Lens for Things Fall Apart

Throughout history, women have been discriminated against in most cultures, and were not of an equal stature to men; feminism’s goal is to end this discrimination. After reading Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, I have decided to look at the story through a feminist lens in order to analyze the text from that particular perspective.  Specifically, feminism advocates “equal rights for all women in all areas of life: socially, politically, professionally, personally, economically, aesthetically, and psychologically” (Feminism 167). The theoretical text discusses in large the overall plight of feminism by describing its methodology, history, and criticism along with other things. I’ll use these different aspects of feminism to get a good grasp on how it relates to the story in the sense of the male dominated society which it takes place in. An insight within the theoretical text that relates to Things Fall Apart is the way in which women were seen in history. For the most part, women have been seen as nothing but a piece or property historically (although in some cultures they are still seen that way today), and it is shown through the novel in the way that the number of wives a man determined what his social status was. The value of women went to the extent of them only being mentioned as the bearers of children, implying that they are nothing but tools of reproduction. The fact that a man could beat his wife freely is another depiction of the discrimination against women and how they had no rights compared to their male counterparts, which connects again to the theoretical text in the sense that it describes how women have had very little civil rights—let alone human rights—throughout history. Looking at these, as well as other events in the story through the perspective of the theoretical text will help characterize the objective of the feminist movement because of its goal to end the way women were treated in the novel.