Maxine Hong Kingston\'s Memoir, the Woman Warrior,

¶ … 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 combination of three female characters each trying to find a voice and fighting against silence, some by choice such as the narrator, some by force, such as the mother, that makes this a powerful theme.

Silence is especially important in the story in relation to women, women are not expected to be outspoken but to live in the background, not expressing their feelings and more importantly, not being expected to have feelings, "the work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one's guts not be turned into action" (Kingston).

The silence theme is also linked to the words as weapons theme.

Firstly, the villagers use words as weapons to push the aunt to suicide.

Even more importantly, words are a weapon used against the ghost of the aunt, with the mother refusing to speak the aunt's name. This is a continual punishment for the aunt as well as for the mother, with the mother living in denial of the aunt's actions.

The narrator uses words as a weapon where she goes against her mother and brings the aunt's story back to life by writing about it. This telling of the story incorporates the voice of the aunt, the mother and the narrator. It is this that gives the story its power, not the story itself, but seeing the story from these three different angles (Chatman).

Looking at the story in this way, words are a weapon offering something to the reader. Just as the aunt was punished by silence, her story comes back alive where the narrator breaks this silence.

The concept of invisibility works on several different levels.

Firstly, the individual becomes invisible where the goals of the village as a whole are put above the needs of the individual with nobody expected to have any type of individual private life, "the villagers punished her for acting as if she could have a private life, secret and apart from them" (Kingston).

We also see that anything outside of the villager's values is invisible to them. We see this with the Aunt's pregnancy, "she could not have been pregnant, you see, because her husband had been gone for years" (Kingston). The reality of the situation is oblivious to them, because it is outside of what the village as a whole considers correct behavior.

We also see that an individual is invisible without a family, with this being the reason that the Aunt kills the child along with herself, "but how would this tiny child without family find her grave when there would be no marker for her anywhere, neither in the earth nor the family hall?...A child with no descent line would not soften her life but only trail after her, ghostlike, begging her to give it purpose" (Kingston).

The greatest reference to ghosts is through the Aunt herself. We see the mother of the narrator refuses for the Aunt's name to be spoken, choosing to act as if she never existed. The Aunt herself is a ghost, there in the background but never acknowledged.