The Woman Warrior illustrates the many ways in which women function within a patriarchal, male-dominated paradigm to both empower and disempower each other. Kingston’s stories, interwoven with personal experience, myth, and history, demonstrate the intersection of gender and ethnicity, and also illustrate the social construction of gender roles.
Silence and Revelation in The Woman Warrior
The memoir begins with “You must not tell anyone” (3). This immediately opens the theme of writing about socially unspeakable topics. The memoir itself represents an act of rebellion, a public revealing of secrets.
It is the mother’s voice who opens the novel; she is telling her daughter, the narrator, about her husband’s sister, who had an illegitimate child and killed herself and the baby. Telling the narrator this family secret represents a subordination of the patriarchal rule.
However, the mother ultimately tells her daughter this so her daughter can act properly to remain conformed to the patriarchal order and its social surveillance. This, then, is both conforming and rebelling.
Ambiguity of Empowerment and Disempowerment in Maxine Hong Kingston's Memoir
This ambiguity of empowerment and disempowerment occurs throughout the novel. The mother, an accomplished doctor, tells her daughters stories of powerful female swordsmen and shamans; however, she also often emphasizes the notion that girls are inevitably disappointing to their parents, regardless of what they accomplish.
This subordination also occurs when a slave pretends to waver when asked a question about her weaving, in order to lower her price. Although these acts of rebellion undermine the patriarchy, they do nothing to attempt to overthrow or change it, only to adapt to it.
Although empowering women to succeed in the spaces allowed by patriarchy is empowering, it still reinforces or implicitly accepts the surrounding structure of inequality.
Intersection of Gender and Ethnicity
The mother and daughter suffer oppression not only because they are female, but also because they are Chinese. According to the notion of intersectionality, gender, class, race, sexuality, and other facets of identity interact to form interrelated structures of privilege or oppression.
This intersection of identities is reflected when the narrator discusses how she isn’t sure which aspects of herself are tied to various facets of her identity: “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” (6). The oppressed position of being female is compounded by the low status of an immigrant.
Cultural Constructs in The Woman Warrior
The clash of Chinese and American cultures and the narrator’s deliberate attempt to succeed in American culture demonstrate the constructed nature of culture.
To succeed in American society, the narrator must act like other American girls in order to fit in and be accepted; she must dress, talk, and act like them, essentially emulating their performance of gender roles and cultural expectations.
The narrator is conscious of this performance because she is an outsider who is deliberately, consciously trying to fit in. To the American girls, however, this performance seems natural; they are probably not aware of the way their everyday actions construct gender.
Cultural Conflict
The culturally constructed quality of gender roles and expectations is also revealed in the conflicts between Chinese and American culture. For example, eye contact is considered rude in Chinese culture, but is necessary to succeed in American business culture: “Most emigrants learn the barbarians’ directness – how to gather themselves and stare rudely into talking faces as if trying to catch lies” (70).
Social expectations and interpretations of physical appearance also differ. The narrator’s mother complains that her daughter is too skinny; it is shameful to the narrator’s mother to have “a whole family of skinny children,” although in America, being thin is considered attractive and associated with wealth, rather than poverty.
The variance in social expectations illuminates their subjective and essentially arbitrary nature. Other differing gender expectations include the socially acceptable ways to give and receive compliments; Moon Orchid marvels that her nieces and nephews accept compliments, rather than denying them modestly.
Female Experience and Layers of Oppression
The title of the memoir, The Woman Warrior, captures the narrator’s position: a woman, and yet a warrior, a fighter. Had the title been The Warrior, it would have been assumed that the book was about a male.
Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir is so deeply about female experience that it is difficult to conceive of what a man’s life in the same cultural location might be. All the reader can understand is that it would be radically, unimaginably different.
However, the book vividly captures the texture of life as a Chinese-American woman navigating the varying cultural expectations and roles. This portrayal also reveals the effect of the intersection of layers of oppression, as well as the culturally constructed quality of social norms and expectations.
Vintage: April 23, 1989
ISBN-10: 0679721886
Rebekah Richards - Rebekah Richards has published fiction and nonfiction in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Brandeis Law Journal, Where the Children Play, ...
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