The woman warrior: themes and literary analysis

¶ … Yuan Shu's, "Cultural Politics and Chinese-American Female Subjectivity: Rethinking Kingston's Woman Warrior,"

In "Cultural Politics and Chinese-American Female Subjectivity: Rethinking Kingston's Woman Warrior," Yuan Shu observes the Warrior Woman as a feminist piece as well as a political and social one. While this is an exhaustive piece about these topics, I disagree with most of what Shu presents. One notion that I disagreed with Shu on was the observation, "Kingston virtually constructs the woman warrior as an antithesis to 'the no-name woman' and, in the process, pits the more successful woman against the less fortunate one in precisely the same patriarchal terms against which she has tried to rebel" (Shu). While I agree with this assertion, I am not sure that I agree with her final point. While Kingston does pit these types against one another, I think what she has failed to cover, in Shu's estimation, is something that simply did not fit into the context of her novel.

Later, Shu maintains, "Kingston's sense of female subjectivity indeed points to an alternative to the version of individualism in Western autobiography. However, Kingston never challenges the value of individualism per se and actually deploys the discourse of individualism as a means to fight against Chinese patriarchal tradition and to articulate her identity in American culture and society" (Shu). I disagree with this notion as well because Kingston does challenge the value of individualism - she does it through the context of the novel, which is through the mother and daughter relationship. The novel is comprised of situations and circumstance that shape individuals. It is through the process of story telling that the mother and daughter discover who they are. The narrator in this story evolves as this process does. She might discover who she is but she also discovers what she is not. This is the process of discovering oneself.

I do not mind that Shu can ask questions about the novel such as, "Why were Chinese-American businesses separated from the mainstream economy? Why didn't working class immigrant women like herself get any adequate training for the workforce?" (Shu); however, I do not think that it is fair to criticize the novel because these questions are not answered according to Shu's expectations. These are important questions to ask but the novel does not set itself up to answer these questions and should be read as the work of art it was intended to be rather than an historically accurate piece.

I do agree with Shu on the idea, "Kingston combines stories from different sources in Chinese history and culture. She constructs the woman warrior as one who both fulfills her filial obligations to her family and village and cherishes her own dream of love and the world of success" (Shu). This is true and I think this idea is the most predominant one with which readers will walk away. Furthermore, I believe this is the notion that Kingston hopes to convey more than anything else in her novel. While she might broach other issues, they are secondary.