Silencing Women in Woolf and Hong Kingston's Works

The Silencing of Women in Woolf and Hong Kingston

Woolf's essay Shakespeare's Sister is a clear portrait of the silencing of women by larger society. Within it, Virginia Woolf describes the fictional life of Judith, the sister of Shakespeare. She begins by noting the absence of women's presence in both history books and literature: "what I find deplorable, I continued, looking about the bookshelves again, is that nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century." She goes on to consider the role of women in that period — their subservience to the men in their lives and the silencing of their voices — and declares, "it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare."

In large part, Woolf attributes the absence of women's presence within literature to the silencing of women's voices. In musing on the lack of any work by Judith, Woolf notes that anonymity was central to women's place in the world: "Undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century."

No Name Woman by Maxine Hong Kingston also reveals the silencing of women by the larger world. Set within the twentieth century, Kingston's story tells of the shaming and silencing of a Chinese woman — the aunt — who becomes pregnant by a man who is not her husband. As scholar Amy Ling notes, No Name Woman is the "cautionary tale of woman as victim."

In Hong Kingston's story, the aunt is silenced not so much by the overt actions of her family and friends, but by a deliberate erasure. Writes Hong Kingston: "The real punishment was not the raid swiftly inflicted by the villagers, but the family's deliberately forgetting her. Her betrayal so maddened them, they saw to it that she would suffer forever, even after death."

In both No Name Woman and Shakespeare's Sister, women are silenced not by society as a whole but by the actions of their families and loved ones. The aunt in No Name Woman is silenced by her family's shunning. Similarly, Judith is constrained by her family: "She (Judith) cried out that the marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father," writes Woolf. The women in these stories are often unthinking in their obedience and virtually powerless to resist. Kingston writes of the aunt's sexual relations with the man who impregnated her: "She obeyed him; she always did as she was told." Woolf likewise notes Judith's obedience to her father's demands.

Resurrection by the Female Author

Both Shakespeare's Sister and No Name Woman employ the literary device of the resurrection of the "disappeared" woman. In Shakespeare's Sister, Woolf deliberately recreates the fictional life of Judith, the sister of the famed playwright William Shakespeare. Her recreation is detailed and aimed at helping the reader understand why Judith disappeared from history. From the beginning, Judith, though talented and imaginative, does not have the same resources as her brother: "she (Judith) was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil." Later, Judith disobeys her father and goes to London in the hope of joining the theatre, where she meets terrible resistance. Woolf writes, "She (Judith) stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager — a fat, loose-lipped man — guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting — no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress." Woolf's tale of the disappeared Judith ends tragically: she "killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses stop outside the Elephant and Castle."

Within No Name Woman, Maxine Hong Kingston also depicts the resurrection of the disappeared woman. The narrator, a young Chinese-American woman, tells the story of her aunt, who was ostracized by her family for the crime of giving birth to an illegitimate child. As Ling notes, "The author breaks the family silence by writing about this rebel whom she calls 'my forebear.'"

In Kingston's story, the narrator has participated in the silencing of her aunt, causing her to "disappear." Kingston writes: "there is more to this silence: they want me to participate in her punishment. And I have. In the twenty years since I heard this story I have not asked for details nor said my aunt's name; I do not know it." Yet the narrator breaks this silence, and causes the story of the disappeared aunt to be told once again: "My aunt haunts me — her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her."

Interestingly, the stories of the disappeared women in both Shakespeare's Sister and No Name Woman end in tragedy. Both women die by suicide, victims of the silencing of their lives and stories. The aunt in No Name Woman even goes so far as to "haunt" the niece who dares to tell her story. Writes Hong Kingston: "I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water."

Conclusion

Woolf's Shakespeare's Sister and Hong Kingston's No Name Woman describe the silencing of women's voices and the resurrection of these disappeared voices by the female author. The lives of Hong Kingston and Woolf provide a dramatic contrast to the suppression of women depicted in their works, and the success of Hong Kingston and other women in the literary world represents the fulfillment of Woolf's dream for Shakespeare's sister.

Works Cited

Cross, Edwina Peterson. "Shakespeare's Sister." Outback Online. 2003.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. "No Name Woman." The Modern World.

Ling, Amy. "Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940)." Houghton Mifflin Company.

Ockerbloom, Mary Mark, ed. "Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)." Celebration of Women Writers. 2000.

Woolf, Virginia. "Shakespeare's Sister." From: A Room of One's Own.