Comparison of Themes in “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe and “My Antonia” by Willa Cather Pg 1 • 2 ►

Other essays and articles in the Literature Archives related to this topic include :  Women, Colonization & Cultural Change in "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe • History, Narrative and Culture in "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe •  Comparison of Tragic Characters in Things Fall Apart and Oedipus the King  •   The Role of Land in O! Pioneers by Willa Cather

There are two vastly different portrayals of women and femininity presented in Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. In Cather’s text, My Antonia, women are offered a far more equal role in society and their interactions with men, particularly the narrator, demonstrate that they are capable of expressing emotion and having complex interior as well as exterior lives. At no point in My Antonia are women beaten mercilessly, nor are they presented as fearful and obedient to men. In fact, part of what makes the female characters in My Antonia so powerful is that posses independent wills and often go against society.

The case is much different in Things Fall Apart. It is important that a female is not one of the protagonists in the text (as is the case in Cather’s work) since there is not the chance for the kind of full character development seen in My Antonia, but still, it is clear that in Things Fall Apart Achebe is representing an African society and culture that offered few roles for women outside of motherhood and care giving. It is also interesting to note that in both texts there is a very large distinction in how men are considered in relationship to women. In other words, in the tragic novel by Achebe,"Things Fall Apart", men are only true men (at least to Okonkwo) if they do not show any signs of femininity whereas in Cather’s text, her main character is more associated with women than men. What these texts do share in common as it pertains to notions of femininity is that women are connected to the earth and symbolize home and comfort. Even with this binding element, these are texts from two completely different cultures, thus the only way to conduct a meaningful analysis of them is to look at the treatment of women in each respective text while also examining the universality of the image of the “earth mother” or the woman that represents the land, home, and comfort.

My Antonia offers readers a unique perspective since it is being told by a man, yet not one with traditionally “male” character features. Even as a young man Jim eschewed relations with Antonia’s brothers, insisting on playing with her and her young sister instead. As the text goes on it seems that Jim and Antoina’s gender’s “blend” and exchange places. Jim is prone to doing feminine things such as associating with women in a non-romantic way just as Antonia does farm work and is a tomboy. In one of the important quotes from My Antonia by Willia Cather When Jim explained that, “For Antonia and me, this has been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can never be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious and incommunicable past,” he is suggesting that are one person and although there are differences between them, they are both one in the same—even in terms of gender. This kind of mutability between traditional gender relationships would be unthinkable to Okonkwo who, unlike Jim, is fiercely protective of his masculine identity. His father had been a man who refused to pay his debts and cared more about “feminine” activities such as language and singing and thus Okonkwo cannot stand any of these signs of perceived weakness or frailty—especially in himself and his son.

The narrator tells us at a very early point that Okonkwo, despite his heroic deeds and the success and admiration and he’d gathered through his efforts, as put in one of the important quotes from "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe, “his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and weakness.” The problem with Okonkwo in this regard is that this hatred of all things weak causes him to seem to dislike women. It is difficult to interpret if he truly hates most women but the fact that he beats them seems to indicate this. While it might have been a custom or accepted practice to beat women in Igbo society, Okonkwo does so for the slightest offense. In one case, his wife forgot to cook dinner and in the other case she accused him of not being able to fire a gun. This last statement might have enraged Okonkwo so much because of the obvious metaphor of sexual inadequacy implied here. In any case, it would be unimaginable for Jim to ever act out against a woman, especially because he is a thoughtful and gentle man. It would not be hard to imagine that Okonkwo would despise Jim for such “weakness” and this difference is one of the most marked in any comparison between Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and My Antonia by Willa Cather.

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