Gender Roles in D. E. K. Krampah’s Mbofra Mfa Adwene: A Feminist Critique

Literary writers have always been influenced by their environment. They consciously or subconsciously include society’s take on gender issues in their writings. In many societies, males and females are assigned different roles based on their gender, which they play in consonance with their age limits. Literary writers tend to hide behind language to portray gender stereotypes in literary works. For some time now, feminism has been a well-used literary criticism approach. It has been used as a tool to criticize gender roles, especially the representation of women in literary works in general. Feminist literary critics argue that the representation of women in most literary works shows a large equality gap between males and females. These inequalities are often measured in literature by diction, characterization, setting and other rhetorical devices. Substantial data in the literature show that whereas male writers often write to present the position of women in society and their social expectations, most of which are related to marriage, female writers accordingly, present the different female responses to these social norms and the objection of the position of women in society. Following these trends of analysis, this paper analyzes the kind of gender roles that some Akan male writers assign to their male and female characters to ascertain whether males and females are indeed presented as equals in literary texts. The paper adopts a radical feminist approach to literary criticism and analyses D. E. K. Krampah’s novel, Mbofra Mfa Adwene(1970).