Controlling deviant wives: Marriage and justice in the early Ghanaian novel

Abstract

This article looks at two early Ghanaian novels, A. Native’s Marita: or the Folly of Love (serialized in 1886–88) and R.E. Obeng’s Eighteenpence (1943), which portray conjugal life in colonial Ghana during a time of legislative and judicial transition. They deal with ways in which both the colonial administration and traditional authorities attempted to regulate the contested arena of marriage. The novels create the impression that such external controls freed married women from traditional restraints and turned them into deviant wives who asserted their own interests, overturned gender norms and undermined their husbands’ authority in private and in public. We argue that far from liberating women, the external control of marital affairs left women bereft of traditional support systems and therefore dependent on, and submissive to, men. We conclude that an underlying male angst is responsible for the representation of wives in both novels, as well as for the texts’ silencing of resistant women.

Keywords:

• Ghana
• colonialism
• judicial transition
• marriage
• gender
• women’s resistance