Many points of view come from people who share powerful stories with hidden messages, which change other people’s lives. Maxine Hong Kingston’s book, “The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts,” is about the stories she had grown up hearing throughout childhood, mainly of women who have had a significant role in her life. She writes about the memories, fantasies, and speculation of women’s lives who have impacted hers. The power of this book comes from the ‘talk-story’ or stories such as Fa Mu Lan, and Ts’ai Yen told by her family, because these bring her the strength on her path of finding her identity and gaining a better understand of her own place in the world. Also, Kingston shares language with women so that they can discover
For Kingston, The Woman Warrior signifies more than five chapters of talk-stories synthesized together. Within each chapter of the memoirs, Kingston engraves the method in which she undertook to discover her discrete voice. The culture clash between her mother and Kingston accumulated her struggles and insecurities, resulting in Kingston’s climax during her tirade. However, what Kingston accentuates the most is that the a breakthrough from silence requires one to reject a society’s
Within Megan H. Mackenzie’s essay, “Let Women Fight” she points out many facts about women serving in the U.S. military. She emphasizes the three central arguments that people have brought up about women fighting in the military. The arguments she states are that women cannot meet the physical requirements necessary to fight, they simply don’t belong in combat, and that their inclusion in fighting units would disrupt those units’ cohesion and battle readiness. The 1948 Women’s Armed Services Integration Act built a permanent corps of women in all the military departments, which was a big step forward at that time. Although there were many restrictions that were put on women, an increase of women in the U.S. armed forces happened during
Do you believe all women are smart enough to get an education or strong enough to go to war? In countries like Afghanistan and even America, there is a preconceived notion that women are simply best for bearing children, raising them, cleaning, and cooking for their husbands. From a young age, many women are given gendered roles, such as being taught by society to find husbands and care for children. For instance, girls are given baby dolls and kitchen sets for their birthdays instead of books. In Flashes of War, by Katey Schultz, the two stories “Deuce Out” and “Aaseya and Rahim” the protagonists Stephanie and Aaseya may live in different worlds, but they share much more than we think. Because of predetermined expectations that society has imposed upon women, Schultz’s book comes to a surprise since it defies pre-conceived notions of women.
In a world where the vast majority of cultures are patriarchal, in response to traditional structures, women often find themselves at war in their minds, hearts and in their own actions. 'Yellow woman' and 'The story of an hour' are examples of how women struggle in a male domintaed society. In these two stories, the women fnd themselves wrestling with thoughts and emotions that our society consider unacceptable. The following statements ,ay be asked and considered of these women:
Jonathan D. Spence weaves together fact and fiction in his book The Death of Woman Wang. Approaching history through the eyes of those who lived it, he tells a story of those affected by history rather than solely recounting the historical events themselves. By incorporating factual evidence, contextualizing the scene, and introducing individual accounts, he chronicles events and experiences in a person’s life rather than episodes in history. Spence pulls together the narrative from a factual local history of T’an-ch’eng by scholar Fenge K’o-ts’an, the memoir of magistrate Huang Liu-hung, and fictional stories by writer P’u Sung-ling. The book closely resembles an historical fiction while still maintaining the integrity of an historical reconstruction.
In the novel The Woman Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston uses ghosts to represent a battle between American and Chinese cultures. The two cultures have different views of what a ghost is. The Chinese believe the ghost spirits may be of people dead or alive. Chinese culture recognizes foreigners and unfamiliar people as ghosts because, like American ghosts, they are mysterious creatures of the unknown. Americans view ghosts as spirits of the dead that either help or haunt people. American ghosts may or may not be real. There spirits are there but physical appearance is a mystery.
I began a study of autobiography and memoir writing several years ago. Recently I discovered two poets who believe that recording one’s place in history is integral to their art. Carol Muske and Joy Harjo are renowned poets who explore the intricacies of self in regards to cultural and historical place. Muske specifically addresses the poetics of women poets, while Harjo addresses the poetics of minority, specifically Native American, writers. Both poets emphasize the autobiographical nature of poetry. Muske and Harjo regard the self as integral to their art. In this representation of self, Muske and Harjo discuss the importance of truth-telling testimony and history in their poetics. Muske says, “…testimony exists to confront a world beyond the self and the drama of the self, even the world of silence—or the unanswerable…” (Muske 16).
