Slave, Warrior And Poet

The present study purposes to contribute formalistic narratology to the study of female identity in Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior. Since its publication, The Woman Warrior has experienced immediate success and received various criticisms. To sum up, the existing numerous criticisms focus their attention either on such ideological issues as ethnicity, female identity, women studies, cross cultural story presentation, and thematic studies including silence and the necessity for speech, mother-daughter relationship and conflicts or such formalistic issues as genre, postmodern writing. Little has been done to combine the ideological study with formalistic study. Moreover, narratology as a relatively new discipline has appeared to expand classic narratology into interdisciplinary field, which takes into account of race, gender, class and other social issues. However, in the study of The Woman Warrior, this approach has not been systematically and scientifically used.To mend this critical imbalance, this present study takes a thematic, formalistic narratological approach, aiming at making contribution to the studies of The Woman Warrior in the following two ways: (1) By applying narratology to the interpretation of the text, this thesis scientifically accounts for the peculiarity of the narrative strategies and techniques that puzzled critics and readers seriously, solving the problem of formalistic structure of the text thoroughly. (2) By means of practical analysis, this thesis attempts to reveal the relationships between narrative techniques and female identity, taking advantage of both a formalistic and an ideological study.This thesis contains three parts. Besides Introduction and Conclusion, the main body consists of three chapters. Chapter one is concerned with the narrative perspective, narrative situation, and direct discourse in the stories of No Name Woman and Moon Orchid, positing that slave is the first phase of identity formation for Chinese American women. In this phase, Chinese American women lack the self-esteem for an independent identity. They have no identity, no status as slaves, and can be discarded or killed casually. Chapter two focuses on the second phase of warrior by way of examining such narratological elements as narrative paratext, narrating self,...