Interpreting Silence and Voice in Maxine Hong Kingston´s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of A Girlhood Among Ghosts

Abstract

In my thesis I examine how Maxine Hong Kingston depicts a young girl's tough search for self-identity in her book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of A Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975). The thesis aims at interpreting the themes of silence and voice in Kingston's book, especially women's silence and voice. Written as a girl's childhood experience, The Woman Warrior recounts the life experience of Maxine Hong Kingston, a Chinese American woman who was born in the United States and grew up in the Chinatown in Stockton, California. Like many other children of immigrants, Kingston experienced adolescent turmoil and rebellion, vacillating between her inherited Chinese culture and traditions and modern American culture and values. Thus in her first book, The Woman Warrior, Kingston recalls in the memories of her childhood the struggle to reconcile her Chinese and American identities as a second generation Chinese American. Furthermore, through this book, Kingston also explores the lives and struggles of other Chinese women who were born and lived in China, or who immigrated to the United States, as well as the lives of their children.

During the past 30 years, a great number of articles and books have been written on Kingston and The Woman Warrior. Most of the critics praise Kingston's contribution to the formation of a new Chinese American identity for women who were long oppressed by Chinese patriarchal tradition. In addition, her skill of storytelling is said to continue the Chinese art of "talk story", which actually advances the oral traditions of literature into a written treasure. At the same time, The Woman Warrior has also received negative reviews concerning autobiographical accuracy, cultural authenticity, and ethnic representativeness (Yuan 2001, 1). In the theoretical section of the thesis, I firstly review briefly the development of Chinese American literature in order to introduce a context for Kingston's The Woman Warrior. Secondly, as genre and feminism are the key issues in the debates on The Woman Warrior and central to my research question, I explore the related theories on autobiographical writing and Asian American Feminism.

In the first analytical chapter, Chapter three, I first analyse the meaning of silence as a reflection of early Chinese immigrants and their community. Silence illustrates the situation of the entire Chinese American community in American history. Kingston describes the silence of Chinese immigrants in the US and their voiceless lives because of hard work and unfair treatment, and she writes about people who have been deliberately neglected by the mainstream society over a long period due to sociopolitical factors. Second, I focus on the silence of two individual characters - No-name Woman and Moon Orchid: silence can be seen as a symbol of female victimization in patriarchal Chinese culture and society and also in modern American society. Thus, silence can be interpreted as a speechless revolt of a woman against the patriarchal society.

In the second analytical chapter, Chapter four, I interpret the theme of voice in The Woman Warrior and examine its different forms, as voice can be articulation, speaking and expressing one's own opinions, even talk-stories and oral literature which carry the Chinese classic and tradition. In particular, voice represents the feminist awareness of Chinese American women, since feminism, as traditionally understood, is speaking up, demanding women's rights, refusing to be looked down upon, which is the opposite of silence. Kingston portrays the voices of Chinese American women in the book, and, furthermore, these voices take different forms; forms which do not only include articulation and speaking up, but also refer to oral literature, writing, and literary creation, which use words as weapon to fight for women's rights. Voice can therefore be interpreted as writing and even rewriting classic literature in order to deliver a new voice.

To conclude, through the interpretation of silence and voice in Kingston's work, it is clear that Kingston has succeeded in creating many true Chinese women warriors, in the past and the present. Her purpose is to change the traditional images of Chinese women, to improve their social status and to rewrite Chinese women's history. By writing, Kingston breaks the taboo on silence and rewrites Chinese American female subjectivity in a way that transcends Chinese patriarchal tradition. Just as Ts'ai Yen, her role model, who learns the barbarian's language and lyrics and then creates a new song for her own people, Kingston masters the English language, uses voice and pen as weapons creating new pages in American literature, and gives the women warriors she writes about places in American history and perhaps immortality. Furthermore, her book can be seen as a new voice, which break the silence in the history of Chinese Americans and destroys the Orientalist stereotypes of Chinese Americans as well as "claim[s] rights" and "claim[s] America", which are the demands of the Chinese Americans for their emerging sense of identity.

Asiasanat:Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior, ethnic literature, Chinese American literature, immigrant, autobiography, feminism, Asian American feminism, ethnic identity, cultural identity, silence, voice, racism, Chinese culture, classic literature rewriting