Woman Warrior Term Paper

Woman Warrior

My aunt haunts me -- her ghosts drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her," (16). Aunts, the sisters of fathers or mothers who serve as surrogate female role models, play a central role in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. However, Kingston's aunts are no warrior women; in fact, "No-Name Woman" and "Moon Orchid" embody the antithesis of the woman warrior-heroine. No-Name Woman disgraces herself and her family, killing herself and her newborn and forever erasing her name from the family tree. Kingston can but imagine the true spirit of this no-name aunt who haunts her since her mother told her the tale of her downfall. Similarly, Moon Orchid displays shameful characteristics: she cannot pull her weight doing chores when she arrives in America and she hasn't got the gumption to stand up to her husband. Both No-Name Woman and Moon Orchid became subservient to men, a quality Kingston fears and struggles to reconcile with her life in the more sexually liberated culture of America. Kingston's aunts are victims of their internal psychological weakness and of the restrictions placed on them by an overtly patriarchal society. Kingston uses her aunts to convey several messages in The Woman Warrior; serving as contrasts to the solid strength of strong, empowered women like Fa Mu Lan, Brave Orchid, and even Kingston herself, the aunts featured in the book provide the contrast necessary to illuminate the struggles of being female in a traditional Chinese culture.No-Name Woman and Moon Orchid are not necessarily innately weak; in fact, Kingston attempts to imbue both aunts with symbolic power and therefore both women are catalysts for Kingston's growth and self-realization. Brave Orchid's talk-story of No-Name Woman stimulates Kingston's fertile imagination. Filling in the gaps of her mysterious aunt's life, Kingston imagines what went on in her aunt's psyche to lead her to her fate. As with many of the incidents and tales in The Woman Warrior, the story of No-Name Woman could indeed be a fiction, a tall tale her mother drew up for the sole purpose of frightening her daughter away from premarital sex. The No-Name Woman tale could have been a family myth, one passed on from mother to daughter for generations for that very purpose. Even if the aunt was real, Kingston has no way of discovering the truth and is thus forced to complete the picture of No-Name Woman herself.

In her re-telling of her mother's talk-story, Kingston betrays a sense of admiration for her disgraced aunt. In doing so, she elevates her status from a forgotten person to a teacher. Kingston notes that No-Name Woman never betrayed the name of her lover, an act of dignity and pride. Moreover, through her tragic story, Kingston formulates some of her own values, beliefs, and ideals about her culture, about men, about sexuality, and….....