CHAPTER ONE

1.0 INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Agarwal (2007) states that having unique indigenous cultures, nature-based attractions, beautiful landscapes, and pleasant weather conditions, local communities in Africa, and other Third World countries; however there is difference in tradition.

        Traditions are generally defined as the transfer of customs, beliefs and behaviour from one generation to another within a community or society. The word is said to derive from Latin meaning something to be handed over. Included in tradition is language, objects, beliefs, practices, institutions, music, dance, art, sculpture. They are usually developed over a long time sometimes even centuries and they keep on evolving. For some, tradition is simply a collection of time-honoured customs, accepted, not on critical grounds, but merely because things have always been so or have always been done that way. Any attempt at improvement is opposed in the name of tradition.

We can also speak of the traditions of an organization for example traditions of educational institutions, the military or church or mosque or even of families. There are also national and regional traditions. Tradition is also regarded as being more than mere conservatism. It includes the continual presence of a spirit and of a moral attitude.

Africa has a lot of traditions and Africans pride themselves in their traditions which are expressed in music, art, dance and sculpture. These traditions have been passed from one generation to another through oral traditions. Music and poetry in African traditions is very important and are often sung in call and response form. Songs regularly accompany marriage, birth, rites of passage, farming, hunting and even political activities. Music is often used in different African cultures to ward off evil spirits and to pay respects to good spirits, the dead and ancestors.

1.1.1 Biography Of Abubakar Adam Ibrahim

Abubakar Ibrahim, branded a “literary provocateur” for his portrayal of women’s sexuality in northern Nigeria’s Hausa culture, is the current recipient of the Goethe Institute & Sylt Foundation African Writer’s Residency Award. During his visit to Potsdam he will offer a short reading from Season of Crimson Blossoms, and then talk about his work as a writer in northern Nigeria and the role of literature in the region. Afterwards, there will be a question and answer session about Abubakar’s writing, Hausa culture, and his work as a journalist. All interested students are staff is cordially invited to attend.

1.1.2 Biography of Nathaniel Hawthrone

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864). Born on July 4 in Salem, Massachusetts, Nathaniel was the second child and the only son of Elizabeth and Nathaniel Hathorne. By the time Nathaniel was born, five generations of Hathornes had lived in Salem. Two of the most infamous of these ancestors were William Hathorne and his son, John. William was a Puritan leader and a fierce persecutor of the Quakers. He ordered that a Quaker named Ann Coleman receive a public whipping; she almost died during this harsh punishment. John was a judge who conducted hearings during the Salem Witchcraft Trials. As a young man, Nathaniel added a w to his last name. Some speculate that he made this change to distance himself from his intolerant Puritan ancestors. Nathaniel’s father was a seaman who caught yellow fever and died in Surinam (Dutch Guiana) in 1808, when Nathaniel was only four years old. The sea captain left his wife with little money, so Elizabeth sold the Hathorne house and moved her family into the home of her more wealthy brothers, the Mannings.

        When Nathaniel was nine, he injured his leg and was unable to attend school for almost two years; however, he began reading widely on his own. Hawthorne was particularly influenced by the allegory and symbolism in works such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, as well as by Sir Walter Scott’s historical romances and by the works of eighteenth-century novelists such as Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollet.

        In September of 1821, Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College, where he befriended Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Franklin Pierce, and Horatio Bridge. In college, Hawthorne continued his extensive reading, enjoyed the Maine outdoors, and excelled in composition. Hawthorne graduated from Bowdoin in 1825 and returned to Salem. For the next twelve years, he wrote prodigiously, attempting to establish himself as a respected writer. He published his first romance, Fanshawe, at his own expense but later tried to retrieve all copies of the book and burn them. Similarly, Hawthorne burned his first collection of stories, Seven Tales of My Native Land, because he failed to find a publisher. Eventually, in 1830, he published five stories in The Salem Gazette, and in 1834, some of his stories appeared in NewEngland Magazine. In 1836, Hawthorne worked as an editor for the Boston-based The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge. In 1837, he published Twice-Told Tales, a collection of stories that finally brought him recognition. Hawthorne was unaware that his college friend Horatio Bridge had given the publisher financial guarantees against failure as an incentive to publish this work. The same year, Hawthorne met his future wife, Sophia Amelia Peabody, to whom he was engaged in 1838. To save money for his marriage, Hawthorne worked as a salt and coal measurer in the Boston Custom House, and planning for his future, bought shares in Brook Farm, a utopian Transcendentalist community, intending to live there with Sophia once they were married. However, communal living did not agree with Hawthorne, and he soon requested the return of his stock.

