The Paradox of the "Other": Womanism, Emasculation, and the Persistence of Oppressive Structures in Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other

Abstract

Patriarchal social structures have long been identified by many feminist scholars as a primary source of women's oppression and gender inequality; hence, the obliteration of the system and castigation of men remain at the centre of most feminist novelists’ preoccupation. Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other (2019) has been celebrated for its polyphonic representation of Black British womanhood and its apparent alignment with Alice Walker's (1983) womanist spirit of inclusivity and the wholeness of all humanity. The study adopts a qualitative method, drawing on Walker's (1983) womanism as its theoretical framework while engaging Charles Nnolim's (1994) critique of feminist literary practice as “a house divided against itself” to illuminate the novel's internal contradictions. This study argues, however, that in spite of the novel's systematic emasculation and marginalisation of male characters, the novel fails to produce the egalitarian world its feminist framing intended. Instead, the women's world constructed through the narrative absence of fully realised men reproduces, within female-to-female relationships, the same structures of power, coercion, prejudice, and abuses that characterise the patriarchal order the feminist ideology ostensibly seeks to dismantle. The study concludes that patriarchal oppressive structures are not dismantled by relegating men to the narrative background but are merely transferred into female hands, confirming that the true adversary of women is not man as biological category but the internalised hierarchies of power that govern human interaction irrespective of gender.