To be or not to be Agatha Bell?: Chinaza Okafor’s private life experience in Adichie’s “The arrangers of marriage”

Abstract

Female participation in society is marked by constant demands for rights and equity in the social sphere, whether in the public or private sphere. Therefore, it becomes imperative to [re]think the places they occupy, as well as the way they have been represented for a long time. Therefore, this article aims to analyze the role of the character Agatha Bell in the short story “The Matchmakers”, written by Chimamanda Nigozi Adichie, which makes up the collection of short narratives The Thing Around Your Neck (2017). To this end, we used the theoretical contributions of Bonnici (2004), Cooper (2007), Vergès (2020), Spivak (1997), Pinto (2007), Davis (2016), Ribeiro (2018) and Cardoso (2022). Therefore, qualitative and descriptive research of a documentary and bibliographic nature was used to construct theoretical discussions and analyze the corpus. The studies developed here point to the need to no longer accept socially conventional female roles based on essentialist precepts, as well as the relationship between gender, class and race should not be used as a category to delegate a female inferiority locus.