        Hawthorne and Sophia married on July 9, 1842, and moved into the Old Manse, a house in Concord that they rented from Ralph Waldo Emerson. In Concord, Hawthorne formed friendships with Transcendentalist writers and thinkers such as Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. In 1845, the Hawthorne family returned to Salem, and in the following year, Hawthorne published Mosses from an Old Manse, a work that brought critical acclaim but little financial success. Hawthorne’s financial woes were temporarily solved when President James K. Polk made him surveyor of the Salem Custom House. Hawthorne wrote little while working at the Custom House. In 1849, Zachary Taylor, a Whig, became president, and Hawthorne, a Democrat, lost his office. In September, Hawthorne began work on The Scarlet Letter and on “The Custom-House,” which satirizes the Salem CustomHouse and its officers, as well as the Whigs who deprived him of his office. Hawthorne originally planned to include “The Custom House,” The Scarlet Letter, and other works in a collection called Old Time Legends; Together with Sketches, Experimental and Ideal. By 1850, Hawthorne had published The Scarlet Letter, and he published The House of the Seven Gables by 1851. By this time, he, his wife, and their children had moved from Lenox, Massachusetts, to West Newton, Massachusetts, where Hawthorne’s second daughter was born. The Hawthorne family returned to Concord in 1852. In 1853, President Franklin Pierce appointed Hawthorne to the post of American consul at Liverpool, England, and Hawthorne served in this position for four years before moving his family to Italy for a year. Hawthorne and his family returned to Concord in 1860, where he published a collection of English sketches under the title Our Old Home in 1863. Nathaniel Hawthorne died in 1864, leaving several unfinished works.

1.1.3 Synopsis of season of crimson blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim

Season of Crimson Blossoms is a story of forbidden relationships in a conservative Muslim northern community. It tells the story of Binta Zubairu and opens with the statement “Hajiya Binta Zubairu was finally born at fifty five when a dark-lipped rogue with short, spiky hair, like a field of miniscule anthills, scaled her fence and landed boots and all, in the puddle that was her heart” (Ibrahim 3). What does it mean that a fifty five year old woman was reborn? Hajiya Binta was a widow who lost her husband to one of the incessant religious and ethnic crisis that characterises Northern Nigeria. He was killed by the very boys he was helping. Munkaila her son moves her to Abuja away from the crisis in Jos but they end up with another crisis. It started when Hassan „Reza‟ Babale a twenty six year old thug and weed dealer breaks into her house. She reminds Reza of his mother and he reminds Hajiya Binta of her dead son Yaro. Binta had been married off to a man she barely knew when she was just fifteen years and sexual relations with her husband was a duty to be performed as a wife. Hassan stirred up something in her which was culturally forbidden. However her passion got the better of her and she started an affair with a man thirty years younger Reza would meet her at her house when her granddaughter and niece had left for school. However Hureira her daughter arrived suddenly having separated from her husband. This presents the lovers with a major problem. Hajiya Binta tries to get Hureira to go back to her husband’s house and clear the coast for her and Reza but she refuses. Finally they resort to using Shagali (enjoyment in Hausa) hotel. This step is what leads to their exposure. Malam Haruna, Hajiya Binta’s suitor coincidentally sees her and Reza arriving and leaving the hotel. He makes the right connection and conclusion and goes on to tell Uztaz the Islamic teacher. Unfortunately Uztaz’s wife overhears the conversation and the issue becomes talk of the town such that Hajiya Binta is derided at the Islamic school. Meanwhile her relationship with Reza begins to unravel as seen where he almost slapped her and he begins to compare her with Leila the young lady they had kidnapped. Things come to a head when Malam Haruna reports her to Munkaila her son. He comes to the house and meets Reza there confirming what he was told. In the end Reza, in a bid to escape, strikes Munkaila and he dies in the process.

