Silence and Resistance in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

Female silence as a form of imposed social control and the creative reclamation of voice as a form of resistance are central concerns of both Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and a comparative reading reveals the persistent dimensions of gendered exclusion from intellectual and literary life across colonial and modernist contexts. This study examined how both texts construct the relationship between material conditions, intellectual freedom, and the gendered right to speak. A feminist comparative methodology drawing on Woolf's own tradition and African feminist theory was applied. Woolf's essayistic argument that women require material independence (a room, an income) to produce serious literature is read alongside Aidoo's epistolary fiction depicting a Ghanaian woman's diasporic critique of European racism and heteronormativity as structural constraints on Black female expression. The analysis showed that while Woolf speaks from within the centre of literary culture (however excluded as a woman), Aidoo speaks from the double marginalisation of race and gender in a European context. Both texts, however, enact their arguments formally: Woolf's essay refuses to be a conventional academic argument, and Aidoo's novel refuses to be a conventional novel. The study concludes that both texts offer model performances of intellectual resistance to the structures they critique and recommends the pairing for gender and literature courses in Nigerian universities, particularly those in the South East zone with strong feminist literary traditions.

Keywords: female silence, resistance, Aidoo, Woolf, feminist literature