Reactive Defensive Oppression: A New Theoretical Praxis on Emotional Power and Colonial Anxiety: A Comparative Study of Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Tagore's The Home and the World

This paper aims to enhance the understanding of emotionally motivated critical thinking in literature through the introduction of a new theoretical term, Reactive Defensive Oppression (RDO). Reactive Defensive Oppression will try to intercept and analyze Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World in terms of the characters, like Okonkwo and Sandip, who violate the basic human decencies and choose oppression to defend their emotional stature. Okonkwo’s psychological collapse, hypermasculinity, and rigidity of character, Sandip’s choosing a superficial and ideological appearance to mask his moral anxiety and social irrelevance, Bimala’s hyperreaction, and Nikhil’s detachment to maintain his moral and ethical ground suggest that they are all-natural prey of Reactive Defensive Oppression. Thus, RDO backs their oppression by analyzing psychoanalytical fear of shame and fear of being irrelevant. RDO offers a diversified explanation and a chance to apply this theory in cultural anthropology, gender studies and queer theory.