Owned Bodies and Resistant Selves: Patriarchy, Bride Price, and Female Agency in Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price and The Slave Girl

Abstract

Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price and The Slave Girl examine the lives of young Igbo women whose bodies, labour, sexuality, and futures are placed under systems of male authority, kinship control, and economic exchange. While both novels depict female suffering within traditional and colonial Nigerian society, they also reveal how women develop forms of consciousness and resistance within deeply restrictive social worlds. This paper studies the representation of female ownership and agency in the two novels. It argues that Emecheta exposes patriarchy not merely as male dominance but as a social order sustained through family, marriage, custom, inheritance, slavery, and women’s own participation in oppressive structures. Aku-nna in The Bride Price becomes valuable to her family because of the bride price her marriage can bring, while Ojebeta in The Slave Girl is literally sold into domestic slavery by her brother. In both cases, the girl child is treated as transferable property. Yet Emecheta does not present her female characters as passive victims alone. Aku-nna’s love for Chike and her refusal to submit inwardly to Okoboshi show a fragile but important assertion of choice. Ojebeta’s survival in Ma Palagada’s household reveals the complex relation between bondage, adaptation, and self-awakening. The paper further examines the role of mothers, female guardians, and other women in reproducing patriarchy. Through these two novels, Emecheta shows that female identity in Igbo society is produced through struggle: between ownership and selfhood, obedience and desire, survival and freedom.