Silencing Women in Kingston's "No Name Woman"

Introduction: Silencing and Its Enforcers

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 order to scare the narrator into conforming more closely to cultural norms. However, the narrator is critical enough to see through this ideological imposition, and works to undermine not only her mother's method of control through fear but also the underlying societal assumptions which motivate her mother in the first place. By examining the motivations of the narrator's mother in conjunction with the critical perspective of the narrator, one is able to see how breaking the silence of women's voices necessarily stems from confronting those women actively engaged in maintaining that silence.

The narrator identifies her mother's goal in telling the story of her nameless aunt immediately after it concludes, when she notes that "the emigrants confused the gods by diverting their curses, misleading them with crooked streets and false names," and thus "must try to confuse their offspring as well, who, I suppose, threaten them in similar ways — always trying to get things straight, always to name the unspeakable" (Kingston 5). Because "those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America," emigrants are necessarily confronted by their children regarding the social structures and norms transferred from one country to another (Kingston 5). In the act of trying "to understand what things in you are Chinese," the narrator implicitly criticizes any and all preexisting standards of behavior and thought given to her by her parents, because there is no way to accurately understand the different elements of her identity (Kingston 5).

The Mother's Story as Ideological Control

This presents a conflict between "those carrying traditional female social roles [and] those whose experience and values have been shaped by the new possibilities [...] of the late twentieth century" (Machin 110). The former group represents an attempt to maintain preexisting social standards not by arguing for the logical validity of those standards, but rather by precluding any criticism of them. Thus, the purpose of the mother's story is not only to instill a sense of fear regarding sexual relationships outside the strict boundaries dictated by traditional society, but also to preclude any questioning of those boundaries.

This is why the narrator's mother begins and ends the story of the nameless aunt by telling the narrator that she "must not tell anyone," and especially must not "let [her] father know that" she told her (Kingston 1, 5). While this entreaty is obviously born out of a sense of propriety and a dedication to the social standards which condemned the aunt in the first place, its most important function is to preclude questioning or investigation, because the narrator is supposed to accept it as truth without any opportunity for finding corroborating evidence. This is why she is especially forbidden from discussing it with her father, because he would be the one best suited to reveal whether or not he actually had a sister.

In a sense, the narrator's mother is "succeeding" where the nameless aunt failed, because the narrator notes that her aunt's parents "expected her alone to keep the traditional ways, which her brothers, now among the barbarians, could fumble without detection" (Kingston 8). The lie which serves to justify this requirement for women to maintain traditional standards of behavior is based on a claim towards "assign[ing] to women an ethical high ground" by pretending that women represent something more essentially "pure" than men, and thus must work extra hard at remaining pure, whether sexually or culturally (Smith & Watson 30).

Women Enforcing Women's Silence

This assumption that the aunt would be solely responsible for maintaining the traditional ways is merely a specific example of the phenomenon present in nearly all patriarchal societies, in which men are generally not expected to conform to the same set of rules applied to women, especially regarding sexual promiscuity and fidelity. The narrator recognizes this double standard when she wonders about the man who impregnated her aunt, asking "whether he masked himself when he joined the raid on her family" (Kingston 7). Although the claim was that "the heavy, deep-rooted women were to maintain the past against the flood, safe for returning," in reality this assumption — that women would maintain traditional standards while men explored the world — is merely a continuation of unspoken traditional standards of behavior, standards that ultimately serve to control and disempower women (Kingston 8).

Where the narrator's aunt ultimately fails in maintaining these traditional ways by becoming pregnant, her mother succeeds (at least partially) by attempting to maintain these traditions through imposing them on her daughter in the form of stories "to grow up on" (Kingston 5). This demonstrates one of the crucial observations of the story, because it reveals the way in which women often serve to silence their own voices far more effectively than men by internalizing patriarchal assumptions and delivering them to the next generation in the form of "motherly advice." This is not to lay the blame for the historical and ongoing oppression of women on women in general, but rather to acknowledge that this oppression would be largely impossible without the acquiescence of female authority figures.

Specifically, the story seems to suggest that the role women play in silencing women's voices is not through the prescription of laws and explicit standards of behavior — a duty often reserved for men in patriarchal societies, something revealed simply by looking at the disproportionate representation of men in many contemporary legislatures — but rather through a secondary form of control that serves to make the questioning of these laws and standards taboo. This may be seen more clearly when one considers the punishment meted out on the narrator's aunt.