Study on the Interrelationship between Nature and the Female Gender: An Analysis of Ifeoma Okoye's The Fourth World

Abstract

One of the core values of literature is its ability to adopt existents in the society and restructure it in an aesthetic form so as to pass specific message(s) to the audience. Adopting the novel to carry out this task, Okoye inspected the environment and its effect on the inhabitants with the pivotal theme of gender inequality in The Fourth World. This paper focused on female characters in Okoye's novel, oscillating between ecofeminism and environmental psychology. It presented the relationship between nature and the female gender (sources of reproduction), portraying how injustice meted out on nature can affect the female gender negatively and vice versa; it depicted environmental degeneration and its effect on the growth and development of the female characters in the novel. Also the paper reviewed the different types of female characters in the novel and their mode of assimilating the environment and situation they find themselves in. It concluded its analysis focusing on the way forward, carving out for self an identity as embodied in the novel through the heroine, Chira.