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Analysis Of The Piece, No Name Woman By Maxine Hong Kingston

Decent Essays

The role of the woman has said to serve a humble and very significant aspect in tradition and ritualistic beliefs in Chinese culture in pre-modern times. Traditionally, woman were to stay loyal to the man they were married to and were required, by custom, to stay in the household of “the-in-laws” as a sign of respect to the family. We consider the words loyalty, respect, and submission a numerous amount of times when analyzing the women’s role and how it pertains to Chinese culture when we read about it in articles, newspapers, and novels. In the piece, “No Name Woman,” Maxine Hong Kingston insists on clarifying the ignorant notion that women were always acquiescent to the word of the man. Kingston reflects on her adolescent fascination about the aunt she never knew by engaging in heavy discussion to examine the for that not all women shared those values. Using the story of a speculated aunt that the narrator was told she had by her mother, Kingston asserts that even if the story of her aunt may not be factual, the message of the piece is to communicate that women were both obedient and strictly submissive in Chinese culture.
The characterization of the female roles in the text is used to assert that the narrator not only possesses a compliant behavior toward her father, but also engages in defiant acts to analyze the similarities between her and her speculated aunt. In the piece, Kingston describes how the aunt was oppressed by social obligations of being a woman, where as

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