At first glance in Wole Soyinka’s play, Death and the King’s Horseman, it seems like women are given a powerful role, but this soon changes as the story goes on. There are several different women in this play, all with different social statuses and power. Some women can do things like speak their mind, while other women are told to shut up. Some women have a powerful role at first, only to have it stripped away later in the play. Some women don’t even have a name. They are just known as “woman” or “the bride”. Some women are able to speak freely, and some never say a word. Overall, in this play, women are only there to further other character’s stories, not their own.
Before reading a word of this play, the reader is able to get a glimpse of a couple of the women. In the character list given by Soyinka, only five characters are given a summary of themselves, including Iyajola and Jane Pilkings. Iyajola is referred to as “Mother” of the market, and Jane as “his wife”. Just by these two summaries of two of the women in the play, it’s inferred that Iyajola seems to be in a position of power by the way she is shown here. On the other hand, Jane is referred to only by who she is married to, and it doesn’t seem like she has any power at all. Despite this, as you get further into the book, these women end up switching roles of power. Instead of Jane having less power than Iyajola, it turns out that Jane can do more things than Iyajola. I’ll show more of this after we get to know each of the women in this play.
The first woman the reader meets is Iyajola. From the character list, you know that she has some power. This is shown even more when she is the only woman given a name of the group of women, “More women arrive during his recital, including Iyajola” (Soyinka, 11). Even without her saying anything, it seems as though she has a powerful role, among the other women, at least, if she’s the only woman to be named so far. In a scene in Act 1, Elesin and the Praise Singer are at the market talking with Iyajola and the women talking about his impending death for the sacrifice. The conversation seems innocent, but when one of the women says, “We know you for a man of honour” (Soyinka, 15) Elesin grows angry and Iyajola and the women beg for forgiveness without really knowing what they have done to anger him. This was the first time, in the play, that I realized how powerless Iyajola, and the women are against Elesin and other men. Just one wrong word is enough to need to beg for forgiveness.
Another instance of powerlessness I noticed in the play had to do with a scene between Elesin, Iyajola, and the bride. Elesin wishes to be with one last woman before he dies, and he chooses a woman who walks into the market, who is further known in the play as “the bride.” He describes her as, “And that radiance which so suddenly lit up this market I could boast I knew so well?” (Soyinka, 20). Iyajola begins to tell him that she is already betrothed to someone, although what she doesn’t mention is that the man she is already betrothed to is her son. After telling him, Elesin reacts, irritated, and asks why she is telling him this, as if the fact that she’s already betrothed shouldn’t even be an issue. Since she is so loyal to the cause of Elesin’s sacrifice, she lets him go after the bride, despite the women asking Iyajola why she didn’t tell him that the bride is already betrothed to her son. Since she doesn’t want anything to go wrong with the sacrifice, she goes along and lets Elesin do what he wants in his final hours.
At many times, Iyajola and the women may seem powerless, the person who has the least amount of power is the bride. For one, she doesn’t even have a name. She is only known as what she means to Elesin. When she learns that Elesin wishes to marry her before he dies and have a child with her, she has no choice in the matter even though she is already betrothed to Iyajola’s son. Along with not having a name in the play, she also never says a word of dialogue, either. Therefore, the bride is the most powerless person in this play, and it shows how women were treated in this time period. They were just expected to go along with whatever their husband told them to do.
The last woman in this play that we are introduced to is Jane Pilkings, and she ultimately has the most power of all the women in this play. Jane is Simon Pilking’s husband, the district officer. They are both a bit ignorant to the culture that surrounds them, although Jane is a little more willing to learn and educate herself than her husband. Jane is married and does follow what Simon wants her to do for the majority of the play, but she is also able to speak her mind when she needs to, which is something the other women are unable to do. She is able to tell her husband to listen to Amusa; whether he is able to listen is a different story, though. Since she is a white woman and British colonist and married to someone in a position of power, Jane is able to do a lot of things that the other women cannot.
Going back into the text really showed how Yoruba women were treated and how little they were able to do in their day to day life, and that some were not even given names or able to say a word. I couldn’t help but think of how the women in this book compared to women we’ve read in other texts this semester. Right after reading Death and the King’s Horseman, we read The Dew Breaker. Although there are many stories in one, the first story, and the most important story is “The Book of the Dead ” which is narrated by Ka. She wasn’t the most important person in the story since the reader was more curious about her dad’s backstory. But, that first story is from her point of view, which was a very welcome change from the women in Death and the King’s Horseman. She is able to be sure of herself throughout the story, even when learning some tough information about her father. Having a woman at the forefront of the story gave it a very different feeling than if it was someone else.
A text that had a strong female lead that I have read recently is Jane Eyre. This is very similar to The Dew Breaker because there is a female character leading the story, who is very independent and knows what she wants throughout the book. In those ways, it’s similar to The Dew Breaker, but in other ways it reminded me of Death and the King’s Horseman. Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë, centers around title protagonist, Jane Eyre, as she goes to live in Thornfield Hall to be a governess. There, she falls in love with her employer, Mr. Rochester. Throughout the novel, she is continuously gaslighted by him, which is what reminds me of the women in Death and the King’s Horseman. A scene in Jane Eyre that shows this is where, one night, Jane thinks she is hearing strange noises at night and goes to investigate. Rochester continuously tells her that it’s just the house creaking from the wind at night. Later in the novel, we find out that the strange noises Jane has heard at night is actually Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, locked up in the attic for being “mad”. The reader doesn’t actually know if Bertha is actually mad, or if he just locked her up there to get rid of her, and she eventually went mad on account of almost no human contact. This reminded me of Death and the King’s Horseman because it showed the powerlessness of women. At first, in Jane Eyre, you think that she is this powerful woman, but as you read on, because of the time period, she is continuously undermined by the men in the novel. In Death and the King’s Horseman, I thought that the women would have a powerful role in the text, but they were no match for the power exhibited by male characters onto them, like Elesin, Simon, and more.
Looking at the female characters in Death and the King’s Horseman allowed me to see how much women in the texts we read have changed for the better. Women are no longer not given a name, they’re given pages of dialogue, they are leading the story, like Ka. It was also interesting to read a text with women of different cultures and how some have more power than others, like with Jane and Iyajola. At first, I thought Iyajola would have more power because she was described as “the “Mother” of the market” and Jane was described as “Simon’s wife,” but it turned out to be the opposite in terms of power because of Jane’s status as an English colonizer.
Sources
Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman. W. W. Norton, 2002.
Danticat, Edwidge. The Dew Breaker. Vintage Contemporaries, 2004.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Smith, Elder and Co, 1847.
Sprockets and Springes 