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Gender Roles In Things Fall Apart

Decent Essays

Gender roles have been a big part of society since the eldest known cultures in history had existed. It is not only applied to an individual’s behavior, but to their appearance, their way of thinking, their ideals, and, in some cases, their importance in society. In today’s society we see people stepping outside the binary realm of gender to assume identities that better fit the perception they have of themselves on a psychological level. Because of situations like these, gender roles have proven to be obsolete in modern times; but back in the time where it was only male or female, black and white, or strong and weak, people’s duties, rights and assigned characteristics based on their gender were the way many cultures and belief systems were …show more content…

Umuofia is a group of villages situated in the south of Nigeria. Okonkwo, who is the main character, comes from a background of struggle and hard work. Okonkwo’s father, Unoka, had always been characterized by his laziness and neglectfulness towards his duties as a farmer and a family man, so much that he became the definition of everything Okonkwo did not want to be. It can be inferred that, subconsciously, Okonkwo felt that his father not doing any relevant work or generating much income could be associated with the common perception of a woman in the Igbo …show more content…

While Umuofia did assign different duties to people based on their sex, Okonkwo seemed to commit a mistake that is also very common today, mistaking a person’s sex with their gender. According to Achebe, women in Umuofia “worked hard enough, but they grew women’s crops, like coco-yams, beans and cassava. Yam, the king of crops, was a man’s crop” (22-23). Since he was very young, Okonkwo had thought that gender was defined by actions, and so he had gotten an even deeper implication of this idea from a childhood experience, as Achebe states, “he still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate had told him that his father was agbala. That was how Okonkwo first came to know that agbala was not only another name for a woman, it could also mean a man who had taken no title” (13). Okonkwo had many emotional scars that led to him adopting the idea that defined gender roles were of severe

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