Rebellion And Compromise In The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston's work, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, once published in 1976, made a reputation for herself and marked a new era for Chinese American literature. This thesis is to focus one theme of The Woman Warrior and it is this theme, as far as I think, is one of the major reasons that make the book so popular. The theme of rebellion and compromise, simultaneously employed by Kingston, characterize The Woman Warrior, and many ethnic works at large.The theme is indispensable in understanding The Woman Warrior and is determined by the awkward predicament the author Maxine Hong Kingston was stuck in. Kingston, as a daughter of a Chinese immigrant family, born in America, finds herself situated in a very paradoxical position when she grows up. With her parents representing the traditional Confucian Chinese mores on one side, the mainstream white American society not without racist prejudice on the other, she feels that she is kept a certain distance from both, i.e. she feels excluded by both and there seems to be a gap extremely hard to bridge, this causing her much anguish. But at the same time she has some affinities with both sides for she is a Chinese American, born in an immigrant family, receiving education in America. Standing between, she is doubly marginalized but meanwhile has dual heritages. This characteristic of Chinese Americans like Kingston, in Amy Ling's terms, is"between worlds". This very characteristic serves to make sense of the feature of rebellion and reconciliation"of The Woman Warrior.Doubly marginalized, Kingston is doubly burdened to rebel against sexism and racism. With duel heritages, her rebellion can't be too radical to reject the Chinese immigrant community and the dominant white society. She can't but resort to reconciliation between two genders, and two cultures.This thesis is composed of five parts: Part one is the introduction. A general survey of the history of Chinese American literature will be made first. Then Maxine Hong Kingston's particular position in Chinese American literature will be given some words. Next are an introduction of The Woman Warrior and a review of the criticisms, which are not only large in amount but controversial. The profuse criticisms show the multiplicity of the book, which helps to explain the paradoxical mentality of the narrator.Part two focuses on the dilemma of"in-between-ness"confronted by Kingston. A historical perspective will be taken to analyze this point. I tend to hold that the dilemma is more characteristic of Kingston when she wrote the book in the 1970s than are the writers before her and after her.In Part three and Part four, emphasis is put on the delineation of the feature of the Woman Warrior, i.e. rebellion and compromise. Through close reading, I follow the spiritual process Maxine goes through from being a warrior to becoming a pacifist. Theories like minority feminism, racism and Orientalism will be employed to help interpret the book.Part five comes to the conclusion. It is a reaffirmation of the above-mentioned arguments."Between worlds"characteristic of Kingston determines that she has no choice but to reconcile between and to construct Chinese Americans as culturally hybrid persons, thus transcending the gender and culture divide.