The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston - Essay Example

Task The Woman Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior is the recounting of a story that happened in ancient China. The writing style of her texts is lyrical and appealing due to figures of speech employed to make the story more interesting. This book does not sustain a clear margin between the fantasy world and reality; that is why the author does not mention her name throughout the text. The ‘no name woman’ story is based on Brave orchid’s story concerning her sister-in-law. It describes the sister-in-laws ordeals and her pregnancy, while her partner having been gone for many years. The villagers criticized her for the reason that she had become pregnant. They treated her in a very terrible way and even destroyed her property leaving her with nothing to call her own. She delivered a baby and drowned herself in the family well; Brave orchid found her there when she went to fetch some ater from the well. She drowned herself because she did not want her child to be treated as an outcast. The storyteller tries to visualize how the aunt got pregnant; no one knew for sure whether she was raped or sexually involved with a lover. The goal of this narration is to expose and condemn the oppression that is experienced by Chinese women in silence. She is the only voice for them after so much suffering. She, however, fears that her aunts ‘ghost’ is angry because her aunt did not want anyone to know but now she had let everything out. In the Chinese culture, those who had brought shame to the family used to be treated as outcasts. They never interacted with the other people. The narrator’s mother tells her that she should be careful so that she does not embarrass her. The narration was originally intended to justify her aunt who had suffered in silence; but in general it represents all the women who are oppressed in the Chinese culture and have no right of voice (Ahokas). In Brave orchid’s narration, she tries to speak on behalf of her aunt because she is dead; besides, Chinese women are not supposed to talk freely on such matters. This tactic was applied in her narration and established her ethos. The fact that Maxine Kingston used another authors’ writings is employed for establishing her ethos too. This shows her confidentiality in whatever she writes considering the fact that the society she is representing does not appreciate women’s voice. She is also a representative voice for the Chinese children who try to hide their real identity as they are forced to act like Americans while inside they are Chinese. Ethos is also rendered by the use of anamnesis. Anamnesis is a way of trying to recall something that was negative; it is used to represent emotions negatively. One of the examples is when Brave orchid tells the author that “what happened to her could happen to her.” On the other hand, pathos is used to describe emotions in a text. The narrator envisions her aunts suffering and her ordeal with the villagers and her family. She imagines painfully how her aunt gave birth in the dark pigsty (Kingston, 5). The language she uses shows the level of naked truth in her narration. All these sufferings had made the character jump into the well with the child. The author imagines her ‘ghost’ begging for scraps of food and showing deep suffering. Another figure of language that is meant to arouse emotions is Pathopoeia. For example, the narrator imagines that her aunt, the only daughter in the family, used to sit at the ‘outcast table’ and was not allowed to eat with other members of the family because she had cast ‘shame’ upon them. Another example of emotional approach in the narration is the following comparison: “Like a great saw, teeth strung with lights, files of people walked zigzag across our land, tearing the rice” (Kingston, 3). Logos is the usage of facts, definitions and laws in order to attract the reader. It is also referred to as the appeal to reason. For example, “She will add nothing unless powered by Necessity, a riverbank that guides her life. She plants vegetable gardens rather than lawns; she carries the odd-shaped tomatoes home from the fields and eats food left for the gods” (Kingston, 6). The narrator is referring to her mother as her guide in running the everyday life. Another representation of logos in the narration is the phrase, “adultery is extravagance”, and it is a kind of a definition that is destined to mean that one cannot afford to practice adultery because of the results it brings (Kingston, 6). According to the Chinese culture, “to be a woman, to have a daughter in starvation time was a waste” (Kingston, 6). During those times, adultery was a very big mistake and pregnancy made it worse. The villagers thought in terms of reduced source of labor because a pregnant woman would not be able to work. The word ‘ghost’ in this context is used to refer to the traditions of the Chinese people, and can be used to mean the white people too. The Chinese people referred to Americans as ‘ghosts’; it is possible to see identification parallels between the ghost in the story and the author, being a kind of “ghost” herself too due to her American residence. The aunt is a ghost all through her lifetime because she is despised and treated as an outcast. The narrator thinks that her aunts’ ghost is mad at her, because she told her story to the public. The narrator creates stories and scenarios in an attempt to describe what her aunt went through, because her mother refused to tell her the whole story. The narrator defends her aunt throughout the whole text and blames the villagers for what they did to her. In spite of the fact that her aunt committed suicide with her newborn baby, the narrator makes it universally known that women are very important in the society and should be respected. According to Wang, children should not be punished because of their mother’s mistakes; they are innocent creations of God. The author confronts women who suffer in silence and makes them acknowledge their problems, as well as be brave to share them. In today’s society, women deserve equal rights with men; men have no right for merciless judgments. The incorporation of the Chinese culture in the narration can help the Chinese women struggle with outdated traditions that harass them. The authors focus on women throughout her narration has helped paint a complicated picture of issues concerning motherhood, sisterhood, child bearing and being a wife. M. Kingston describes her family and is mainly focused on her mother, her father, aunt and uncles. She writes mostly on her mother’s generation and not hers because in her mother’s time traditions and superstitions were numerous and widespread. People in those days had to follow those traditions strictly; the failure to comply with them could evoke the assault on behalf of the community (Chu). It actually had happened to her aunt: she lost everything before killing herself and the baby. Rejection is one more theme in the narration, as the character was rejected by her brothers who were supposed to protect her; she was their only sister. This narration is a combination of two stories: her mother’s and M. Kingston’s own one. The resulting story is based upon the real facts and events which are exposed with the hope of benefit for the general public. Works Cited Ahokas, Pirjo. Maxine Hong Kingston’s the woman warrior: Constructing a female Chinese‐American subjectivity. NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, Volume 4, Issue 1, 1996. Print. Chu, Patricia. "The Invisible World the Emigrants Built": Cultural Self-Inscription and the Antiromantic Plots of The Woman Warrior. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 1992, pp. 95-115. Print. Kingston, Maxine. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. Vintage International Edition, New York. 1989. Pp 3-16. Print. Wang, Dingming. Enhanced Tragedy—Changing Point of View in The Woman Warrior. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 457-459, March 2011. Print. Read More