Panopticism and Buchi Emecheta

Women and marriage are two important issues handled almost in each century; the place of woman as an individual in the society and her role in marriage has been problematized by numerous novelists, feminists, critics and by women themselves for centuries. One of these novelists critics is Buchi Emecheta who reveals the facts of an immigrant woman’s life in a patriarchal society in her novels: Second Class Citizen, The Joys of Motherhood and Bride Price. This patriarchal society can be described as the leading role of Panopticon Theory which is coined to literature and social sciences by Michel Foucault. In that respect, the marriage of immigrant women in a foreign country can be assessed as a tool of Panopticon's idea in which the women are trapped. This research focuses on the struggle of a woman who is a wife, a daughter, and a mother, trying to be a viable individual in the male-dominated society. Therefore, there are several questions to be handled in this paper; What are the social norms, realities, traditions of black people and the place of a black woman in the family reflected in Second Class Citizen, The Joys of Motherhood and The Bride Price? What is the core idea of Panopticism? Can the marriage be handled in the boundaries of Panopticism? Finally, one of the most important questions of this paper is whether writing process and education can be a way of fulfillment of the self for women.