        The book centers on the affair of fifty five year old Hajiya Binta and twenty six year old Hassan „Reza‟. This kind of relationship is regarded as taboo in virtually every culture in Nigeria. However it is more so in conservative Muslim northern Nigeria. The irony however is that what is regarded as taboo for women is a regular practice by men. Society tolerates a fifty five year old man who has an affair with a twenty something or even less year old lady but changes the rules when it comes to women. Related to this is the issue of sexual repression among women. Hajiya Binta wanted more out of her sexual relationship with her husband but is restricted by a culture that regards women who do so as wanton or promiscuous. Note Dijen Tsamiya’s lecture to a teenage soon to be bride about sex, it’s all about the man (51). Sex is therefore exclusively for the man’s satisfaction and the wife’s feelings are immaterial. One can therefore see why Hajiya couldn’t stop once she started the affair with Reza. She continued even after she knew that their secret had been exposed when the other women in her Islamic school began to insult her.

        Another unwholesome tradition that the book addresses is the issue of early marriage. The 2003 Child Rights Act sets the age of marriage in Nigeria at eighteen years, however only twenty three states have taken concrete steps to implement it. Thus in Northern Nigeria particularly in the rural areas, girls are married off before their eighteenth birthday. This is the reason for the high cases of Vesicovaginal Fistula (VVF) in northern Nigeria. Hajiya Binta is lucky to have escaped this traumatic and humiliating condition. However as she told Reza love had no place in her relationship with her husband. She hardly even knew him before their wedding (186). Early marriage is actually forced marriage because the girls cannot refuse. Hajiya Binta dared not refuse to marry Zubairu although she clearly wanted an education. Some teenagers who are bold have rejected these marriages with grave consequences. A case widely reported in both local and foreign media was that of fourteen year old Wasila Umar in Kano state. She killed her husband and three other guests when she concealed rat poison in their food. Her father had forced her to marry the thirty five year old man.

        Hajiya Binta had to also endure the tradition of „Kunya‟. This is where mothers develop an avoidance relationship with the first child and refrains from calling the child by its name or showing affection to the extent of not even talking to the child in extreme cases (Yusuf 11). Hajiya Binta‟s love and affection for her first child Yaro could not be expressed due to this culture and when the child dies tragically she is traumatized. One can argue that her affair with Reza was fallout of her relationship with Yaro. Nagu stated that their escapades had an incestuous look to it because she reminded him of his mother and he reminded her of her son.

1.1.4 Synopsis of the scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthrone

The Scarlet Letter has often been taught as a moral text in high school and university classrooms in the United States, with Hester Prynne as the scarlet (white) woman/adulteress who serves as a cultural warning to girls and women and, therefore, as part of the social conditioning they internalize. Darrel Abel, in The Moral Picturesque, articulates the warning as he moralizes about Hester’s “moral inadequacy” and “moral dereliction,” saying that she “unwomaned herself and deluded herself with mistaken notions” (181, 187). Wendy Martin recontextualized this kind of warning more than twenty years ago:

As daughters of Eve, American heroines [including Hester Prynne] are destined to lives of dependency and servitude as well as to painful and sorrowful childbirth because, like their predecessor, they have dared to disregard authority or tradition in search of wisdom and happiness; like Eve, heroines of American fiction are fallen women. (258)

Yet despite Wendy Martin’s prominence in feminist studies, her challenging critique has had almost no effect on mainstream scholarship on The Scarlet Letter. Similarly, such critiques by other women have had little measurable or lasting impact on the culture’s or the academy’s attitudes about women. In fact, Hester-Prynne-ism has taken all kinds of bizarre and moralizing cultural twists and turns—for example, in 1991, in Iowa: “Pointing to Hester Prynne’s badge of shame as a model for their recommendation, some officials . . . hoped to curb drunken driving by requiring offenders to display car tags labelling themselves as having been guilty of DUI charges” (NHR 26; see also Schell, “Three-Time Loser DUIs get a Scarlet Letter ‘Z’”). In an article entitled “Handing Out Scarlet Letters,” Time magazine reports that partners seeking divorces are relying on outdated anti-adultery laws that primarily privilege men (see A. Sachs).

