Big Brother is Watching You: Interrogating Feminine Subjectivity in Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood

Abstract This paper explores the construction of feminine subjectivity in Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood. Against the background of studies of the novel as a feminist narrative which exposes women’s subjugation and patriarchal hegemony, we consider the emergence of the female subject under the surveillance of the symbolic authority operative in the text. In other words, our study examines the symbolic determination of femininity by the symbolic order whose constitution in the text is inherently patriarchal. Hence, we understand patriarchy in psychoanalytic terms as a symbolic authority, the Big Brother, whose watchful eye plays a major role in the formation of the female subject. By borrowing insights from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to analyse the novel, we argue that Nnu Ego and Ona are characters whose subjectivities are determined by the patriarchal order, for which their desires as subjects revolve around the provision of this order. The attainment of consciousness towards the end of their lives is, therefore, read here as a return of the repressed desire which tends to surmount the borders of patriarchy. Our analysis focuses mainly on Nnu Ego, the protagonist, and Ona, her mother, with the introduction of Adaku serving to highlight the difference between her subjective constitution and that of the novel’s protagonist. This way, the paper concludes that Nnu Ego is an ideological habitus whose death symbolises the death of patriarchal ideology in the text.