The Unspoken Ideology: A Critical Stylistic Analysis of Silent Ideologies in Festus Iyayi’s Violence and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus

This study applies Critical Stylistics to Festus Iyayi’s Violence and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus to examine how the linguistic choices of both authors construct and communicate ideologies of gender and power. Rather than accepting the conventional assumption that both novels simply reproduce a feminist ideology of male domination and female subjugation, the study sets out to identify the authors’ more complex visions of the female gender, to demonstrate how specific linguistic choices function as indices of intended meaning, and to illustrate how dialogue contributes thematic depth and stylistic distinctiveness to the two narratives. A descriptive, textual-analytic design was adopted, with data purposively sampled from Violence (19 chapters, 293 pages) and Purple Hibiscus (4 chapters, 140 pages). The analysis is anchored in Jeffries’s (2010) Critical Stylistics framework, drawing on four of her ten analytical tools. The findings indicate that both authors deploy linguistic choices that position women not only as victims but also, at points, as agents of power and, in some instances, oppression. The study concludes that linguistic choice is central to how each text constructs a layered social reality in which power is distributed unevenly and does not run in a single direction. Future research applying this Critical Stylistics model to Iyayi’s Heroes and The Contract, and to Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, is recommended to test whether these ideological patterns hold across the two authors’ wider bodies of work.