        There is even a chapter by Peter French in a book on business ethics, called “The Hester-Prynne Sanction.” In Computerworld Thornton May describes how electronic commerce approaches the Internet through four literary categories, one of which is the scarlet letter, and in Broadcasting and Cable Joe Flint argues that a ratings system for violent television shows “could be an economic scarlet letter” (33; see also Gordon, The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street, and McCormack on the 1990 elections). The scarlet A shows up as well in an article by Harry Hadd in Steroids: “The Scarlet Letter: Reichstein’s Substance S”; in a Policy Review essay, “A Farmer’s Scarlet Letter: Four Generations of Middle-Class Welfare Is Enough,” by Blake Hurst; and in an essay in the book Misdiagnosis: Woman as a Disease, published by the People’s Medical Society, entitled “Norplant: The ‘Scarlet Letter’ of Birth Control” by June Adinah. Hester’s A has also been modernized to symbolize AIDS—for example, in Computer/ Law Journal as “The Scarlet Letter ‘A’: AIDS in a Computer Society” (van Dam)—or, to designate modern women who, “as Hester Prynne before them, are ‘challenging the mores set down for them by contemporary society . . . [and have been] similarly stigmatized, branded with the scarlet A, for Autocratic, Aggressive, Authoritarian, Arrogant’” (S. Easton 740). In Time, the A is designated as “Today’s Scarlet Letter: Herpes” (see also Osborne), and Brenda Daly uses the scarlet letter to discuss incest survival and incest narratives (155–88).

        Newsweek describes Reggie Jackson as “the Hester Prynne of sluggers . . . with a scarlet dollar sign on his chest” (NHSN 8), and the scarlet letter is used in Sports Illustrated as a reference to Ohio State and Penn State football rankings (see Layden). In a 1989 article in the Houston Post the scarlet letter refers to an affair between baseballer Wade Boggs and Margo Adams (Robertson). In an interview question on the NBC Nightly News the A is mentioned when the registration of sex offenders was likened to an “unfair scarlet letter” (July 3, 1995; see also Earl Hubbard, “Child Sex Offender Registration Laws”; Suffolk University Law School, “Ex Post Facto Analysis of Sex Offender Registration Statutes: Branding Criminals with a Scarlet Letter”; Kabat, “Scarlet Letter Sex Offender Databases and Community Notification”; Kimball, “A Modern Day Arthur Dimmesdale: Public Notification When Sex Offenders Are Released into the Community”).

        Recently, a newspaper article reported that “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne had to wear a single scarlet letter to identify herself as an adulteress. A judge in Illinois went much further . . . ordering 48 letters, each 8 inches high, on a sign on a felon’s property . . . WARNING A VIOLENT FELON LIVES HERE. TRAVEL AT YOUR OWN RISK.” The Illinois Supreme Court, however, decided that such “humiliation is unnecessary and unfair . . . and ordered the sign taken down” (“Scarlet letters in Illinois”; see also Feldman, “The ‘Scarlet Letter Laws’ of the 1990s” and Reske, “Scarlet Letter Sentences”). This judgment exceeds even that of Hawthorne, who read about such punishments in Joseph B. Felt’s 1827 The Annals of Salem, which explained: “[I]n 1694, a law was passed requiring adulterers to wear a two-inch-high capital A, colored to stand out against the background of the wearer’s clothes” (TSL: Case Studies 12; see also Hawthorne, “The Custom-House” 41). By 1782, the use of the scarlet letter for adulterers was discontinued in New England (Davidson and Wagner-Martin 950).

        Hester-Prynne-ism shows up even in the military. The first woman bomber pilot, Lt. Kelly Flinn, was generally (not honorably) discharged in 1997 by the Air Force for the admitted charges of adultery and lying. Wire services reported as follows: “Lieutenant Flinn, 26, who is single, was charged with committing adultery with a married man. Her allies assailed the military for branding her with a scarlet letter for allegedly committing an act that many male officers have done with impunity” (“Embattled Female Pilot”). The New Yorker also picks up on the connection between the treatment of Flinn and Hawthorne’s romance:

There is nothing funny about the contretemps for Lieutenant Flinn; she is no longer in danger of doing time in a military prison, but her pioneering military career has been ruined, and her less than honorable discharge is a stigma. The rest of us, though, can be forgiven for having found entertainment in this unexpected Pentagon production of “The Scarlet Letter” and in the enduring ridiculousness of our antiquated and unenforceable sex laws. (Angell 4)

