Gender and Power in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre

Domestic spaces and family structures serve as microcosms of larger patriarchal systems in both nineteenth-century British and contemporary Nigerian fiction, and a comparative reading of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus illuminates continuities and differences in how young women writers depict female resistance to patriarchal control across widely separated historical and cultural contexts. This study examined how Kambili and Jane Eyre navigate oppressive domestic environments while seeking authentic selfhood and moral agency. A feminist comparative methodology drawing on liberal and third-wave feminist theory was applied. Both protagonists are silenced by powerful male figures (Eugene Achike and Mr Brocklehurst/Rochester) and must develop internal moral resources to resist or escape their environments. The comparative analysis revealed that while Bronte's Jane ultimately achieves romantic love and domestic authority within the Victorian ideal of the companionate marriage, Adichie's Kambili inherits a more ambiguous freedom in which her father's death liberates rather than resolves the family's trauma. Both novels use the voice of a first-person narrator whose growth in articulacy parallels her growth in agency. The study concludes that while the specific forms of patriarchal control differ across colonial and postcolonial contexts, both novels construct female resistance as primarily internal, ethical, and narrative, and recommends a joint reading for courses exploring the global novel at universities in the South East geopolitical zone of Nigeria.

Keywords: gender, patriarchy, Adichie, Bronte, feminist literary criticism