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Importance of personal narrative
The woman warrior analysis essay
Essay on women warrior
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In The Woman Warrior, Kingston gradually finds her own personality and seek its own identity by examining these talk-stories. These stories often contain the values and traditions of society throughout many generations in China. The book begins with silence where Kingston’s mother says “You must not tell anyone” about the stories of her aunt. Kingston is illustrating the concept of the inner circle within the Chinese culture. They fear of negative consequences because these talk-stories that Kingston is about to uncover is shameful and an unpleasant history of their family. In Chinese culture, the idea of family is very important and all actions of the family members will affect the entire group. In the stories, the aunt betrayed her husband …show more content…
Kingston showed his rebellious and feminine side because she decided to stand up against her mother’s words at the very beginning of the book for her aunt. Also, she is differentiating herself from her own culture by publishing this disturbing secret that continues to bother many women today. However, she is aware of the risks involved in separating from her own Chinese community. As a first generation Chinese-American woman, she grew up believing in American Ideal such as freedom of speech and that "we [girls] failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves" (Woman Warrior 18). At the same time, she remained her Chinese culture by talking about traditional myth such as Fa Mu Lan which contains subversive messages. For example, in the chapter of White Tigers, the legend of the Chinese woman warrior Fa Mu Lan is a constant reminder to young Kingston that women can overcome the limitation set by men. Kingston even imagined herself to be like Fa Mu Lan, who saves her family and the whole community. She even says that “the villagers would make a legend about my perfect filiality” (Hong Kingston
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
An Asian-American writer growing up in a tight and traditional Chinese community in California, Kingston is placed by her background and time period to be at the unique nexus of an aged, stale social institution and a youthful, boisterous one. She has had to face life as an alien to the culture of the land she grew up in, as well as a last witness of some scattered and unspeakably tragic old ideals. She saw the sufferings and has suffered herself; but instead of living life demurely in the dark corner of the family room like she was expected to, Kingston became the first woman warrior to voice the plight of the mute females in both Chinese and American societies. The seemingly immeasurable and indeed unconquerable gap between the two fundamentally divided cultures comes together in herself and her largely autobiographical work The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.
Since people who have different identities view the American Dream in a variety of perspectives, individuals need to find identities in order to have a deep understanding of obstacles they will face and voices they want. In The Woman Warrior, Maxing Hong Kingston, a Chinese American, struggles to find her identity which both the traditional Chinese culture and the American culture have effects on. However, in The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros clearly identifies herself as a Hispanic woman, and pivots to move up economically and socially to speak for her race. Even though both Kingston and Cisneros look for meanings of their identities, they have different approaches of reaching the full understanding.
“Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on. She tested our strengths to establish realities”(5). In the book “The Woman Warrior,” Maxine Kingston is most interested in finding out about Chinese culture and history and relating them to her emerging American sense of self. One of the main ways she does so is listening to her mother’s talk-stories about the family’s Chinese past and applying them to her life.
Kingston’s mother told her this story as a warning; to avoid being a disgraceful and disloyal woman like her aunt. Kingston, however, does not view her aunt as a promiscuous woman, but rather a victim or a martyr. “Imagining her free with sex doesn’t fit”, she claimed. Kingston imagines her aunt as a woman who abandoned the traditions set forth by China’s extremely patriarchal society. She saw her and someone who did what so many Chinese women shou...
...in her essay “No Name Woman”. The Chinese tradition of story telling is kept by Kingston in her books. Becoming Americanized allowed these women the freedom to show their rebellious side and make their own choices. Rebelling against the ideals of their culture but at the same time preserving some of the heritage they grew up with. Both woman overcame many obstacles and broke free of old cultural ways which allowed them an identity in a new culture. But most importantly they were able to find identity while preserving cultural heritage.
Early Chinese women and modern American women have more in common than one may think. Unfortunately, they both sell themselves short, not realizing the potential that they hold and by letting men control the world that they live in. Unlike the earlier times in America when women were appreciated for their contributions to the world, women in these stories and modern America try to please men and be equal to them. Like Lady Han is portrayed in the story "The Boot Reveals the Culprit," a silly woman after silly dreams. There is no credibility to the actions of women in these two time periods in these two different places. They are only objectified instead of personified, given little thought to what they think or feel - which is the worst case of anti-feminism there is.
