How to Tame a Wild Tongue - Essay Example

Maxine Hong Kingston's "Tongue-Tied" and Gloria Anzaldua's "How to Tame a Wild Tongue." Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior has an annoyed reaction narration that both demonstrates to its reputation and challenge it. The deliberations concerning Kingston's book that burst up right away after the book's publication mainly concerned accuracy and symbolism. These disagreements focused on whether the author's depiction of Chinese society and Chinese Americans was realistic. Even as the questions over genuineness and symbolism have fallen down, the questions concerning the depiction of a minority still discover their approach into current learning on The Woman Warrior. This paper's focal point on a key outline from the author's text--tongue-cutting--because it exemplifies a key apprehension brought about by censors of The Woman Warrior: does Maxine falsely depicted the Chinese American population as barbaric while accepting the conventional audience's outlook for Orientalist accounts Due to its hostility and brutality, tongue-cutting covers the hazard of being enigmatic when advanced within a contracted set of characterizations of civilization and its customs. Possibly the simplest means to resolve this dilemma is to consider the tongue-cutting in the author's book as story bound, as an application of Kingston's artistic thoughts. The remarkable effort that has been done on Kingston's ground-breaking utilization of genre in The Woman Warrior upholds such analysis. Screening Kingston's book as a chronicle in the conventional sense is presently dishonored. Yet, while The Woman Warrior does not request for a distinction of truth from imaginary tale, too quickly tagging as imaginary every occurrence in the book that potentially indicates intercultural apprehension does not facilitate comprehension of Kingston's stylish treatment of actuality and imagination. The author censures the building of a language custom by presenting how language differentiation develops into race-oriented language. The act of tongue-cutting is essential to comprehending how language, frequently considered empty of material meaning, cannot be understood apart from the body. Erving Goffman's hypothesis of stigma triggers a great fraction of this debate, since it is necessary to demonstrate the relationship between the creation of a language custom and the stigmatization of specific language dissimilarities. It is best to begin at the speaker's school commencement into a collective world of "normal" language as well as social norms. The speaker has difficulties in school, because of conflicts between her and the norms of satisfactory classroom performance, exemplify how the decisive factors for identifying aptitude and disability transform depending on social and cultural conditions. It is also ideal to concentrate on the act of tongue-cutting and the undecided association that the speaker has to her verbal communication. It is possible to examine two incidents from the story that exemplifies the speaker's worries about language and her discovery of how to establish her relationship with language. For the speaker of The Woman Warrior, school is the location where she initially studies about customs. Though public schooling is a recognized way of socialization, the cultural differentiations involving dwelling and school resulted to difficulties in the understanding of socialization for the speaker. The primary coping approach she assumed when she is shoved into an unfamiliar world of community organization is to resort to silence. Muteness has functioned as a defensive guard, but it revolves into a pressure issue the instant the speaker recognizes that muteness is not well-accepted by her instructors. The virtuousness of muteness is vanished when the speaker learns a consciousness of the social purpose credited to language. In the final episode of The Woman Warrior, the speaker ponders on the origins of her language. After analyzing her ability for formulating and exaggerating stories, the speaker astoundingly reveals how doubtful she thinks about her storytelling capacity: "[m]aybe that's why my mother cut my tongue" (Kingston, 163). The occurrence of tongue-cutting is made all the more numinous by its meandering presentation. The recollection that the speaker has of her tongue being cut is diminished in the course of the mother's recall of the event, which is deficient in facts. Her tongue turns out to be a childhood fascination for the speaker, who "made other children open their mouths so [she] could compare [their tongues] to [hers]" (Kingston, page 164). While the truthful condition of the tongue-cutting is by no means lucid, the figurative connotation of tongue-cutting takes an important position in the speaker's life and in her self-understanding. In the course of her act, she integrates the narrative of her tongue-cutting into a fraction of her individuality. "Sometimes I felt very proud that my mother committed such a powerful act upon me. At other times I was terrified--the first thing my mother did when she saw me was to cut my tongue" (Kingston, page 164). The expressive phrase "a powerful act" concisely communicates the ambivalence with which the speaker thinks of the act. It means an act of freedom; by cutting her tongue her mother has not placed harsh restriction somehow from the limitations she was born with as a lady in a patriarchal population. Undermining customary expectations for being a reserved, unassuming, and submissive lady, the speaker is now prepared to walk a trail of her own preference with a gratis tongue. In contrast, it remains an aggressive act. The hostility of the act affects the speaker to the position of her developing undecided thoughts toward her mother and in addition, her mother's Chinese ethnicity. Kingston accentuates the uncertainty of traditions and identity, but the author also does not undervalue social norms that regulate and eliminate differences. The tongue that is cut stays with the speaker as a symbol of her consciousness that language is in fact a battlefield. In the narrator's case, the social principles of evaluating language skill always fall short of her real language capability. The suppositions and discrimination that mark her ethnically and racially affect the social fortitude of her language performance. The cut tongue starts as a sign of the corporal guideline that convenes the social demands of homogeny, yet it eventually turns out to be the outline through which the author opposes. "Obstinate, adamant, unfathomable as stone, yet possessing a flexibility that make us unbreakable, we, the mestizas and mestizos, will remain" (Anzaldua, 2002, p.58) The author in her short essay entitled "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" utilizes English and Spanish to communicate who she is and her ethnicity by her fluency in language. The exceptional method of writing and use of two languages aids to position an atmosphere not typically experienced by the reader. Anzaldua incorporates every metaphorical appeal there is all the way through the end of her essay. Anzaldua shifts from discussing her childhood and her language to the languages spoken by natives in the southwest of America. She made use of diverse organization within the essay, but the structure that is found in the piece as a whole is order of significance. "Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out" (Anzaldua, 2002, p.50) This sentence is mentioned in the earlier part of the essay. It is the foundation for the entire essay. This plain phrase introduces the essay to a lot of dissimilar conduits and thoughts that are each done in the arrangement of their value and their adherence to reason. For example, Anzaldua (2002) writes about the eight languages of her culture before she initiates to figure the differences in Chicano Spanish and Spanish. This passage is found on page 51 and 52, "Some of the languages we speak are. 1. Standard English, 2. Working class and slang English, 3. Standard Spanish, 4. Standard Mexican Spanish, 5. North Mexican Spanish" (Anzaldua, 2002 p.51-52). Later in the essay an explanation of the differences of standard Spanish and Chicano Spanish is given. The whole essay is set out deductively. The essay moves from the broad statement, "wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out," (Anzaldua, 2002, p.50) into the specific examples of the difference of each of the eight languages and how Chicano Spanish has grown and developed in Mexico without butchering Standard Spanish. Anzaldua (2002) shows the Chicano's language validity in this excerpt, "But Chicano Spanish is a border tongue which developed naturally" (p.51). Then Anzaldua deals with the problem of being told that the Chicano Spanish she speaks is a bastard language. She takes a broad subject of a wild tongue cannot be tamed, and then builds upon that idea and goes into many different specific examples. Anzaldua, G. How to Tame a Wild Tongue.In S. Gruber et al (ed.). Constructing Others, Constructing Ourselves (pp. 49-59). 2002. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Cassuto, Leonard. The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts . 1999. Vintage Read More