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The Woman Warrior Stereotypes

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In The Woman Warrior, Kingston describes herself bullying a voiceless girls in order to illustrate how difficult it was finding her own voice while growing up in America. In the sixth grade, Kingston begins to dislike a girl in her class. Her hatred stems from realizing how similar she is to the girl. They both picked last for games, struggle in class, and follow their older sisters around. Kingston views the girl as being weak and this infuriates her. Kingston especially hates how the girl does not talk. After school, Kingston lures the voiceless girl into the school's lavatory and bullies her into talking. She starts out by calling the girl names and verbally harassing her. Kingston calls her a baby and stupid. Eventually Kingston realizes …show more content…

Suddenly Kingston's demeanor dramatically changes as if a switch flipped in her head. Yelling turns into begging and anger turns into the tears streaming down Kingston's face. She is standing in front of the voiceless girl as she is "sniffling and snorting, I couldn't stop crying and talking at the same time. I kept wiping my nose on my arm, my sweater lost somewhere". This breaking point that Kingston has reached is symbolic for how painful it is for her to find her own voice. She sees herself as this voiceless girl. Kingston begs and crystal because she needs to hear the voiceless girl talk in order for herself to overcome her own issues with speaking. The validation Kingston is looking for can only be given by the voiceless girl because Kingston associates herself with the girl. The burden of having to talk weighs down Kingston so much that she hates herself. She has struggled her whole life with using her voice. Growing up she had a hard time learning english. This setback in her speech development as a toddler is only the beginning of Kingston's problems with using her voice. Next, she struggled with talking in school because she did not understand why it was necessary for her to

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