Re-framing Parenthood in Emergent Nigerian Fiction: A Study of Lola Shoneyin and Ayobami Adebayo

Abstract

African women writers have had to bear the onus of softening the anguish of women often accused of barrenness in marriages by providing them with alternate vistas of having meaningful and successful lives. Although much has happened in the history of humanity to negate the circumstances which had fueled essential feminists' theses about the family, the typical African psyche has invariably been so conditioned as to still give procreation premium over companionship in marriage. Using psychoanalytic as well as feminist perspectives, the works studied here effectively deconstruct patriarchal assumptions and determinants which urge procreation in the ordering of society.