Psychic Reality of Female Characters in Ahmed Yerima’s The Sisters and Femi Osofisan’s Women of Owu

Abstract

Psychic reality is a conceptual reality developed, to denote the level of reality specific to unconscious processes. It refers to an object of characterisation, understanding and exploration in psychoanalysis. Existing literary scholarship on women’s psychology which focused mostly on women’s psychological imbalances does not define the psychic reality of female characters in Nigerian dramatic literature. This study was, therefore, designed to examine the psychic reality of female characters in selected southern Nigerian plays, to determine the dynamics of their actions. The Feminist Model of Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory was adopted as the framework, while the interpretive design was used. The two plays, Ahmed Yerima’s The Sisters, and Femi Osofisan’s Women of Owu, were purposively selected due to the similarity in their characterisation of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Attention is given to female reactions to social and marital frustrations. The analysis reveals a range of literary strategies deployed by the playwrights in conveying different psycho-manifestations of female characters and psychic scenes in the texts. The two texts reveal that the psychic reality of the female characters are reflections of their traumatic experiences which eventually affects their understanding of internal and external realities. Thus, social and marital frustrations, are major challenges of social development.