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In this paper, despite the reservation that has been expressed by feminist critics against the application of Freud's and Lacan's concepts of unconscious female desire to female texts and characters, I argue for their relevance using two Nigerian contemporary novels written by women. I then go on to establish a confluence between Sigmund Freud's penis envy and Jacques Lacan's the Desire to be the other by deploying them to provide a psychological explanation for the motivations of the action or inaction of the major female characters in the two selected works. However, my use of penis envy in this paper is not in the sense of a woman's desire for erotic pleasure from her male counterpart as in the sense in which Sarah White speaks of a woman that "wants her husband's body to be completely covered with erect penises" (20), but in the sense of appropriating that which is lacking in her as a result of the sociocultural environment in which she finds herself. I argue that Ezeigbo's and Agary's major female characters are propelled in their actions or inactions by their desire to be like the other; and that it is on the basis of this desire that they enter into and sustain their individual relationships.
For instance, even though Sisi in Agary's Yellow-Yellow knows little or nothing about the eponymous heroine, she accommodates her because she wants to appropriate to herself phallocratic privileges and roles. Similarly, before her own daughters were born, Eagle woman in Ezeigbo's Children of the Eagle squanders deep affection on Lois and treats her as her own child because she wants to appropriate to herself the space and role of a mother. Therefore, Freud's penis envy and Lacan's theory of the other has been appropriated and reappropriated in this paper: they are not restricted to the female appropriation of male roles and authority. Rather, this essay sees the "other" as any absence or vacuum in the life of a female character: that which she does not possess and which she unconsciously craves for. But by also craving for this lack and doing something to acquire it, I also argue that these female characters are illustrative of transgressive female behaviors in contemporary Nigerian prose fictions.
Critics, especially female ones,...