Themes and Analysis
According to E.D. Huntley, several
themes that arise in the novel include: “silence (both gendered and racially
constituted); necessity for speech; the discovery of voice; the construction of
identity and the search for self-realization; the mother-daughter relationship
and the conflicts that it engenders; memory; acculturation and biculturalism;
and cultural alienation.” Huntley compiles a list of scholarly reviews on the
themes and finds that they agree with his findings, particularly themes
relating to immigrant communities and cross-cultural conflict. “Other reviewers
reflect on Kingston’s handling of a theme that pervades the literature of
diaspora and immigrant communities, the theme of cross-cultural conflict.
Huntley also notes: "For reviewer Miriam Greenspan, Maxine Hong Kingston
captures “the pain of an American-born child who inevitably reject the
expectations and authority of her family in favor of the values of the new
land” (Greenspan 108); Linda B. Hall describes the book as “remarkable in its
insights into the plight of individuals pulled between two cultures” (Hall
191); and Susan Currier writes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography
that Woman Warrior is a personal narrative that represents Kingston’s effort
“to reconcile American and Chinese female identities” (Currier 235)." When asked about the cultural themes in her
writing, Kingston responded, “I wonder if it just takes a lifetime or two to be
an integrated person, so that you don’t have to think, at what point do I have
to announce that I am a minority person or a woman or what? When I think back
on when I was a young writer, I would wonder, ok now, when do I let everybody
know that I’m Chinese American? Do I have to announce that?”
The novel also employs several
smaller themes that feature in one or two stories but support the overarching
themes mentioned by Huntley.
No Name Woman
Necessity and Extravagance
In an essay about The Woman
Warrior, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong writes about "the protagonist's
struggle toward a balance between self-actualization and social
responsibility... identified as 'Necessity' and 'Extravagance.'" The
struggle between necessity and extravagance is embodied in the narrator’s
mother’s sparse talk-story and the adultery of the narrator’s aunt:
My mother has told me once and
for all the useful parts. She will add nothing unless powered by Necessity, a
riverbank that guides her life.
Wong explains how “The code of
Necessity that Maxine's mother lives by is a legacy from her native land, where
scarcity of resources has given rise to a rigid, family-centered social
structure.” The aunt’s response to necessity-driven society is extravagance,
embodied in her adultery:
Adultery is extravagance. Could
people who hatch their own chicks and eat the embryos and the heads for
delicacies and boil the feet in vinegar for party food, leaving only the
gravel, eating even the gizzard lining - could such people engender a prodigal
aunt? To be a woman, to have a daughter in starvation time was a waste enough.
Silence: Individual and Cultural Repression Across the Generations
The theme of silence is tied to the
cross-cultural difficulties that the narrator faces throughout her own life.
Kingston writes that “The Chinese I know hide their names; sojourners take new
names when their lives change and guard their real names with silence.”
The implication of silence goes beyond simply
hiding names; it means the confusion of Chinese culture to first-generation Chinese
Americans like the narrator. The narrator asks:
Chinese-Americans, when you try
to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is
peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who
marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese
tradition and what is the movies?
But the silence of the narrator's
family is also used as a curse against the adulterous aunt. The way in which
the family is silent about her erases her from the family history and from life
itself. It is this silence that creates a horrifying ghost out of the aunt that
haunts the narrator:
My aunt haunts me—her ghost
drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of
paper to her.
The Community vs. the Individual
Although the story takes place in
1924 before the time of the Chinese Revolution, we get the sense that there are
intense communal ties binding No Name Woman’s village together. In one
interpretation of the story, Kingston describes the villagers’ violent raid as
a reaction against her individual will:
In the Village Structure,
spirits shimmered among the live creatures, balanced and held in equilibrium by
time and land…the villagers punished her for acting as if she could have a
private life, secret and apart from them.
This idea that the individualistic
person is a negative asset to a community directly contrasts from the American
culture, which values the individual. From this perspective, the No Name Woman
story can be interpreted as showing the contrast between communal values of Old
China versus the impending American culture that is taking so many of the
villagers away.
Repression of Sexuality
The repression of sexuality can be
interpreted alongside the aforementioned theme of the community vs. the
individual. Kingston interprets No Name Woman’s adulterous relationship as a
result of her ability to remain sexually attractive, which is an expression of
individuality. All the villagers in the 1924 China town are supposed to remain
dull as a sign of community solidarity:
Brothers and sisters, newly men
and women, had to efface their sexual color and present plain miens. Disturbing
hair and eyes, a smile like no other, threatened the ideal of five generations
living under one roof.
Although both men and women had to
remain sexually dull in 1924 China, Kingston finds herself reevaluating the
meaning of sexual attraction while growing up. She finds herself having to both
repress her sexuality (she insists that she will have "no dates" but also
uphold a standard of being “American Feminine.”) Trying to find her sexual
identity as a Chinese-American woman growing up in the 1940s is something that
vexes Kingston throughout The Woman Warrior.