Another instance of a reference to the scarlet A and Lt. Flinn occurs in a May 29, 1997 newspaper cartoon in which a line of formidable-looking Air Force officers are headed by one who holds a branding iron with a red-hot A; he says, “Lieut. Flinn, Step Forward.” In the corner of the cartoon, a little bird says, “They want you to take it like a man” (see also Barto, “The Scarlet Letter and the Military Justice System”; S. Chase, “The Woman Who Fell to Earth”). Even more recently, William Ginsberg, the former attorney for Monica Lewinsky, stated on CNN on January 25, 1998 that Lewinsky may have to wear “the scarlet letter of indictment for the rest of her life.” Literarily, John Updike’s book S “turns to Sarah Worth, a modern version of Hester Prynne. . . . Instead of having a way with a needle Sarah has a way with a pen or tape recorder— after all she is a woman of the 1980’s” (NHR 26; see also Updike’s Roger’s Version). Grace Jones argues convincingly that another Sarah, John Fowles’s Sarah Woodruff in the French Lieutenant’s Woman, “is a Victorian Hester . . . Hester’s true child . . . [and] proof of how slow is the evolutionary process Hester envisioned” (78, 71). Christopher Bigsby’s novel, Hester: A Romance (1994), is a prequel to The Scarlet Letter, narrating the time from Hester’s birth, as herself a “bastard” child, to her death; Bigsby claims to have written the novel because, “repeating Dimmesdale’s sin,” he “fell in love with” Prynne (188). Charles Larson’s novel, Arthur Dimmesdale (1983), opens after Hester Prynne’s admission to Dimmesdale that she is pregnant and ends as Pearl kisses him and he dies. The protagonist of Bharati Mukherjee’s novel, The Holder of the World (1993), Beigh Masters, discovers her ancestor Hannah Easton, who was Hester Prynne. Born in Salem, and later marrying an Englishman, Hannah moves to India, where she becomes the mistress of a Raja. Then, pregnant by him, she returns to Salem. (See also Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School.)

        From the 1870s on, dramatic productions have refocused attention on Prynne’s scarlet A; for example, Joseph Hatton’s The Scarlet Letter, or Hester Prynne (1870), Emile de Najac’s five-act tragedy The Scarlet Letter (1876), James Edgar Smith’s The Scarlet Stigma (1899), Phyllis Nagy’s adaptation of The Scarlet Letter for the American Theatre (1995), and the opera based on The Scarlet Letter (Lathrop and Damrosch 1896). Mysteries, both dramatic and literary, have also made use of Prynne’s symbolic A, as it designates evil and adultery or threatens disruption—for example, in The Perfect Crime, now in its eighth year of off-Broadway production, in Ellery Queen’s Scarlet Letters, and in a recent detective novel by Julie Smith, The Axeman’s Jazz (see also Maron, Steinberg). In Primal Fear, a film released in 1996, the killing of a Catholic bishop is underscored with references to The Scarlet Letter. The killer, in fact, leaves an underlined section of the text as a clue to his motivation for the slaying (see also Diehl).

        Paradoxically, the mainstream body of scholarship on The Scarlet Letter has functioned as both a moralizing warning and radical model to women who choose not to act fully in terms of their social conditioning—for example, women in an academy where male critics and scholars admire the duplicitous radical subversion of men like Nathaniel Hawthorne and hold up as a model his male fantasy of a radical, subversive woman, Hester Prynne, who can be reread as profoundly (hetero)sexualized and objectified, as one who “stands by her man,” and as one who finally self-punishes.6 As Sacvan Bercovitch has claimed, Hester finds “conversion to the letter” at the end of the text (Office 3). Or, as Millicent Bell put it more than thirty years ago, Hester, like other of Hawthorne’s “most memorable female characters” (Beatrice, Zenobia, Miriam, and Drowne’s mysterious model), “suggests experience . . . knowledge . . . [and] sin, the moral cost of experience and knowledge, which is the artist’s [and the critic’s] peril” (Hawthorne’s View 133).

1.1.4.1 Main Characters In Scarlet Letter

Hester Prynne. Hester is an English woman who is sent to live in the American colonies by her husband, Roger Prynne, an aged scholar. Prynne plans to join her after he settles business matters in Amsterdam, where the couple has been living. When the novel begins, Hester has been living in Boston for two years without her husband, who has never arrived. Hester has given birth to a child by a father unknown to the community and has been found guilty of the sin of adultery. As punishment, she must always wear a scarlet A on her dress and stand for three hours on a public scaffold, exposed to the ridicule and rancor of the community.

Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. Arthur Dimmesdale, an unmarried man, is the pastor of Hester’s congregation and the father of Hester’s baby, Pearl. Hester refuses to name him as the father of the child, but Dimmesdale’s private guilt and anguish eat away at him throughout the novel.

Pearl. Pearl is the daughter of Hester Prynne and the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. She is the living symbol of Hester’s sin and grows up fascinated by her mother’s scarlet A. Pearl has a strong, unpredictable personality, and Hester worries that Pearl will be taken from her.

