Mortality As Liberator Of Victimised Womanhood In Selected Works Of Nawal El-Saadawi And Sofola

Abstract

Humans generally desire to live and to enjoy life to its fullest. No normal person wants to die, even in the face of debilitating challenges. To think of freedom as being possible only at death is superfluous and can only provide temporal feeling of relief not supported by empirical evidence. This paper examines the feminist ideals in the works of El Saadawi and Sofola, particularly, of the protagonist and the heroine belief in death as the best way out of the problems of patriarchy and matriarchy. The theoretical thrust is to deconstruct this line of belief and discourage further thinking along this direction. The paper adopts an analytical content approach to unveil the idea that, that many families fail in their responsibilities of providing the basic needs for human survival, love, adequate education, and security, which are the ties for harmonious up-bringing of female children. It further discovers that forced marriages depress and destroy the woman, and may cause the woman to wish away the marriage even by death either of her husband or of herself. The study recommends that female children should allowed to grow to full maturity before they go into a complex issue such as marriage.