American Research Journal of English and Literature

 The interest of this paper is narrowed on a comparative investigation of the portrayal of the girl child in both the Bible and literary works of art where special reference will be made to Buchi Emecheta’s novel, The Bride Price and Yvonne Vera’s Under the Tongue in order to discover whether the girl child’s experience reflects the well-documented subjugation of women in general or hers is a unique experience, specific for her. The study acknowledges that while the larger percentage of focus of many writings on gender disparities has concentrated on the adult woman, comparatively little attention has been directed onto the girl child. By including the Bible as part of its study sample, the paper wishes to trace, ascertain and contribute to the question on whether male female gender dichotomy is traceable to the bible, making it a divine mandate or this is man-made as highlighted by de Beauvoir(1949) that “one is not born but becomes a woman.” This library based study is informed by Feminism in its search for an explanation of how the girl child has been portrayed in the aforementioned sources. The researchers have discovered that both the Bible and literary art project a ‘victim-image’ of the girl child whose subjugation and existence of privation reflect clipped and curtailed human rights and privileges when compared to her compatriot, the boy child. The study has also discovered that because the girl child is female, her patriarchal subordination and subjugation can not be looked at as totally divorced from the general negation of the womenfolk though her experiences are worse and more harrowing than those of the older woman, given her tender age, inexperience and innocence. The conclusion of the study is that the little girl suffers a double yoke under the combined aggression of both men and older female ambassadors of the patriarchal machine. The research has also exposed as false the patriarchal myth that views girls as made up of inferior intellect.