Myth, Nature, and the Female Terrain in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and Wole Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers

Abstract

Critics generally acknowledge the pervasive presence and effects of the Industrial Revolution and man’s excesses on nature and the woman in Ibsen’s and Soyinka’s works but project the overriding values of benevolence and coexistence as benefits of these capitalist processes. This reading is challenged in this article as it argues that in Ibsen’s and Soyinka’s drama, capitalism associates with myth to serve an unjust society as they codify and promulgate the values of a culture repressive to the woman and to nature. The article examines the interconnections between the systematic, the archetypal, and the institutional in relation to the woman, and shows how Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, and Wole Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers acted as dissenting voices to the already existing images, myths and constructs. It argues that Ibsen’s and Soyinka’s plays trace the relationship between myth, the capitalist unemotional economy, patriarchy, the woman, and nature to show how the natural environment and the feminine gender are trapped between systems that minimise their uniqueness and authenticity. Building on the significant contributions by ecofeminists, myth, and capitalism are seen as products of masculinist and colonialist assumptions that license exploitation and encourage discrimination, thus disrupting the building of personal narratives. The plays, written over a century apart, therefore depict the minimal progress made in protecting the environs and society’s failure in lifting the binary polarities that suppress women and enforce male dominance. The analysis of the dramatic texts therefore forces one to reflect on the modern forms of patriarchy and environmental degradation which have assumed a much greater public form.