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Feminism In The Virtuous Woman

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worthy of note that while in The Virtuous Woman the main female character Nana Ai feels handicapped by her lameness and mainly exist within the “…virtuous cocoon constructed around her by the author” (Ajima 64), we find the female heroines in The Descendant such as Magira Milli and Umma Saytu more outspoken, pro-active and realized in much more human terns that in the earlier books. Li in The Stillborn had to break away from the restrictions all around her beginning from her family, then the society and her failed marriage so as to eventually assume the role of the ‘father’ of the house. The message in The Stillborn is that a woman has to rely on herself to to break free of patriarchal oppression that operates in the society through fathers and husbands. To Alkali, education is the key to this freedom. The major …show more content…

Egya is in support of this assertion when he argues that Zaynab Alkali in her fiction dramatizes “…the struggles of the girl-child to acquire education and empower herself in Northern Nigeria, a region that is… educationally backward” (211).
According to Egya, Alkali goes through a process of change like her feminist heroine; coming on stage with her first successive novel, The Stillborn a shy feminist, even denying been one, but subsequently re-launching her feminist stance in an indisputably clear terms. Egya argues further that her denial of been a feminist has made her a self contradictory novelist. He, Egya, quoting Okereke insists that since she writes about women with the intent to make them more ‘conscious’ already locates her in the feminist ideology since it is “the social and literary subjugation and marginalization of women that gave

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