Feminism and Political Reconstruction: the Gynocentric Aesthetics in the Wife's Revolt and a Question of Power

BY IBANGA, GRACE ITORO DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, OLABISI ONBANJO UNIVERSITY AGO-IWOYE FEMINISM AND POLITICAL RECONSTRUCTION: THE GYNOCENTRIC AESTHETICS IN JOHN CLARK’S THE WIVES’ REVOLT** AND BESSIE HEAD’S A QUESTION OF POWER By Grace Itoro Ibanga 1.0 Introduction: 1.1 The Concept of Feminism In African societies men are placed at the centre and everything seems to revolve round them. The patriarchal society is a system where the culture is so slanted that the female folks live in the shadow of the male. The men are always stationed at the forefront women constitute what Mary Daly (1978) describes as ‘a homogenous group of victims of male power.’ Women are subservient to male control and they are largely sexually oppressed. Feminism seeks in an insatiable manner to give a voice to women in a patriarchal dominated society which they find themselves. It explores women as an already constituted and coherent group with identical interests, desires, problems and needs, regardless of class, ethnic or racial location. The conceptualization of its construction by the larger part of feminists has always been the rejection of any form of social or personal or economic discrimination, which women suffer because of their sex. Thus feminism which is the dominant and most widely acceptable mode of female rejection of male- oppression and violence among the female folks, has always served as a major agency for women’s fair and decent welfare foundation, all over the world. It is an accessory to social, psychological and physical structure for women because its superstructure indicates the need to pursue their vocations side by side with patriarchal counterpart without opposition. It is the domain to solicit for the myth of sisterhood as rightly observes by Grace Ibanga (2005) that women derive the pleasure of caring for their co-wives and step-children, most especially during sickness and child delivery (115). This symbolizes the cult of female

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