Nisa: The life and Words of a !Kung Woman was written by an incredible anthropologist, Marjorie Shostak. While doing research and anthropological field-work in the Dobe regions of Africa, she studies women, Nisa, above all, who grabs her attention from the !Kung tribe. Marjorie Shostak does research and studies their culture, language, rituals, practices, and different aspects that make this specific culture so interesting to read about. The author narrates her interviews, observations, and analyses of the !Kung tribe from her field-work. Sexuality and the controls on sexual behavior are important aspects that Shostak describes as Nisa, a phenomenal woman in her culture experiences.
Imagination is a quality that everyone has, but only some are capable of using. Maxine Hong Kingston wrote “No Name Woman” using a great deal of her imagination. She uses this imagination to give a story to a person whose name has been forgotten. A person whose entire life was erased from the family’s history. Her story was not written to amuse or entertain, but rather to share her aunts’ story, a story that no one else would ever share. The use of imagination in Kingston’s creative nonfiction is the foundation of the story. It fills the gaps of reality while creating a perfect path to show respect to Kingston’s aunt, and simultaneously explains her disagreement with the women in her culture.
In the story, the narrator is forced to tell her story through a secret correspondence with the reader since her husband forbids her to write and would “meet [her] with heavy opposition” should he find her doing so (390). The woman’s secret correspondence with the reader is yet another example of the limited viewpoint, for no one else is ever around to comment or give their thoughts on what is occurring. The limited perspective the reader sees through her narration plays an essential role in helping the reader understand the theme by showing the woman’s place in the world. At ...
In Chapter two of the Woman Warrior, Kingston presents the story by using Fa Mu Lan as an archetype to display the heroine image of “I”. Fa Mu Lan disguises as a man and takes her father’s place in the conscription army. “You can avenge your village. You can recapture the harvests the thieves have taken. You can be remembered by the Han people for your dutifulness.” (P23) Inspired by the old woman, “I” make up my mind to fight for the honor and identity. During 15 years of training, “I” have learned how to be quiet, how to survive bare handed and how to practice in dragon ways. After leaving the mountain, “I” become a real woman warrior, raise armies, and fight for justice. Staying in the mountain is “my” choice of life. “When it rained, I
In Chapter 3 of Woman Warrior, Kingston portrays “ghosts” as people who she does not quite associate herself with directly. She argues, “America has been full of machines and ghosts” (96), and then goes on to classify the many different types of these “ghosts”. Thus, at this point in the book, ghosts appear to be actual people. There are “Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree Trimming Ghosts, Five-and-Dime Ghosts” (97). These titles act as ways to classify the Americans around her. These people are ghosts because they represent a culture she does not feel completely connected to as a Chinese-American girl. The characters in the story actually identified as people all seem to be the narrator’s family who are Chinese. This becomes more clear when Kingston goes on to write,
Cultures can shape the identities of individuals. Kingston identity was shape by Chinese and Chinese American culture. "No Name Woman," begins with a talk-story, about Kingston’ aunt she never knew. The aunt had brought disgrace upon her family by having an illegitimate child. In paragraph three, “she could not have been pregnant, you see, because her husband had been gone for years” (621). This shows that Kingston’s aunt had an affair with someone and the result was her pregnancy. She ended up killing herself and her baby by jumping into the family well in China. After hearing the story, Kingston is not allowed to mention her aunt again. The ideas of gender role-play an important role in both cultures. Kingston in her story “No Name Woman” describes some of the gender roles and expectations both women and men had to abide. Some of the gender roles in Kingston story have a semblance with the contemporary American culture.
In various countries, women are to live a certain lifestyle through what society places them in. Many novelists, from foreign areas such as the Caribbean’s and Africa, write stories that are heavily influenced by their lifestyles they had when growing up or watching someone else go through the same lifestyle. The stories Women Like Us by Edwidge Danticat and Girl by Jamaica Kincaid, are both a perception on women. However, while Danticat’s story lean more on the subject of women and writing, Kincaid’s story is more about women and femininity. Kincaid and Danticat both have unique backgrounds that influence these stories, and they express the importance of womanhood through theme and figurative language.
This rite of passage story revolves around Thakane, a woman who suffered at the hands of an oppressive and patriarchal system. The Sotho storyteller utilizes the rite of passage technique as a platform to address the unequal treatment and depreciation of women, and calls for the collaboration of both genders to reform society’s conventional