Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior

Whether born in pre-World War II China, or post-World War II America, whether conventional or rebellious, the female characters in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior are united by various forms of the oppression of women. In China gender discrimination was much more severe than in the United States. The stories of the Chinese women in Kingston's memory novel reveal not only their inferior status in Chinese society, but also their passivity that, in a sense, makes them enablers of their role. Kingston, struggling with her identity as a child and young woman and repudiating the traditional role of the submissive, always obedient Chinese woman, becomes the female avenger in her fantasies, "the woman warrior." By the book's end, Kingston has become a woman warrior in reality, winning her fight to carve out her own place in life without following the dictates of gender and cultural strictures. The subtitle of Kingston's book is Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, and the book is both a well-crafted, imaginative memoir and a means of exorcising the ghosts and demons Kingston faced. The ghosts of the sub-title are entities representing the memories and remnants of the Chinese experience, and these entities permeate Kingston's life and consciousness. This paper will discuss the turmoil she felt growing up hearing horrific stories of her mother's and aunt's oppressive life in China, and how her own experiences growing up in the United States differed. Her dilemma was trying to f

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tory of a mythical woman warrior whose actions provide a life style different from the two traditional roles of slave or obedient wife, roles that depict the oppression of women. Brave Orchid tells her daughter "how Fa Mu Lan fought gloriously and returned alive from war to settle in the village" (20). Fa Mu Lan inspires Kingston because she was a woman who took her destiny into her own hands. Kingston fantasizes that she is a woman warrior, but in reality she knows that the Chinese immigrants of her neighborhood still believe that women are worthless, and that it is "better to raise geese than girls." Still, she is beginning to see that women can be powerful. She rebels against her preordained female role by refusing to cook, and breaking dishes when she had to wash them (47). Attending Berkeley on a scholarship in the 1960s, she "studied, and I marched to change the word, but I did not turn into a boy" (47). The experiences of her college years give her insight into the fact that although women are more liberated in the U.S. than they are in China, they still live in a culture that favors males. Chapter 3, "Shaman," tells the story of Brave Orchid, Kingston's complex mother for whom she has ambiguous feelings. Kingston's father

Category: Literature - M