SOURCE: "Empowerment through Mythological Imaginings in Woman Warrior," in Biography, Vol. 16, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 136-46.

In the following essay, Johnston explores Kingston's use of myth in The Woman Warrior.

In The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston explores the relation between a mythic, three-dimensional reality represented by China of the mind, and a flat literal reality equated with America. In its exploration of the shifting line between history and memory, fiction and nonfiction, dream and fact, Kingston challenges western rational ways of seeing, classifying, ordering. Indeed, the very difficulty of categorizing Kingston's work (fictive autobiography?) may cause us to question the very notion of categories, the dichotomous classifications upon which our systems of logic depend. French feminist critics have reminded us of the subversive potential of new ways of saying: "To put discourse into question is to reject the existing order…. It means choosing marginality (with an emphasis on...