AN ANALYSIS OF AUTHORS’ VIEWPOINTS ON INTERFEMALE HOSTILITY IN SELECTED IGBO NOVELS

Abstract

Social relations among women are generally perceived as being hostile. Indeed, women are adjudged to be submissive only to men than to each other. They perpetrate violence against one another over different reasons, including, struggles for material wealth, romance and political supremacy. And one does not only have to experience the behaviour in real life to know it, for it also abounds in various literatures, which can be read. But the problem in reading about the behaviour in literature is that some authors focus on depicting it as a universal character of all women in the world. They create inter-female hostile female characters and, on that basis, make them depict women as such. Yet, that is not always the case in real life, for as common to all women as the behaviour may seem, it also reserves cultural and individual exemptions. Therefore, given variations in cultural values, women from different ethnicities react differently to interfemale disagreements. This means that some authors misrepresent the women’s character in their books. And the problem makes a case for interrogating authors’ viewpoints for their failure to meet an expectation, especially with respect to their language and style of depiction. This study aims at deploying analytic method of literary discourses to interrogate four authors’ views on the subject.