CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE’S PURPLE HIBISCUS: A GYNOCRITICAL INTERPRETATION

Abstract

Scholars have employed Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus to discuss diverse themes, including domestic violence, silence and voice, religion and fanaticism, family, love, and resistance. The novel has also attracted a number of criticisms, including feminist, colonial, postcolonial, and ecocriticism. This article aims at adding to the list by interrogating the novel through a gynocritic lens, which looks at the novel’s dependence on the woman as a writer rather than as a reader. Gynocriticism is a feminist theory coined by Elaine Showalter in 1979. The theory is an offshoot of the feminist focus on conventional women’s roles in a patriarchal and male-dominated world, but aims to create a new tradition of women’s literature that focuses on women’s experience, their sisterhood and subculture. The article therefore, analyses the themes of voice vs silence, motherhood- a tool for resistance, and friendship and sisterhood from Purple Hibiscus. The article finds from the novel that women cannot only be seen with respect to men, domestic roles, and treatment in a patriarchal literary society and world, as illustrated through the female characters such as Beatrice, Ifeoma, Amaka, and Kambili in the text, but also in their internal struggles and relationships with other women and their perceptions about life. This article establishes that if women continue to focus on the literature produced by men, they will never be able to learn about their internal experiences and will only know women as seen by men. The article therefore, concludes that Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus is a Nigerian narrative that urges women to aspire to negotiate silence, violence, and family to carve out space for themselves through solidarity, alternative space, and ultimately, autonomy.