A Comparative Analysis of Motherhood in Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood and Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Motherhood as a literary and ideological construct is shaped by the specific historical and cultural conditions within which it is represented, and a comparison of its treatment in Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood and Toni Morrison's Beloved reveals how African and African American women writers have engaged with maternal experience under patriarchy and slavery respectively. This study examined how both novels interrogate the social expectations placed on Black mothers in postcolonial Nigeria and antebellum America. A feminist literary critical methodology was adopted, drawing on Black feminist theory and African feminist scholarship. Emecheta's Nnu Ego represents the Igbo woman whose entire worth is mediated through reproduction and child-rearing, while Morrison's Sethe makes the extreme act of infanticide in order to protect her child from enslavement. Both are depicted as loving mothers whose maternal acts are ultimately compromised by oppressive systems. The comparative analysis demonstrated that both authors challenge idealisations of Black motherhood by foregrounding the material and psychological costs of maternal sacrifice in racialised and patriarchal societies. Nnu Ego's dying alone despite her complete investment in her children mirrors Sethe's haunted loneliness as a critique of the systems that exploit maternal devotion. The study concludes that Emecheta and Morrison offer complementary critiques of how Black womanhood is reduced to reproductive function and recommends both novels for combined study in gender and literature courses at Nigerian federal universities.

Keywords: motherhood, Emecheta, Morrison, Black feminism, postcolonial literature