In autobiography, the told story often is accompanied by the untold one. In Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, the idea of autobiography is accompanied by the vision of the stuttering girl, the woman of whom nothing is known, the girl who refuses to speak, the girl with the cut tongue, the one whose throat hurts, the one who quacks like a duck, and the one who talks so much that she is considered mad. Even as Kingston gives a voice to her own life, she is also offering us their suppressed collective biographies, a record of their lives that she has intuited from her own participation in their defeated silences. To do this, Kingston, an American of Chinese descent, must absorb and synthesize the experience of her two cultures, and come to understand her alienation from American life and the particular cruelty towards women in Chinese culture as two central metaphors for the general human experience. The Woman Warrior thus enlarges on the autobiographical genre, making it include not only the actual events of her own life, but also the reconstructed stories of the past that she can only approach through the powers of a sympathetic imagination.
Starting with the image of the abandoned and suicidal aunt, who gave birth to her illegitimate baby in a pigsty and drowned herself in a well, the book moves to the images of superwomen: the mythic woman warrior herself, Fa Mu Lan, about whom the narrator learns in her mother's chant, and the mother herself, Brave Orchid, a seer who has led two complete lives: a doctor in China and a mother in the United States. These chapters, devoted to strong women, are interspersed with chapters about women who could not cope: her aunt, Moon Orchid, who goes mad after coming to America, and the author herself, a prototypical silent Chinese girl, for whom the act of writing itself constitutes a convincing heroism.
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