How feminist critics analyze

In any story, a feminist reader will primarily focus on the adventures and misadventures of the prominent female characters, whether they are the central figures of the tale or not. To be more specific, the reader will search for ways to identify with the woman in the narrative, looking at and understanding her and what she has to put up with and come up against.

The African-based novel “Things Fall Apart” was critiqued through feminist eyes, in contrast to the mostly male point of view with which it had been analyzed before. The story, supposed to be an outcry against the colonizing of the continent, depicts the life of a Native African man. The man was married twice, a daughter born from the second marriage. Most critics would focus on Okonkwo, the man himself, and whatever happened to him in that tale, and pay little or no attention to the plight of his wives and daughter. But what these reviewers, whose views have been forged by a patriarch society, left unexplored, the feminist commentators will shed light to. They (the feminists) point out, for instance, the poor treatment of Ojiugo and Ekwefi, the two wives, not only from their husband (“Moreover, most readings of the novel do not address the brutal beating Ekwefi receives at the hands of Okonkwo”) but from the whole male-dominated society to which she is a part of, a society that trivializes the beatings they regularly receive from him as unimportant unless they deter from its own agenda (“Furthermore, there is no regard from the elders about Ojiugo’s condition; to the contrary, one elder boldly asserts that she is at fault, and thus, the beating itself is not the point of contention.”).

Just as we saw the Marxist reviewers doing before, the feminists use points they find in stories such as these to expose a negative aspect of society and to further their goal, namely the equality among genders.