Fa Mu Lan is a changing character who grows from a little girl to a renowned warrior to a kind mother. On the other hand, Abigail Williams remains stubborn, selfish, and influencing throughout her story. Their external circumstances either shape them or don’t. While they are alike because they both face challenges, Fa Mu La challenges adversity causing her to gain strength as a character and for Abigail, it is others disagreeing and conflicting
Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior discusses her and her mother Brave Orchid's relationship. On the surface, the two of them seem very different however when one looks below the surface they are very similar. An example of how they superficially seem different is the incident at the drug store when Kingston is mortified at what her mother makes her do. Yet, the ways that they act towards others and themselves exemplifies their similarities at a deeper level. Kingston gains many things from her mother and becomes who she is because of Brave Orchid, "Rather than denying or suppressing the deeply embedded ambivalence her mother arouses in her, Kingston unrelentingly evokes the powerful presence of her mother, arduously and often painfully exploring her difficulties in identifying with and yet separating from her" (Quinby, 136). Throughout Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiography Kingston disapproves of numerous of her mother's qualities however begins to behave in the same manner.
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.
Although she got pregnant by someone other than her husband they did not look at the good and joyful moments the child could bring. Having a baby can be stressful, especially being that the village was not doing so great. The baby could have brought guilt, anger, depression, and loneliness to the aunt, family, and village lifestyle because having a baby from someone other than your husband was a disgrace to the village, based on the orientalism of women. Society expected the women to do certain things in the village and to behave a particular way. The author suggests that if her aunt got raped and the rapist was not different from her husband by exploiting "The other man was not, after all, much different from her husband. They both gave orders; she followed. ‘If you tell your family, I 'll beat you. I 'll kill you. Be, here again, next week." In her first version of the story, she says her aunt was a rape victim because "women in the old China did not choose with who they had sex with." She vilifies not only the rapist but all the village men because, she asserts, they victimized women as a rule. The Chinese culture erred the aunt because of her keeping silent, but her fear had to constant and inescapable. This made matters worse because the village was very small and the rapist could have been someone who the aunt dealt with on a daily basis. Maxine suggests that "he may have been a vendor
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston portrays the complicated relationship between her and her mother, while growing up as a Chinese female in an American environment. She was surrounded by expectations and ideals about the inferior role that her culture imposed on women. In an ongoing battle with herself and her heritage, Kingston struggles to escape limitations on women that Chinese culture set. However, she eventually learns to accept both cultures as part of who she is. I was able to related to her as a Chinese female born and raised in America. I have faced the stereotypes and expectations that she had encountered my whole life and I too, have learned to accept both my Chinese and American culture.
Kingston uses the story of her aunt to show the gender roles in China. Women had to take and respect gender roles that they were given. Women roles they had to follow were getting married, obey men, be a mother, and provide food. Women had to get married. Kingston states, “When the family found a young man in the next village to be her husband…she would be the first wife, an advantage secure now” (623). This quote shows how women had to get married, which is a role women in China had to follow. Moreover, marriage is a very important step in women lives. The marriage of a couple in the village where Kingston’s aunt lived was very important because any thing an individual would do would affect the village and create social disorder. Men dominated women physically and mentally. In paragraph eighteen, “they both gav...
The classic Disney movie, Mulan, is often praised as a film involving feminist empowerment, but upon closer look just the opposite appears to be true. The classic storyline includes Mulan, a young Chinese woman, taking over her fragile father’s place in the Chinese army, disguised as a man named Ping. She trains among the other soldiers, becoming one of the very best with her accompanying guardian dragon, Mushu and a cricket her grandmother gave her for luck for the matchmakers by her side. She ends up saving all of China by revealing that the Huns are back and invading the country, and is honored as a hero. This movie breaks away from the typical damsel in distress princess story by having a single woman save all of China. However, on Mulan’s journey she faced extreme female shaming, and experienced stereotypes attempting to belittle her; all