CHARACTER FORMATION IN CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE’S PURPLE HIBISCUS AND KAINE AGARY’S YELLOW-YELLOW
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Abstract
This study analyses two novels by contemporary Nigerian female writers – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow as a representative of Bildungsroman which traces the growth and developmental trajectories of the principal characters from childhood to maturation. The study explores the various ways in which the writers re-adopt the sub-genre as a vehicle by means of which the characters of our contemporary Nigerian youths are formed. It acknowledges the existing German model and precursor, Goethe’s Whilhelm Meister Apprenticeship up to British Bildungsroman as well as African female Bildungsroman, which has become very popular among contemporary female writers. Chapter one serves as the general introduction. It explains the meaning and the processes of character formation, it equally shows the plot pattern of the genre, the interrelatedness of psychology of personality formation with Bildungsroman, and the feministic trends in the novel of formation with emphasis on female Kunsterroman. Chapter two is the review of the available literature on Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus as well as points of view of various critics on Agary’s Yellow-Yellow. This chapter points that the existing research work by various critics has not been able to substantiate the key elements responsible for change and transformation in the characters. The study therefore seeks to explore such factors that influence formation of characters in the focal texts. Chapter three forms the theoretical framework and methodology. It establishes the defining feature that characterises Bildungsroman as transmutation. It also describes the feministic criticism in Bildungsroman, showing the relevance of the genre to the topic of our study, its characteristics and distinguishing between the male and female Bildungsroman
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page……………………………………………………………………………… i Approval page ………………………………………………………………………… ii Dedication. iii
Acknowledgement ………………………………………………………………… IV
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………… V
Table of Contents …………………………………………………………………… vi
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION………………………..…………………
- Introduction 1
- Background of the study 3
- The Plot pattern of Novel of formation 6
- Research Problem 9
- Psychology of Character formation 10
- Feministic Trends in Novels of formation——————————————————— 11
CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW………………………………………
- Review of Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus————————————————————– 16
- Review of Agary’s Yellow- Yellow 28
CHAPTER THREE: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND METHODOLOGY…
- Theoretical framework 34
- Bildungsroman in Feministic Criticism———————————————————- 37
- The relevance of Female Bildungsroman to this study————————————— 41
- Methodology 36
CHAPTER FOUR: TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
- ANALYSIS ON PURPLE HIBISCUS AND YELLOW-YELLOW……… 46
- Psychological Formation of the Characters via Familial-Relationship in Purple
Hibiscus and Yellow-Yellow………………………………………………………………………………… 49
- Religion as a Factor of Character Formation…………………………………………………………. 60
- Culture as a Factour of Formation in Purple Hibiscus and Yellow-Yellow…….. 63
- Education as a factor of Character Formation…………………………………….. 71
- The Use of Literary Devices in Purple Hibiscus and Yellow-Yellow………………………. 78
CHAPTER FIVE: SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
5.1 Summary………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 83
5.2 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………… 85
Works Cited————————————————————————————————- 86
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, some of the innovative and formative trends that dominate the 21st century African literature focus extensively on character formation. In literary parlance, a novel of formation also called Bildungs roman or coming-of-age story is a literary sub-genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to maturation, and in which character change/transformation is thus extremely important. The emerging development covers the creative hiatus of colonial and postcolonial experiences that previously dominate African literary canon. Hence, contemporary writers have been ingeniously and eruditely locating the coming –of-ageethos to emphasize that growth and development are universal human phenomena. Talking about the resurgence of growing-up motif in contemporary Africa, especially Nigeria, Maxwell Okolieopines that:
This privilege phase of growing up is often used as intimate, passion-packed subject matter in fiction; to render poetically, its complex vision was once the yearning of some African novelists who consider it essentially not only to the understanding of African personality… but also to the remaking of Africa (141).
