Portrayal of Male Characters by A Contemporary Female Writer: A Feminist Linguistic Perspective

This article attempts to explore how male characters are portrayed in four of Amma Darko’s prose works, viz. Beyond the Horizon (1995), The Housemaid (1998), Faceless (2003) and Not Without Flowers (2007). Drawing on feminist linguistics, this paper takes the view that the way men are depicted by Darko in her prose fiction overtly counters existing conventional ideologies of gender positioning. These ideologies, for many decades now, have reinforced such traditional social structures as male-dominance, patriarchy or institutionalized sexism in all societal strata. Darko, in the selected prose works, has repeatedly questioned the God-given power of man over woman. She has also highlighted such aspects as innocence (or naivety), illiteracy (or low education) and especially economic subjugation of her female characters as the key factors that sustain male-dominance and power in literature and by extension society.