Archetype and the Image of the Woman in Amu-Nnadi’s A Field of Echoes

Archetype is a universal mode of being which is often recognized as recurrent among humans in different times and culture. It was applied in psychology as a recurrent pattern among human in psychiatric cases. It was later developed into a lager behavioural concept in arts and that identifies and classifies social similarities into common universal patterns. From existing literature, archetype has been studies as the form and the recurrency of the literary motif. Yet, not much attention is given to its prototypical nature which continues to yield critically to original object or pattern for other models of generalization. From Carl Jung’s Archetype and the collective unconscious, this paper interrogates the image of the woman in three recurrent motifs- the famme fatale, the Penelope and the Aphrodite in Amu-Anadi’s A Field of Echoes. Although, the image of the woman has been investigated in many African novels, not much attention has been given to the image focusing on these archetypal models., The paper however, examines the images as universal models foregrounded in archetypal criticism.