Patriarchal Structures and Female Empowerment in Nigerian and Taiwanese Novels: A Study of Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Li Ang’s The Butcher’s Wife*

Abstract

Empowerment has become the buzzword in many discourses about and around women in contemporary times, and patriarchy inevitably becomes the whipping boy on whom the woes of women from Eve to Evelyn are pinned. This archetypal bogeyman has been accused of preventing females from maximising their potentials in many societies of the world today. This paper examines the patriarchal structures in Nigerian and Taiwanese novels which manifestly disempower women, and interrogates the complicity of matriarchy in the debilitation of the female characters in the texts. The thesis of the paper is that the more empowered the female is, the better the society, and this cannot be achieved through the demonization of men but through the collaboration of both sexes.