SOURCE: "The Woman Warrior: Claiming Narrative Power, Recreating Female Selfhood," in Faith of a (Woman) Writer, edited by Alice Kessler-Harris and William McBrien, Greenwood Press, 1988, pp. 293-301.

Frye is an American educator and the author of Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience. In the following essay, she argues that in The Woman Warrior, Kingston portrays an image of female selfhood that is both imaginative and realistic.

One of the compelling insights of feminist literary criticism has been the recognition that the literary traditions we inherit have often denied women the power of naming and the power of narrative: women have inherited a sense of story in which action and affirming self-definition seem precluded not only by social environment but also by expectations of how stories work. Neither the mythic nor the realistic mode, as traditionally used, has seemed capable of adequately portraying the...