Maxine Hong Kingston wrote The Woman Warrior as a collection of stories from her childhood. She is a child of Chinese immigrants who grew up in America, and battled between the culture she was living in and the one Chinese culture her mother tried to preserve. One aspect of Chinese culture that is different between Maxine and her mother, Brave Orchid, is the distinction between ghosts for each person. Maxine and her mother encounter different types of ghosts, and have thus have different reactions than the other.
Brave Orchid was born in China, and lived there for many years before making the journey to America to join her husband. She was raised with traditional Chinese culture, and that included ghosts. In old China, ghosts are considered spirits of the dead. Brave Orchid was brought up with this notion and reacted to ghosts as if they were spirits. While Brave Orchid was in China without her husband, she went to To Keung School of Midwifery. One night while she went into the haunted room to stay the night to prove it did not contain a ghost. While she was sleeping, she encountered the typed of ghost that was prominent in old China . Kingston states, “She pushed against the creature to lever herself out from underneath it, but it absorbed this energy and got heavier,” (169). Brave Orchid fought with the ghost and later, brought back her roomates to cleanse the room of the spirit. Although the original type of ghost is what Brave orchid experiences first, she also uses the term ghost when identifying any character that is unlike herself and her family. Brave Orchid enstills in her children that anyone who is unlike them is a ghost. She proves her reaction when a delivery boy brings the wrong medicine to their laundry and she is...
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...and were ourselves ghost-like. They called us a kind of ghost,” (Kingston 183). Maxine and the other children were never told truthful information because the adults feared the ghosts they would tell.
Maxine and Brave Orchid had different encounters with different types of ghosts. Brave Orchid encoutred spirits while in old China, and referred to anyone outside of her culture as a ghost. Maxine was raised to believe that anyone unlike her is considered a ghost, so her encouters with ghosts were much the same as if she was interacting with another human being. She did not have communications like her mother did when she was in school in China. Maxine never had to cleanse a room of a spirit, she just simply had avoid people who were unlike her.
Works Cited
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Knopf, 1976. Print.
In the book The Ghost of Crutchfield Hall, the ghost is Sophia; Florence’s cousin and James’ sister. Aunt adored her, but now that she is dead, Florence, the protagonist, is basically just a replacement of her, but her Aunt clearly thinks that Sophia was much better than Florence is now.
In conclusion, it is not the ghosts, as the governess suspected, that are corrupting the children, but the governess herself, through her continually worsening hysteria that is corrupting the children. Both Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are not real ghosts that have the peculiar habit of appearing before the governess and the governess alone but they are merely the signs of the fragmenting mental state of the governess.
The definition of the “ghost” is a shadow which wandering among or haunting other people. The villagers called her aunt a ghost because they are scared of her behavior. The life that they know had been attacked. Kingston uses the harsh responses of the villagers indirectly exposes her aunt ‘s challenge to the society.
Ghost- a vision of a dead person that is believed to appear or become visible to the living as a vague image. There have been many cases in reality where one sees the ghost of their deceased loved ones or encounter some sort of paranormal activity in their life. “Proof” by David Auburn plays around with the “Ghost story” in his play to represent identity, memory of Catherine.
The “prodigal” aunt in Maxine Hong Kingston’s essay No Name Woman, was shunned from her family and ultimately ended up taking her life and her bastard child’s, as a result of public shaming. Instead of being heralded as a heroine and champion of women’s rights, the aunt’s legacy is one of shame and embarrassment that has been passed down through generations. While this story’s roots are Chinese, the issue at hand is multi-cultural. Women suffer from gender inequality worldwide.
Like all the best ghost stories, this begins with the most innocuous of introductions: “…life is complicated”, a quote by Patricia Williams that Gordon will remind us repeatedly is “the most important theoretical statement of our time” (3). What obscures, obfuscates, thwarts and yes, haunts us and our work, she argues, is not what is seen but what isn’t, the notable absences out of the corner of our trained eye, those ghosts who may be invisible (especially to the discourse) yet still exact attention from their hidden presence. Perhaps anticipating the confusion of my book’s previous reader, Gordon patiently (and poetically) expands on her conceptualization – ghosts are those whom, through the “complicated relationship between reality and its mode of production” (11) have been relegated to that void between the s...
-Ghost really appears and Horatio confronts it, but as Horatio speaks to it, the ghost disappears
Karr-Morse, R., & Wiley, M. S. (1997). Ghost from the Nursery. New York : The Atlantic Monthly Press.
aranormal activity has been a cause of fear and excitement throughout history. The unknown attracts the curiosity from those who wonder whether the supernatural is real or a figment of the imagination. Ghosts are one of the supernatural beings whose existence is questioned every day. Many want to deny the existence of ghosts because they are terrified of other phantoms who may exist and ignore the evidence that has been brought forth throughout the years. However, ghosts are supernatural pheromones whose existence still impacts today’s society.
Ghost stories have been popular throughout the ages. During the nineteenth century, there was a sudden boom and ghost stories were made popular. Storytelling was the main source of entertainment as there weren't any films, TV's or computer games. People would gather around in groups telling or reading each other stories. The stories were made more real by the superstitions people kept and as the rooms were lit by dim candle light, it built a sense of atmosphere. Most ghost stories were written in the nineteenth century period, so people could imagine such things happening to them, in the places they lived. As storytelling was the main form of entertainment, people had nothing to compare it to, so it built tension, suspense and fear. In the nineteenth century there weren't many scientific advances. Everything was blamed on higher or supernatural forces, therefore, people believed the explanations given in ghost stories. I will be comparing and contrasting four ghost stories which were all written in the nineteenth century. They are ?The Old Nurse?s Story? by Elizabeth Gaskell, 1855 and ?The Ostler? by Wilkie Collins, 1855.
This unique story of a residence being haunted only until the ghost is asked to leave creates a different image from the typical ghost haunting until the inhabitants are driven crazy. The residents thought the ghost more of an annoyance than a threat, and when they asked him to leave; he did so without a fight. By performing no physical harm to any of the individuals and being mostly just foot steps in the dark, this was not a typical haunting.
Pearson, Patricia. When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence. New York: Viking, 1997
The Symbolic Role of the Ghost in Morrison's Beloved and Kingston's No Name Woman. The eponymous ghosts which haunt Toni Morrison's Beloved and Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman" (excerpted from The Woman Warrior) embody the consequence of transgressing societal boundaries through adultery and murder. While the wider thematic concerns of both books differ, however, both authors use the ghost figure to represent a repressed historical past that is awakened in their narrative retelling of the stories. The ghosts facilitate this retelling of stories that give voice to that which has been silenced, challenging this repression and ultimately reversing it.
The Nelly Butler hauntings is referred to as the first recorded ghost story in American history (LiBrizzi 5), and possibly the most exciting hauntings to date as there are still many unsolved mysteries. The apparition appeared on more than 30 separate occasions to over 100 witnesses in Sullivan, Maine, just over fifteen years after the American Revolution (5-6). Although the Nelly Butler apparition is one of the most convincing ghosts of all time, it was subject to suspicions of fraud. These claims turn out to be groundless as the evidence reveals the ghost to be genuine.
Two weeks after her father’s funeral, our protagonist Annie sees his ghost in her bathroom. Knowing he is dead, they small talk about her boyfriend, their farm, their deceased family etc. until he suddenly vanishes. Her father makes occasional appearances after that. They keep talking about everyday life until one night at the Opera House, where she not only sees her father, but her brother and mother as well. Knowing where to find them, she takes her goodbye with her dead family.