Representation of the Female Body in Adichie's The Thing around Your Neck

The female body implies all women, both married and unmarried. The image, position and roles of women arc well spelt out in traditional African society which is patriarchal in nature. The pioneer African literary writers present women from traditional angle, in terms of what they arc, what they can do and what they can achieve. Such portrayal is depicted in the early works of Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, Wole Soyinka, Elechi Amadi, among others. Female literary writers responded to these male writers and many more with a view to reconstruct the image of women. The underlying theoretical framework of this paper, the feminist literary theory is the skeleton upon which interpretative analysis is based. The essence is to determine the extent of reconstruction of the distorted images of African women through diverse modes. This paper focuses on the societal perception of the female body in a patriarchal society like Africa, Nigeria precisely, the fate of the females, and the ironic privileges/expectations.
The paper strives to unveil the corporeality in order to ascertain the subsistence of the females as a body. The discourse reveals that male writers of the pre· colonial era and the period immediately after that present women strictly from a cultural angle. The female writers, following that period, recreate their female characters from unbiased perspective. This paper analyzes the stories in Adichie's The Thing around Your Neck with particular consideration of women's roles, how these affect their characters, and diverse modes of re-imaging women in African literature