FEMALE RESISTANCE AND AGENCY: A FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF PATRIARCHAL STRUCTURES IN HART’S WEYWARD
Keywords:
Female Agency, Female Oppression, Female Subjectivity, Feminism, Male Dominance, Radical FeminismAbstract
The current study focuses on the patriarchal power that governs women's bodies, knowledge, sexuality, and autonomy. The novel Weyward (2023) by Emilia Hart features the life stories of Altha, Violet, and Kate, from different historical periods: 1619, 1942, and 2019, and reflects gender oppression. Close reading and thematic analysis determine feminist issues such as witchcraft in response to patriarchal violence, family imprisonment, domestic violence, and the internalization of male dominance. This study is a qualitative textual analysis informed by Catharine A. MacKinnon's Radical Feminist Theory. In Weyward, Patriarchy manifests in terms of legal, religious, family, and intimate systems that explain gender inequality. In Weyward, the female body is presented as a political entity in which control and opposition coexist. The knowledge of women, such as about nature and herbalism, is a challenge for men's power. Women's resistance shows in the form of silence, strategic compliance, memory, and survival-oriented coping mechanisms. Patriarchal power is a political figure that is important with respect to radical feminist theory. The novel also highlights intergenerational trauma and women's solidarity whereby oppressed histories and collective memory shift individual pain into collective feminist awareness. The study concludes that Weyward is a modern feminist novel that reshapes resistance into endurance, survival, and reclaiming agency. The experience of women placed in a radical feminist paradigm, the study highlights the contemporary discourse on patriarchy, autonomy, and women's resistance in the literary world.
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