The Woman Warrior

the Kingston. To become a warrior woman or at least a woman that can stand out in her community. This can be foreshadowing the struggles that Kingston needs to overcome to become a woman warrior. It may be hard for her community

In both Beloved by Toni Morrison and The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, readers are presented with two female protagonists who are struggling with the concept of freedom. For Morrison, her main character Sethe has trouble coming to terms with her newfound freedom and the emotional difficulties associated with her past. Likewise, The Woman Warrior tells of Kingston's journey as a young Chinese-American girl growing up in America and the cultural injustices she experienced that infringed on

In The Woman Warrior, Kingston develops the motif of comparing herself to a swordswoman in order to illustrate how the talk stories of Fa Mu Lan aid her in combating the racism and oppression she faces as a Chinese woman in America through embodying the power of a woman warrior she possesses in her fantasies. Throughout the chapter White Tiger, Kingston explores the mythical story of Fa Mu Lan, placing herself in the role of the woman warrior and explaining her fantasy of living with an old man and

becoming a woman, her own woman, she must diverge from her mother and societies’ expectations, which ultimately will create a rift for them. Blinde states there are “vast discrepancies between Chinese and American thought progression: thought connectives that may logically lead to conclusions in one culture often progress in different and surprising directions in another culture” (Blinde 61).

A horrific taboo occurs twice in the novel The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston, infanticide. Infanticide is the act of murdering an infant, specifically the person’s own child. When this situation occurs in the writing, there is a different significance to Chinese culture than the other. What is the context behind this cruel act in Kingston’s book about tieing ancient Chinese tales with her own life? Both times infanticide is brought up a powerful emotion

This essay will look at Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. The Woman Warrior explores Kingston’s life as a young girl through a mixture of storytelling and reality. Kingston deals with five different narratives throughout the text. This allows the reader to grasp an understanding of her society and what the people in this society believe to be their norms. Her stories combine that of Chinese history, myths and spouts of reality. The narrator, Kingston, tries to come to terms with the pressures

chase, affable, pure, and polite (Gilbert and Gubar 23), while being “slim, pale, and immobile in a porcelain-like manner (25). However, men are prepared to be competitive, authoritarian, and power-hungry (Zipe 3). In the story of “Mulan”, a young woman cross dresses as a man to join the military, in each version, her reasons for joining are slightly different. Many readers view Mulan as a symbol of women empowerment, however it can be argued that Mulan is another representation of the enforcement

Within “The Woman Warrior,” McLaughlin proclaims that active participation in combat is the “quintessential masculine activity,” but the way in which armies were organized granted women a unique access point, who’s expected roles were thought to be centered within domestic activities . Males were trained in weapon skills, strategy, and warfare in a home setting; within this system a female existed within the realm of military strategy and training. Armies consisted of retainers and the warriors within

mythical, women warrior, depicts an ongoing problem within social hierarchy amongst men and women. Since before the foundation of the nation known now, social norms have separated men and women from one another and identified what he or she is intended for. These gender roles portray the qualities “true” men and women must encompass as a way to fit in society and avoid the possibility of being a social outcast;

Throughout many portions of The Woman Warrior, silence becomes a big theme and develops with the many stories told in each chapter. For the narrator, the concept of silence means not having an identity because not speaking means not having a say as a woman. However, as the book moves on, she becomes aware of the several negative factors that are associated with claiming independence and doing things differently in a Chinese community. Furthermore, the idea of silence is also hooked up to cross-cultural