No Woman’s Land: Marriage in the Fiction of Buchi Emecheta

Abstract

As one of the major ways by which interaction between men and women is regulated in society, marriage has offered a useful yardstick for the assessment of gender relations in many works of African fiction authored by women. The paper examines the way in which the prominent female Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta portrays marriage in several novels, including Second-Class Citizen, The Bride Price, The Joys of Motherhood and Double Yoke. Emecheta believes that many of the cultural assumptions which inform marriage gloss over the inherent contradictions that are inherent in its duality as institution and relationship. As institution, marriage ostensibly provides women with the best context within which to fully realise themselves as women; as relationship, the promise of such self-fulfilment is exposed as arbitrary and hypocritical, Many of Emecheta’s principal female characters become aware of this disjunction, and it crystallizes the challenges confronting them as women in a patriarchal society. In this way, she shows how marriage, far from achieving its professed role of affirming the stability of culturally-sanctioned gender relations, actually disrupts them. This paper begins by examining the biological and social drives that underpin marriage, and the way in which they combine to make it an ambivalent condition for women, ostensibly celebrating their femaleness while entrenching their subordination to men. It then focuses on the concept, objectives and process of marriage as these are dramatised by characters and situations in Emecheta’s novels. The paper concludes that Emecheta characterises marriage as essentially indefinable, with unfocused aims and conflicting processes.