In the real world people have their own gender roles and expectations some of these expectations can be ethnocentric. Similarly, in Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe , the protagonist Okonkwo is the hegemony over all of the women. Gender roles influence other characters in Things Fall Apart because of the things that either the male or female have to do in their everyday lives. Okonkwo is scared to be portrayed as not masculine for not following the expectations for being a male. Further, evidence suggest that Okonkwo is affected by these gender role expectations:
He had an old rusty gun made by a clever blacksmith who had come to live in Umuofia long ago. But although Okonkwo was a great man whose prowess was universally acknowledged, he was not a hunter. In fact he had not killed a rat with his gun. And so when he called Ikemefuna to fetch his gun, the wife who had just been beaten murmured something about guns that never shot (38-39).
This is a phallic symbol which is saying that even though he has a lot of power and known around the villages that he is not really manly because he can not “shoot” his “gun”. This shows that he is not able to fully
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The narrator says “Okonkwo was provoked to justifiable anger by his youngest wife, who went to plait her hair at her friend's house and did not return early enough to cook the afternoon meal” (29). It can affect what the women in Things Fall Apart do because they are lower down in the social strata as male so they may not have as much power or freedom than males. This quote is important because it means that the females have an expectation where they have to stay home and prepare meals and also to ask permission from the male to go out with friends. This quote is significant because it shows females have less power than males and do not have as much freedom as