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¶ … 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 degrading to women who were treated like non-human beings by Chinese chauvinistic society. However things changed for the generation of Chinese that grew up in the U.S. Or at least that is what Kingston wants us to believe.
Frank Chin has been the most vocal critic of Kingston's who accused her "of reinforcing white fantasies about Chinese-Americans" (Chin, 1991) and claimed that writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan and David Henry Hwang who won approval of the American white readers deliberately distorted the image of Chinese-American to reinforce stereotypes and cater to the fantasies of American readers about a traditionalist Chinese culture. (Frank Chin, 1991, pp. 3-29)
In order to better understand the criticism against Kingston, we must first understand what is meant by orientalist thinking or orientalism for that matter. One of the authorities on the subject, Edward Said explains the term "Orientalism" and tackles the question of East and West divide in the framework of western discourse. He realizes that in order to establish the superiority of western ideology, western discourse illustrated an irrelevant and rather unrealistic picture of the "Other." This 'Other' was termed as Orient or the Oriental and the culture that it subscribed was referred to as Orientalism. The creation of this 'other' was critical for accentuating the superiority of the west. And hence Said believes that Orient has not been depicted as it really was but was made to fit the so-called Oriental picture by means of western manipulation and fabrication. This is what was meant by his statement that, "Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be "Oriental"...
5-6)
By discussing the Orient, the west had only one agenda in mind and that was to subjugate all identities and nationalities other than its own. This was done by various means and especially by constructing a poor mythical picture of the Orient and then forcing all Oriental societies to fit that image. The same treatment was meted out to Japanese societies and other societies of the East. India was the land of snake-charmers and spices for as long as we can remember until India burst out with a brand-new identity by becoming a leader in science and technology. However to this day, many people would connect India with its Oriental image and those who visit the land usually do so because of the mythical picture they have constructed in their minds. India is no such place and it never was. But presenting it as an exotic and mythical land west had no desire to accentuate the beauty or charm of the land but instead it simply wanted to develop an unmistakable contrast between East and West so the latter would always be able to maintain its dominance by presenting itself as the more enlightened and educated of the two societies. The same treatment was then accorded to the Chinese societies and the readers assumed that this was probably the real Oriental society without ever questioning the authenticity of the account in the eyes of the people being depicted: "There is very little consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Flaubert's encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was "typically Oriental." (Orientalism, p. 6)
Thus when applied to the novel, The Woman Warrior, we can understand why…
References:
Frank Chin. 1991. Come all ye Asian-American writers of the real and the fake. In: Jeffery Paul Chan, et al. (eds.), The big Aiiieeeee: An anthology of Chinese-American and Japanese-American literature. New York: A Meridian Book.
Maxine Hong Kingston. 1981. The woman warrior. London: Picador.
Maxine Hong Kingston. 1998. Cultural mis-readings by American reviewers. In: Laura E. Skandera-Trombley. (ed.), Critical essays on Maxine Hong Kingston. New York G.K. Hall & Co., 100.
Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. Vintage Books, New York.
Maxine Kingston's Contribution To Literature Maxine Kingston's Contribution to Contemporary Literature Maxine Hong Kingston's literature falls into the Contemporary Literature movement and many critics consider her work to be an important contribution on the feminist front as well as that of Asian literature. Kingston was born in Stockton, California in 1940 and is the best recognized Asian-American writer of today. (2094) The Woman Warrior demonstrates the struggle experienced as a Chinese-American growing
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
Woman Maxine Hong Kingston's short story "No Name Woman" approaches the silencing of women and the potential for their expression in younger generations through the story of the narrator's unnamed, possibly fictional aunt. In particular, the story highlights the way in which women can actually work to reinforce the social standards which keep them silenced and relatively powerless, because the narrator's mother uses the story of the nameless aunt in
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
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.