This article argues that despite the apparently exhaustive critical attention paid to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), certain key aspects of the novel’s meaning remain unresolved. At the heart of the problem lies the question of how to interpret the reasons for Okonkwo’s downfall or fate. The article suggests that a number of different sources of explanation appear to be plausible at various levels, but it goes on to demonstrate that at least some of these putative explanations are incompatible if not mutually exclusive. The more general difficulty arising from this is that several of these explanations are underpinned by worldviews which differ from and even conflict with each other. The article intends, therefore, through an exploration of the possible reasons for Okonkwo’s demise, to consider what worldview the novel finally supports and, indeed, whether the novel’s outlook is coherent at all. The chief conclusion is that although the overall perspective of the novel is highly complex, it does not necessarily follow that the actual meaning of the novel itself is either illogical or selfcontradictory.
This article focuses on Fay Weldon’s novel, “Praxis”, as a means of exploring the concept of “liberal feminism”. “Praxis” charts the development of the eponymous main protagonist from a woman complicit in her own patriarchal oppression to a radical feminist activist and finally to the point where she comes to a liberal realisation of the nuances of individual women’s experiences and the complexity of emancipation. The novel may be regarded as a liberal feminist text in its emphasis on both gender equality and individual liberty, and in its insistence that society may be positively reformed within the paradigm of the liberal state and without resorting to radical extremism. Published in 1978, the novel anticipates the later shift in feminist thinking from an exclusive concern with women’s rights to a more inclusive liberal vision of human rights
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