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¶ … Woman Warrior
My aunt haunts me -- her ghosts drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her," (16). Aunts, the sisters of fathers or mothers who serve as surrogate female role models, play a central role in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. However, Kingston's aunts are no warrior women; in fact, "No-Name Woman" and "Moon Orchid" embody the antithesis of the woman warrior-heroine. No-Name Woman disgraces herself and her family, killing herself and her newborn and forever erasing her name from the family tree. Kingston can but imagine the true spirit of this no-name aunt who haunts her since her mother told her the tale of her downfall. Similarly, Moon Orchid displays shameful characteristics: she cannot pull her weight doing chores when she arrives in America and she hasn't got the gumption to stand up to her husband. Both No-Name Woman and Moon Orchid became subservient to men, a quality Kingston fears and struggles to reconcile with her life in the more sexually liberated culture of America. Kingston's aunts are victims of their internal psychological weakness and of the restrictions placed on them by an overtly patriarchal society. Kingston uses her aunts to convey several messages in The Woman Warrior; serving as contrasts to the solid strength of strong, empowered women like Fa Mu Lan, Brave Orchid, and even Kingston herself, the aunts featured in the book provide the contrast necessary...
Brave Orchid's talk-story of No-Name Woman stimulates Kingston's fertile imagination. Filling in the gaps of her mysterious aunt's life, Kingston imagines what went on in her aunt's psyche to lead her to her fate. As with many of the incidents and tales in The Woman Warrior, the story of No-Name Woman could indeed be a fiction, a tall tale her mother drew up for the sole purpose of frightening her daughter away from premarital sex. The No-Name Woman tale could have been a family myth, one passed on from mother to daughter for generations for that very purpose. Even if the aunt was real, Kingston has no way of discovering the truth and is thus forced to complete the picture of No-Name Woman herself.
In her re-telling of her mother's talk-story, Kingston betrays a sense of admiration for her disgraced aunt. In doing so, she elevates her status from a forgotten person to a teacher. Kingston notes that No-Name Woman never betrayed the name of her lover, an act of dignity and pride. Moreover, through her tragic story, Kingston formulates some of her own values, beliefs, and ideals about her culture, about men, about sexuality, and about marriage. She…
Works Cited
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
Her visions of her mother as some kind of monster-deliverer appear in Kingston's nightmares. She states on page 86, "My mother has given me pictures to dream -- nightmare babies that recur." The grotesque imagery of her mother delivering monsters corresponds also with her dreamlike memories of foods they ate when she was a child in China. The images converge in Kingston's head to provide the foundation for her
Woman Warrior Maxine Kingston's Woman warrior has been a controversial addition to the literature written by Chinese-American writers. The writer has tried to answer the critical question of Chinese-American identity and hence been criticized for adopting an orientalist framework to win approval of the west. The woman warrior speaks of a culture that neatly fits the description of the "Other" in the orientalist framework. It appears alien, remote and immensely
It is true that while Kingston can use irony against the stereotypes of passivity imposed upon Chinese femininity, at other times she seems to use these stereotypes less self-consciously. Her portrayal of her mother calling white people 'ghosts,' and her decision to name her mother Brave Orchid, seem to reflect cultural construction of Oriental women and Asians in general as superstitious and somewhat primitive in their understanding of the world.
Forbidden Face and the Woman Warrior In My Forbidden Face, Latifa narrates a poignant coming-of-age story of a young girl growing up under the brutal regime of the Taliban. Latifa skillfully pulls the reader into a world that seems that of a typical teenager. She writes of "college, girlfriends in search of music tapes, film videos, novels to read avidly in bed in the evening" (11). Latifa's protected world collapses when
memoirs, The Woman Warrior and Angela's Ashes, Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank McCourt, respectively, present unique and complete views of worlds that widely diverge from the sort of lifestyles and experiences that are enjoyed by the average citizens of the United States of America. Part of the most simple reason for this is their "outsider" statues. As an immigrant, in Frank McCourt's case, and as the child of immigrant
Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir, the Woman Warrior, may be considered a microcosm of the work as a whole. The section "No Name Woman" incorporates the recurring themes of silence, invisibility, ghosts and using words as weapons. It is argued, that the story's central theme is the process of "finding a personal voice" (Ling). This is mainly about the Aunt, but also about the mother and the narrator. It is a