By implication, the writers are clear in their ingenuity to locate the process of human growth and development as germane to understanding human personality.More writers are subscribing to this ethos, as will be featuring in the focal texts:Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Adiche and Agary Kaine’s Yellow –Yellow.The texts present characters that come of age by virtue of their transformations. Kambili in Purple Hibiscustransforms froma stuttering voiceless teenager to a self-assertingadult, while Zilayefa in Yellow –Yellow transforms from a village teenager to a gorgeous coquettish and profligate woman.
Human character can be bewilderingly complicated. In order to appraise the dilemma of the 21st century Nigerian child, the writers, as the conscience of society, have adopted the Bildungsroman dialect to investigate the protagonists’ trajectories in their processes of “becoming”. The hallmark of our study is the contemporary Nigerian youth(as reflected in the texts) who are caught in socio-psychological comatose. In a situation where “growing up” in consistently modernizing Africa (Nigeria) has meant a gradual but steady departure from the ethos of nobility and innocence, one would not hesitate to question the benchmark as well as the blueprint for the formation of these characters in their journey from infancy to adulthood. Character, according to ancient Greek scholars such as Plato and Aristotle, is predicted on a person and it must be acquired and cultivated. By implication, one learns and acquires good character when one recognizes an ennobling role and wishes to practise it. Character formation entails the acquisition ofhabits. Broadly, it is the expression of the personality of a human person which reveals itself in his/her conduct. In a narrower sense, character implies a certain unity of qualities with arecognizeddegree of constancy or fixity in mode of action. It refers to the fixed, repetitive,and organized psychological formations, which is determined by the person’s values and find expressions in and through the overt and covert aspects of his or her life.When a person has developed a character, he/she can accomplish something by him/herself.Character comes from the mind and enables the person to carry out a task with self-direction. The interaction of nature-nurture dichotomy dictates to a large extent the pattern of character formation and manifestation.
1.2 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
The birth of the Bildungsroman is normally dated to the publication of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1795. Etymologically, it is German in origin, comprising two words: Bildung meaning“formation” and “roman”meaning “education”. The term therefore describes the novel of formation or novel of education. The term was coined in 1819 by the philologist, Karl Morgenstern, in his university lectures, and later famously reappraised by Wilhelm Dilthey, who legitimized it in 1870 and popularized it in 1905. Although the genre arose in Germany, it has had extensive influence first in Europe and later throughout the world. Thomas Carlyle translated Goethe’s novel into English and after its publication in 1824, many British authors wrote novels inspired by it such as: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Thomas Mann’s TheMagic Mountain, George Eliot’sThe Mill on theFloss, Charles Dickens’sGreat Expectations, James Joyce’s The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man,Somerset Maugham’sOf Human Bondage anda hostof others.
Read Also: A DEPICTION OF THE NIGERIAN CIVIL WAR IN CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE’S HALF OF A YELLOW SUN
The genre is further characterized by a number of formal, topical and thematic features. The term Coming-of-Age novel is sometimes used interchangeably with Bildungsroman, but its use is usually wider and less technical.Within the 20th century, it has spread across the seas of Germany to Britain, France, and several other countries around the globe. A pertinent question has been about the origin of Bildungsroman in Africa. Its origin in Africa has been a controversial issue similar to the origin of feminism.Recent researches by African scholars in contextualizing the Bildungsromanic conceptdraw attention to the predominance of the Coming
–of-Age motif in African oral narratives. Teresa U.Njoku observes that “Though the term Bildungsroman is German,narratives which dealwith the development of a character and his society through the informal educationprocess existed in Africa even before colonialism” (271).
One would sayemphatically that Bildungsroman structure has its root in Igbo folktale suchas NwaenweNneand Iduu na Oba from the Nigerian Igbo lorebefore its use by modern African writers. It is evident that these new writers have grabbed the Bildungsroman tradition fromwhere
the oral tradition stopped. There are reasonablenumbers of works that feature Bildungsroman structure in African novel, such as Camara Laye’s The African Child, Mongo Beti’sMission to Kala, Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen, The Slave Girl, Double Yoke Christ Abani’s Becoming Abigail,as well as Sade Adeniran’s Imagine This.
