DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2020.v08i09.003

Pages: 439-448

A woman’s immediate environment determines her course of life. This is more so when both enduring practices of culture and race seem to conspire to restrict a woman’s possibilities of mapping her vision and maneuvering through the day-to-day challenges. In this study, we explore how Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus portray the deceptive systems of inequality as espoused in the depressing home spaces. The illusory familial ties are revealed for what they really are: ties that bind the woman to servitude. The two writers suggest a need for a new gender consciousness that will give space to a new woman to unfurl. The two novels converge at the point of imagining a refashioned woman who, having festered within walls of patriarchal reign, lets the male excesses to implode and out of the patriarchal smithereens, emerges a majestic woman. Locating its search in the theoretical strain of Ogundipe-Leslie’s Stiwanism, this study confirms the two texts as formidable proposals for a possible independent vision of a black woman.