Breaking Silence And Constructing Female Subjectivity:Ways Of Solving The Conflicts In Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior And Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife

This thesis attempts to analyze the theme of silence in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts and Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife, and to reveal the conflicts hidden behind silence: the conflict between two genders, the conflict between Chinese Americans and White Americans, and the conflict between Chinese culture and American one. The thesis proposes that in order to solve the conflicts, women should break silence and assert their subjectivity. After analyzing the perniciousness of silence for women in the two books and affirming the need for breaking silence, the thesis concentrates on a significant way of solving the conflicts: constructing female subjectivity. The analysis finally comes to the conclusion that in constructing subjectivity, the experience and desire of women should be discovered and a harmonious relationship between the self and the other needs to be maintained since the interdependence of the self and others is inevitable. Intersubjectivity, that is, taking both the self and the other gender, the other race or the other culture as equal subjects, is essential for solving the conflicts of gender, race and culture.