Gender differences in the Tempest and Things Fall Apart

In every society, the difference between genders leads to different roles and lifestyles depending on the culture of each society. While there may be similarities between gender roles among many societies, the explanations tend to be different from culture to culture. The society depicted in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is reminiscent of an Ancient Greek or Roman society, where the men are considered to be strong warriors and breadwinners, and the women are looked at as objects, whose main duty is to tend to the children and obey the husband without a question. While at first glance, the Shakespearean play Tempest seems different from Achebe’s book, in reality, similar themes lie at its center, including the abuse of women and male power dominating throughout the play. While the only female character is a young girl, who is a puppet of his father’s will, she has courage to be honest and to stand up against her father on more than one occasion, exhibiting an innate female power like Ekwefi in Things Fall Apart. Hence these two works, while written three hundred years apart and showing two societies at the opposite ends of colonization, illustrate that the gap between them is not as big as one would think when it comes to society’s gender roles.

The Iguedo village at the center of Things Fall Apart lives a peaceful life through the contributions of men and women, who act according to their accepted gender identities. Men are considered to be stronger than women, as presented by Okonkwo, the main character of the story, whose main duties include being strong warriors when there is a need to protect the village, owning property, taking prominent roles in the council and religious festivals, and working on their farms to provide ...

... middle of paper ...

...hey were servants, like Ariel and Caliban, representing the traditional social world of European societies. The other men’s power came from the inheritance of their social positions, asserting their will on those below them, without little physical work. While in both stories, women were dominated by male power and their greatest values appeared as possessions of men, on certain occasions, women were able to break away from being subservient by standing up for what they believed in. Ekwefi risked her own life to be with the man she loved and to save her only surviving daughter, while Miranda stood up to the mistreatment of Ferdinand and openly admitted her feelings. However, these small scenes cannot fight the male dominance in both Things Fall Apart and the Tempest, and show the same gender problems in both the civilized and “savage” societies of the colonization.