsive ladylove.1 The modern woman reader of The Rules is counseled to be cool and aloof, to withhold her affection, to drive her suitor mad, and thereby hold him captive. And yet, as in many medieval love lyrics and adventure stories, it is in fact the man's desires and needs that govern this modem courtship. The Rules woman (or girl as she is referred to here) is told unapologetically to suppress her feelings: He must take the lead (Fein and Schneider 1995, 64),

The term gender is relatively new in such disciplines as Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, Sociolinguistics, let alone with Literary Linguistics. As opposed to sex which refers to biological characteristics, gender is culture based. Nowadays, it is actively recommended to include aspects of gender in whatever project we undertake. The present article is an attempt at probing the language used by male and female characters in Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel to see how gender issues are grounded in the play to let it play its didactic role. The aim is to pinpoint the way female and male are represented through a lexicogramatical analysis with a special focus on its transitivity system as suggested by Halliday (1994) to enter Wole Soyinka’s characters’ inner and outer world as they use language to enable them ‘to build a mental picture of reality, to make sense of what goes on around them and inside them’ (1994:106). That Soyinka considers or does not consider women or just recounts the situation of women in Yoruba traditional societies is what is at stake in this study. The results of the investigation in the light of transitivity and Critical Discourse Analysis shows that Soyinka, consciously or unconsciously has represented male characters as strong, powerful and metaphorically as a lion, a symbol of irresistible power. They are also portrayed as initiator, doer of something, and commander in chief, the king while their female counterparts (Sidi, Sadikou) are represented as goals and/or beneficiaries of men’s actions and associated with processes of sensing and of emotion.