The Patriarchy and Paradox of Sisterhood in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dream Count

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count (2025) represents female solidarity as both a connection the novel’s characters actively seek and a relationship repeatedly undermined by patriarchal expectation. Reading the interlocking stories of Chiamaka, Zikora, Omelogor, and Kadiatou, this study asks why women whose circumstances differ substantially in class, nationality, and migration status nonetheless end up injuring one another through strikingly similar patterns of surveillance, judgement, and withdrawal. The answer, it argues, lies less in any individual woman’s character than in structures none of them chose: maternal gatekeeping, a scarcity economy built around patriarchal approval, son preference, and professional rivalry. This study reads the novel through psychoanalytic feminism, drawing on Nancy Chodorow’s account of the reproduction of mothering, Adrienne Rich’s distinction between the experience and institution of motherhood, Luce Irigaray’s theory of women’s inscription within phallocentric structures, Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, and Jessica Benjamin’s analysis of mutual recognition. The central argument is that the paradox of sisterhood in Dream Count operates not through women’s deliberate antagonism but through an internalisation of patriarchal norms so thorough that female characters police oOne another with a conviction no external authority could match. Although the novel depicts meaningful moments of solidarity, these moments remain constrained by class, reproductive, familial, and institutional inequalities, and the study attends to both their value and their limits.