Maxine Hong Kingston "Woman Warrior" novel

Traverses the lines between silence and deficiency of it in her novel The Woman Warrior. Transitioning between the traditional gender norms assigned to Chinese women and Chinese American women, Kingston tests the boundaries imposed on her gender. Speaking, or making the choice not to speak, is a common theme in Kingston’s novel, and is a uniform topic for critical analysis. In ancient Western culture, silence is associated with submissiveness. Women and children are seen as secondary objects, to be seen and not heard.

While silence can be seen and thought of as a formidable agent of interaction, Kingston offers the enigma of silence through a multi-generational story in one family in The Woman Warrior.

Kingston presents an enigma to her readers. It is difficult to find a stable Chinese American identity through alone character. As a narrator and a writer, Kingston is caught between multiple worlds: that of a woman, that of a Chinese woman, and that of a Chinese American woman.

Being caught between these different worlds allows Kingston to see and feel the contradictions between tradition and modernity. The traditional Chinese world allows Kingston to see that women are silenced and suppressed when her mother tells one of her “talk stories” about her unnamed aunt. “You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you. In China, your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born,”.

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This act is symbolic of the rebellion of women. Her aunt, the “No Name Woman” is representative of individual female strength. The question remains as to whether deliberately eliminating her from family history and refusal to give her name and tell her story gives it more or less influence over future generations of the Kingston women. Kingston suggests, “But there is more to this silence: they want me to participate in her punishment. And I have”. The fact that her aunt had betrayed the customs and the mores of the Chinese tradition angered the family so much they wanted her to suffer even after her death. However, through the oral tradition, her aunt’s story has the opposite effect. It adds strength and fosters an ardent and perpetual Chinese American identity.

Because the silence of females is revered as an ideal of strength in the Chinese American culture, the story of the “No Name Woman” gives the idea of strength to future generations. While she took her own life, as well as that of her child, in her silence, she epitomizes strength because she decided to become the mistress of her own fate. According to Dr. Shirley Garner in her article “Breaking Silence: The Woman Warrior” “For Kingston, telling No-Name Woman’s story is a moral act, a way to stop participating in the punishment”. In her novel, Kingston disputes the cultural dichotomy of being silenced. She is not willing to allow herself to succumb to the racial and cultural oppression placed upon her. Silence is an enigma. It is two faceted. While it is a form of erasure and cruelty, it is also a source of self-expression and strength, and through telling the story of her aunt, is able to shatter the enigma of silence plagued by Asians and Americans on both continents.