FRAGMENTED SELVES, SILENT RESISTANCE: A GYNOCRITICAL READING OF FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN AKWAEKE EMEZI'S FRESHWATER

Abstract

This article presents a gynocritical reading of Akwaeke Emezi's debut novel Freshwater (2018), examining how the text constructs female subjectivity through fragmentation, silence, and spiritual embodiment. Drawing on Elaine Showalter's biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic, and cultural models of gyno criticism, alongside Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's theory of female doubling, the study analyses selected passages that depict Ada's plural identity, the collective "we" narrative voice of the ọgbanje spirits, and the dual function of silence as both oppression and resistance. Although Freshwater has attracted substantial critical attention within queer, postcolonial, trauma, and speculative-fiction scholarship, a sustained gynocritical engagement with the novel remains largely absent. Using a qualitative, interpretive method of close textual analysis, the article argues that Ada's fragmented selfhood should not be read through a Western psychological framework of disorder, but rather as a culturally and spiritually grounded articulation of Igbo cosmology. It further contends that silence in the novel operates simultaneously as an instrument of familial and patriarchal control and as a strategy of self-protection and refusal. The article concludes that Freshwater extends the boundaries of gyno criticism beyond its originally Anglo-American frame, demonstrating that indigenous African spiritual epistemologies can meaningfully expand feminist literary theory's understanding of embodiment, voice, and female subjectivity.