Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
¶ … 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...
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…
Bibliography
Chatman, S. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon, 1990.
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 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
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
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
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.
Ghosts in Two Novels Immigration can be a painful and to a certain extent puzzling experience for those who leave behind a culture, which was starkly different from the one, they encountered upon immigration. We have heard and read numerous tales of immigration and related problems and thus there have been numerous books on the subject and some of them have left an indelible impression on reader's mind. Two such books,