A study of the representation of women in Veronique Tadjo's Le royaume aveugle and Loin de mon père

Abstract

The emergence of feminine writing on the Francophone African literary scene presents new multiplicities of fictional representations of women. These representations usher new insights to our understanding of femininity. This study examines women representations in Véronique Tadjo’s Le royaume aveugle (1991) and Loin de mon père (2010), to investigate how different narrative styles from a single writer can express idiosyncratic feminine identities. The present research aims at examining whether Tadjo highlights feminist ideals in Le royaume aveugle and Loin de mon père and if so, how this is achieved. The study employs African feminist literary criticism to critically analyse the various literary feminine representations in the two texts. The thesis is divided into two main parts – the first one which focuses on feminine representations in Le royaume aveugle and the second one which looks at Loin de mon père. The study concludes that although the author employs different narrative styles in her novelistic writing of both texts, it all results in rich literary feminine identities. Also, it becomes evident that various feminist aspects are present in both novels. Secondly, the study concludes that in her portraits of women, Tadjo, unlike early African feminist writers, does not seek to necessarily relegate men to inferior positions but, rather, she proposes that men and women are equal partners in fighting not only feminine oppression, but also many other forms of inequalities which stem from socio-political problems in the images she depicts.