Shaman
Ghosts
Ghosts perpetuate throughout The
Woman Warrior, but it is especially prevalent in “Shaman.” There are evil
poltergeists such as the Sitting Ghost who torments Brave Orchid, but there are
also the numerous White and Black Ghosts referred to in America:
Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts Police
Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree Trimming Ghosts, Five-and-Dime
Ghosts.
Brave Orchid considers all
non-Chinese people to be ghosts. She sees these people as foreign and calling
them “ghosts” is her refusal to accept them, though she has lived in America
for so long. She still considers China to be her “home” and refers to America
as a “terrible ghost country, where a human being works her life away.”
At The Western Palace
Tradition vs. Assimilation
Throughout this chapter, Brave
Orchid seems incredibly unaware of the realities around her. We first notice
this in the beginning, when she cannot conceive that Moon Orchid may have aged
in the past 30 years. When she later “speaks with the invisibilities” while her
children are opening Moon Orchid’s presents, we know that something is amiss.
Brave Orchid is showing a complete submissiveness to all things traditional.
This intense hold on tradition is
most evident while Brave Orchid desperately attempts to reunite Moon Orchid
with her husband. Brave Orchid is willing to overstep any social code to get
them back together. When Moon Orchid tells her that it is against the law for
men in the U.S. to have more than one wife, Brave Orchid responds by saying
“The law doesn’t matter.” Such blatant denial of reality proves how strongly
Brave Orchid is attached to upholding Chinese moral standards. She refuses to
assimilate to an American code of behavior.
The story of the Western Palace is
the perfect metaphor for this idea. “East” represents the old culture of China,
while “West” represents the modern culture of America. As the Empress of the
East, Moon Orchid is supposed to save her husband from his impending American
assimilation, embodied by his “Western Empress”, or new wife.
Brave Orchid: Feminist?
“At the Western Palace” also brings
up important clues as to the relationship between Brave Orchid and her husband.
This is one of the only chapters in which Brave Orchid slanders her husband for
being sexist, saying ““When your father lived in China, he refused to eat pastries
because he didn’t want to eat the dirt the women kneaded from between their
fingers'. The relationship between the two of them seems passive-aggressively
hostile, which may have something to do with Brave Orchid’s anger towards men
in general. Brave Orchid even cites that the role of a wife is to “scold her
husband into becoming a good man”.
This attitude, combined with her
firm stance on setting things right with Moon Orchid’s husband, proves Brave
Orchid as a type of feminist hero. This idea (although not specifically
connected with Brave Orchid), is written about in Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong’s
casebook on The Woman Warrior. Wong cites another writer, Jeffrey Paul Chan as
saying that he “attributes the popularity of The Woman Warrior to its depiction
of ‘female anger,’ which bolsters white feminists’ ‘hallucination’ of a
universal female condition…”
In truth, Brave Orchid’s feminine
anger definitely defines the mood of “At the Western Palace”, so much so that
at the end of the story, she makes her daughters take a pledge to control the
wily ways of their future husbands. It is a guarded feminism, however, because
Brave Orchid is essentially only arguing for control of men, not for complete
independence from them.
First vs. Second Generation
This chapter clearly proves the
disconnect between the American-born children and their first-generation
Chinese parents. Moon Orchid believes the children to be “savage-like”, being “raised
in the wilderness” of America. The children are essentially so unlike Moon
Orchid in their assimilated lifestyle that she cannot view them as human. The
children, on the other hand, are embarrassed by their more traditional aunt and
mother. When Brave Orchid suggests “calling out to Moon Orchid” through the
glass in the airport the children “slink away”, and when Moon Orchid returns to
the Valley as a mad-woman, the children say “Chinese people are very
weird".Both generations are in their own worlds;, and in this chapter,
there is not that much communication between the two. Moon Orchid’s husband,
although not quite a second-generation emigrant, is perhaps the epitome of the
split between tradition and assimilation.
Language
As it is in the rest of The
Woman Warrior, the clash between Chinese and English is rather apparent in
“At the Western Palace”. Moon Orchid is especially sensitive to Brave Orchids’
children’s accents, and Brave Orchid has trouble communicating with the
receptionist in the doctor’s office. The language gap is perhaps another tool
to show the divide between assimilation and tradition; between first and second
generation. In this chapter, however, sensitivity to language is used as a
metaphor for Moon Orchid’s decline into insanity. When she claims that Mexican
Ghosts are after her, Brave Orchid immediately recognizes it as farce, because
Moon Orchid cannot understand English, let alone Spanish. Brave Orchid asks
Moon Orchid how she knows that the Mexican Ghosts are after her, to which Moon
Orchid replies:
'They were speaking
English….this time, miraculously, I understood. I decoded their speech. I
penetrated the words and understood what was happening inside.’
