The Woman Warrior

In the introduction to When Memory Speaks, Ker Conway (1999) frequently discusses the dilemma of duality for female writers, both in terms of maintaining a separate voice and gender and writing autobiography in a culture, language, and consciousness that are male dominated: "What makes the reading of autobiography so appealing is the chance it offers to see how this man or that woman�has negotiated the problem of self-awareness and has broken the internalized code a culture supplies about how life should be experienced." For Maxine Hong Kingston, a Chinese American female, culture presented a dual ethnic dilemma in addition to a dual gender dilemma. Hong Kingston chose to become a writer to find expression for defining self, something that is readily apparent in the largely autobiographical The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. While a review of Kingston's novel might equally fit in Conway's sections entitled "Feminist Plots", "Assertive Women", and "Grim Tales", I believe it most fits into the section labeled "Word and Image," because of the nature of both silence and voice in The Woman Warrior.

The Woman Warrior recounts the struggles of a Chinese American girl to find herself, feeling distanced both from her family's rigid culture that places a premium value on "sons" and American culture which views her as "different". Language, words, and voice are extremely important throughout the story. Communication become

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attempts to find her own sense, identity and meaning against a backdrop of dualistic cultures, beliefs, and understandings. Ker Conway (1999) maintains that, "Whether we are aware of it or not, our culture gives us an inner script by which we live our lives." In The Woman Warrior we see a most powerful expression of this in the scene where Maxine tortures another girl in the lavatory. She pinches the girl's cheeks and pulls her hair, trying to make the "silent" girl utter even one word. The girl refuses to say anything, despite Maxine's harsh treatment of her and telling her it is for her own good. Showing how unaware she is as a young woman about the influence of her own culture, Maxine mimics her mother's controlling nature in this scene, telling others what to do and making them somehow feel that how they are and who they are is not good. Yet this powerful scene has an enormous significance on the growth and maturity of Maxine. She realizes oppression is often the result of a lack of understanding and only a reflection of self. As Teleki (2001) writes in his review of the book, in this scene "rather than persisting as oppressor and defining another, she sees that monster figures can be reflections of our own fears abou

Category: Literature - T