A ROMANTICISM FISSURE IN ADICHIE’S PURPLE HIBISCUS

Abstract

Adichie’s twenty first century post-colonial African writing, a Romantic writing; explored and successfully projected the ideology that had swept through Europe from the seventeenth century and swayed itself to modern times and all over the world. The conflict that generates in Pre-Romantic and Romantic studies of the dwelling of God as captured by Frye’s structure of imagery and how Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus has captured it is the focus of this study. The Fissure in Adichie’s work that exposed the Romantic Ideology places God within man and is juxtaposed with the Pre-Romantic structure (Christian dogma) where God’s dwelling is placed in Heaven, a place where man must follow to attain through the religion, morality and virtue to achieve to meet with God. These paths are already stipulated and unquestionable and therefore can be misinterpreted and abused as exposed by Adichie in the studied work, an ideology which she has rejected fully in the death of the Patriarch who symbolizes that belief. The study concluded that in Adichie’s Romantic flare, she portrayed successfully the God that is within man that guides us to do right and to create. In doing that one will attain to the highest freedom explored by Romantic thoughts.