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Silence in The Woman Warrior

In Maxine Hong KingstonÆs The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, the concept of silence plays a significant role in illustrating concepts of gender, culture, and prejudice. Above all, silence is used as a symbolic representation of the muting of individuality and individual expression due to gender, culture, and prejudice. These forces of gender, culture, and prejudice that undermine individuality and stifle expression manifest themselves both within the culture of the individual and the mainstream culture. KingstonÆs semi-autobiographical novel demonstrates the struggle of Maxine to form her own identity in relation to her Chinese and American cultures and the demands placed on her by them both tending toward silence of expression. As Richard Teleky maintains, ôKingstonÆs own solution to the conflicts of a dual ethnic perspective and cultural allegiance is to become a writer. Her choice is language as a way out of silenceö (214). This analysis will demonstrate how gender, culture, and prejudice tend to silence individual expression.

In The Woman Warrior we see silence taken to its figurative and literal height. In the story we are witness to a girl whose own culture is so oppressive that it chops off part of her tongue to prevent her from saying anything inappropriate. Forms of expression and occupations that tend to enhance them, like writing and learning, are not fostered in this society. In order to try to escape the silence of oppression of expression, the character in The Woman Warrior must leave behind her family, friends, and culture. She must go against cultural forces and prejudices to keep women silent and chooses to educate herself. She knows her parents are disappointed in her because she is not a male, so she uses college as a means to achieve her own sense of self and self-worth, ôI went away to college-Berkeley in the sixties-and I studied and I marched to change the world, but I did ...

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Silence in The Woman Warrior. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 19:55, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1711475.html