Consequently, there are great many definitions of the literary sub-genre,Bildungsroman. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines the Bildungsroman as “a novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main character”(2009). It can be defined as a novel whose principal subject is the moral, psychological, spiritual and intellectual development of a usually youthful main character. It could also be seen as the novel of personal development or of education. Susanne Howe on her idea about formation defines it on the basis of what she terms the “Apprenticeship pattern” while Franco Moretti in his classic The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture locates the genre on “transient pattern” that describes a process of development through different stages.Therefore, Moretti, interprets Bildungsroman as “a symbolic formby which Europe rethinks the advent of modernity” (5).Moretti’s inference suggests that the need to give meaning to change made the youth the most meaningful part of life. This is to say that the youths are the most relevant and indispensable form of human existence, since they are growing and have the suppleness to adapt and discern change. Therefore, a novel that is characteristic of the Bildungsromangenre describes a young protagonist’s developmental trajectory, or overall development, from childhood to maturity. Encyclopedia Britannica defines it as a German literary term, a class of novel that deals with the maturation process; by investigating how and why the protagonist develops as he does, both morally and psychologically. The literary prototype of the Bildungsroman protagonist is the German author Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s 19th century hero, Wilhelm Meister, who embarks on a spiritual journey “…to seek self-realization in the service of art…” (9).The aim of the young artist’s quest is self-development through a series of hardships encountered along the way. However, the focus of this work will be the Bildungsroman, or the novel of growth and development. Theparadigmatic expansion of Bildungsroman has engendered its divergent definitions by various scholars. M.H Abramlocates the emergence of the Bildungsroman tradition in the eighteenth century German and describes it as the novel whose subject is the “development of the protagonist’s mind and character, in the passage from childhood through varied experiences and often through a spiritual crisis into maturity, which usually involves recognition of one’s identity and role in the world” (201).
There are many variations and subgenres of Bildungsroman that focus on the growth of the individual. A lot of controversies about the definition and delimitation of the genre have their interpretations on the word Bildung (formation). It is imperative to distinguish between the three sub types of Bildungsroman and their variations: Entwicklungsroman (novel of general growth), represents novels about different types of development or novels of development in general.The Erziehungsroman like Bildungsroman has to do with the novel of educational development and the Kunstlerroman refers to the novel of artistic realization. The basic subtype of Bildungsroman is Kunslerroman which M. H. Abrams situates as a sub type that “represents the growth of a novelist or other artist into the stage of maturity in which he recognises his artistic destiny and masters his artistic craft” (121).Scholtz also distinguishes more specifically between the variant forms of Bildungsroman in what he terms (pedagogies-roman). While Bildungsroman refers to the character’s growth more generally, Erziehungsroman focuses on a deliberate inculcation (often by a master) of life lessons by means of a particular pedagogic structure.Hence, if we limit the genre to include all forms of development, Bildungsroman then encompasses most of the novels ever written. Bildungsroman within the context of our study rather has to do with special forms of development with the proviso that a protagonist develops passing through the key elements and factors that influence such formation.
The major feature of the Bildungsroman or the Coming- of –Age motif, for Abram, is the recorded socio-psychological progress of the protagonist from an earlystage of physical and emotional development to other life phases. For the purpose of this work, we situate the Bildungsroman as the novel whose principal interest is to investigate the problems and confusions of the contemporary youth at cross-purpose, who is morally and culturally challenged and suggest that growth and development as a universal phenomenon is conditioned by socio- cultural context, religion, the political environment of the time as well as familial relationship. Hence, exploring the issue of character formation, the writers adopt to re-work Bildungsroman form to articulate the importance of female bonding /personality rolemodeling as a strategy for attaining transformation or change in the life of our growing youths.
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