This quote, combined with Moon
Orchid’s later admission that she is happy in the insane asylum because
“everyone speaks the same language”, proves that language is a metaphor for
Moon Orchid’s overall distance and exclusion from American culture. This was
the cause of her downfall—the inability to translate herself into the new
world. While the basic inability to speak English was a big part of this, the
idea of “truly understanding” someone else invokes allusions to more than just
words—it is the comprehension of one’s identity. Already cast out from the life
of her husband, who she believed to be part of her own culture, Moon Orchid was
so disassociated from any sense of social belonging that she grew obsessed with
ghosts. The ghosts serve as a metaphor for America’s multicultural society that
ironically only found means to exclude her.
Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe
Speech vs. Silence
In “A Song for A Barbarian Reed
Pipe,” Kingston discusses the generational and cultural conflicts of an
“American-Chinese [trying to become] American-feminine.”Raised in the ghost
land of another nation, she imagines that Americans hear the noisy dialect of
Chinese as “chingchong ugly” and instead whispers to her peers at school.
However, Kingston soon rebels against her inability to communicate and comes to
value verbal expression as a sign of sanity and normalcy. As she encounters
more instances of madness in her neighborhood, she concludes that “...talking
and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity. Insane people
were the ones who couldn’t explain." Kingston soon fears that she herself is crazy,
and projects her hatred of own inability to speak onto her shy classmate. By
physically abusing and threatening the mute Chinese girl, she symbolically rejects
the binds of silence and spends the rest of the story pursuing her own form of
articulation. Along with her newly found speech Kingston appears to
simultaneously question Chinese tradition and the indirect way in which the
Chinese speak, hiding both rituals from their children and truths from the
American ghosts: “Lie to Americans. Tell them you were born during the San
Francisco earthquake... Give a new name each time you get arrested; the ghosts
won’t recognize you.” It is thus interesting to note that Kingston’s Woman
Warrior is a collection of Kingston’s personal background, fact, and fiction,
all presented as one memoir.
Gender Roles & Issues
As Kingston slowly discovers her
voice, she must continually reconcile with gender issues, the restrictions of
her Chinese culture, and the presentation of these lies and truths. It is clear
that she is ashamed of her “pressed-duck voice”, and oppressed stereotypes of
women constantly bombard her and her young female relatives. Her grandfather
screams “Maggots!” when he deems it necessary to acknowledge the women, and her
father reminds her that “A husband may kill a wife who disobeys him. Kingston resists putting herself into a state
of submission by purposely presenting herself poorly to her “FOB” suitors.
Finding A "Voice"
In a final look at her past,
Kingston tells the story of Ts’ai Yen to represent the possibilities of two
cultures coming together and “translating well.”Kingston as a writer identifies
with the poetess Ts’ai Yen over the strength they find in expression. The women
warriors can symbolically bridge the cultural gap between the barbarian
(American/ghost) culture and their own with the power found in their unique
voices.
Language and narrative voice
The language of The Woman
Warrior invokes a complex juxtaposition of cultural and linguistic voices.
Kingston tries to capture and emulate the nuances of Chinese speech through her
prose. Trying to transmit a Sinitic language by means of an Indo-European
language was no easy task, and one that Kingston had to pursue actively.
Nevertheless, The Woman Warrior is not pure talk-story. There is in fact
a blending of first, second, and third person narration. The first-person
narration of Kingston is her own American voice, the second-person is that of
the Chinese talk-story, and the third-person (which only appears in “At the
Western Palace”) is a mixture; a talk-story transposed from Kingston’s Chinese
parents to her American siblings, and finally back to Kingston herself. What results
from this combination of voices can only be described as a “fusion language”
unique to Kingston, almost like her own type of Creole language.
Writing in this “fusion language,”
which is an American language with Asian tones and accents, or rhythm, is a way
that Kingston brings together Chinese and Western experiences. This “melding”
of the two experiences –the images and metaphors—is what makes Kingston’s style
her own. Kingston admits that one of the ways she works to bring these two
together is to speak Chinese while writing or typing in English.
Writing process
The completion of The Woman
Warrior came from Kingston’s on-the-spot writing of her thoughts. She wrote
down anything—until some of it started falling into place. It was this habit
that allowed Kingston to complete The Woman Warrior in just three years
while teaching at a boarding school that demanded she be on call twenty-four
hours a day.
It is interesting to note that the
original title of The Woman Warrior was Gold Mountain Stories. As Kingston states in a 1986 interview with
Jody Hoy:
“The publishers didn’t like a
title that sounds like a collection of short stories; they never like to
publish collections of short stories. I wasn’t that happy with either of those
titles, I think that calling that book The Woman Warrior emphasizes ‘warrior.’
I’m not really telling the story of war, I want to be a pacifist.”
In terms of Kingston’s
decision-making process in what to include and exclude from her story, she
admits to using only what she deemed was “necessary” cultural imagery. She
didn’t want readers to approach her work as "exotic.” What cultural
references she did allow to remain in The Woman Warrior she considered
to be more “American-friendly.” This, of course, was a very subjective endeavor
on her part, and, in a more recent reflection she had on The Woman Warrior,
Kingston was quoted as calling the cultural references “really Chinese.”
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