The Push-Pull Dynamic In M.H. Kingston's The Woman Warrior

This thesis is to illustrate how form develops meaning in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. Since its publication in 1976, this book has been criticized by many critics from different points of view, and many critics agreed that it is a typical postmodern work. However, they mainly analyzed postmodern features in this book, and the relationship between its enigmatic form and meaning has been somehow ignored. So this thesis is to analyze the relationship between them systematically and will come to a conclusion that form develops meaning perfectly in this book, and this unique writing form greatly enriches postmodern writing forms.The Woman Warrior relates a story of a young girl growing up and searching for her own language/individuality. Kingston creates her own way of writing vastly different from traditional ones. The book is designed into five structurally independent but contextually unified stories, and each story is told by the mother and her daughter together with different versions. With the two different voices alternating in narration, Kingston creates paradoxes in setting, characterization and narration. In this thesis, such a writing skill is called"push-pull dynamic"(Baum and Orbach, 29) .This thesis will systematically illustrate"how"this push-pull dynamic functions in developing meaning, that is,"how"the daughter finds her own language/ individuality. Chapter One gives a thorough analysis of the push-pull dynamic in the three basic elements in The Woman Warrior, that is, setting, characterization and narration, and marks out that this dynamic is a mimesis of the push and pull dynamic in the mother-daughter relationship, and it shows that the daughter begins to doubt about the truthfulness of her mother's stories; she begins to think about defying her mother, defying her nurturing and suffocating language, from total reliance; she begins to think about growing out of her mother's shadow, looking for her own language/individuality. Chapter Two, on the basis of the previous argumentation, contends that, through this push-pull dynamic, the daughter/narrator succeeds in defying and transforming her mother's stories and breaking down literary boundaries,...