Roger Chillingworth. Roger Chillingworth is the name Hester’s husband assumes after he finally arrives in America. Native Americans have captured him, delaying his arrival in the colony. At the beginning of the novel, Hester recognizes her husband from her place on the public scaffold. Later, he asks her not to dishonor his name by revealing that he is her lawful husband. Chillingworth becomes obsessed with seeking revenge against Dimmesdale.

Governor Richard Bellingham. This character, an actual historical figure who served as governor in Boston in 1641, 1654, and 1665, witnesses Hester’s punishment on the public scaffold. Later in the novel, Hester must visit him to ask that Pearl not be removed from her home.

Mistress Hibbins. This character, another actual historical figure, is the sister of Governor Bellingham and is supposedly in league with the devil. She tries to tempt Hester and Dimmesdale to sink further into sin. The real Mistress Hibbins was executed for witchcraft.

John Wilson. This character advises Dimmesdale to try to find out from Hester who the father of her child is. When Hester refuses to reveal this information, Wilson delivers a sermon about adultery to the crowd watching Hester on the scaffold.

Master Brackett. Master Brackett is the jailer who brings Chillingworth to Hester as she sits in prison

The Sexton. Dimmesdale stands on the public scaffold with Hester and Pearl one night, and the sexton, an employee of the church, finds Reverend Dimmesdale’s glove there and returns it to him. The sexton asks Dimmesdale about the red letter A that appeared in the sky that night. The sexton believes that the A stands for “angel.” Dimmesdale denies having seen the sign in the sky.

The Shipmaster. This character is the captain of the ship on which Hester, Pearl, and Dimmesdale hope to leave Boston. The shipmaster tells them that Roger Chillingworth also plans to be on the ship.

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

African culture and tradition played a major role in shaping the African society; however there seems to be different from other European nations or other developed nations in the world.

In Nigeria these harmful traditional practices include; widowhood rites, wife inheritance, women disinheritance, early and forced marriage. Others include female genital mutilation, discrimination against the girl child or preference for male child, and food taboos. Although these practices differ from one community or ethnic group to another they are most prevalent in the rural areas and are usually enforced by relatives, community members or religious leaders under the pretext of culture or religion.But most developed nations (European nations) hardly practice most of these cultural practices in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. It is to this regard that the researcher desire to throw more light to this cultural variation usingthe books by Binta Zubairu of season of crimson blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim AND Hester Prynne of the scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthrone to justify the difference in culture between Nigeria and other European nations

1.3 AIM AND OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

The main aim of the research work is to carry out a comparative analysis between the female characters using the books by Binta Zubairu of season of crimson blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim AND Hester Prynne of the scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthrone. Other specific objectives of the study are:

1.  to compare the African culture and the European culture

2.  to compare the difference in acceptance of relationship in muslim community and that of other nations in season of crimson blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim and the scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthrone

3.  to determine the difference in personality as regard the marital status of Hajiya Binta Zubairu and Hester Prynne

4.  to determine the differences between Hajiya Binta Zubairu and Hester Prynne in their approach to resolving issues    

1.4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The study came up with research questions so as to ascertain the above stated objectives of the study. The research questions for the study are:

1.  What is difference between the African culture and the European culture?

2.  What is the difference in acceptance of relationship in muslim community and that of other nations in season of crimson blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim and the scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthrone?

3.  What is the difference in personality as regard the marital status of Hajiya Binta Zubairu and Hester Prynne?

4.  What is the difference between Hajiya Binta Zubairu and Hester Prynne in their approach to resolving issues?   

1.5 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

The study ona comparative analysis between the female characters using the books by Binta Zubairu of season of crimson blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim and Hester Prynne of the scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthrone will be of immense benefit to the English and literary studies departments in Nigeria Universities by educating the students on how to compare characters in a play or novel. The study will also serve as a repository of information to other researchers that desire to carry out similar research on the above topic. Finally the study will contribute to the body of the existing literature on season of crimson blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim and the scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthrone.

1.6 SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The study will only go into comparing the female characters using the books by Binta Zubairu of season of crimson blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim and Hester Prynne of the scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthrone without narrating the whole story in the books.

1.7 DEFINITION OF TERMS

Culture: Culture is the social behavior and norms found in human societies

Mutilation: Mutilation or maiming is cutting off or injury to a body part of a person so that the part of the body is permanently damaged, detached or disfigured

Aggressive: ready or likely to attack or confront; characterized by or resulting from aggression.

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