Resumo de The Woman Warrior - Maxine Hong Kingston

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston: A Feminist Discourse
Cultural Heritage and Identity
Critics couldn?t decide whether the novel is an autobiography or a collection of stories both fact and fiction. However, many readers agree that the book is more than a mere memoir of a woman?s experiences as she goes from girlhood to a teenage college student and into adult life. Amidst all these transformations lay the cultural heritage and cultural identities that continually tore the girl apart. One end was demanding her to keep her Chinese roots intact while another required her to evolve into the American woman demanded by the times and the environment where she lived.
The conflict between the Asian and the Western heritage of the author clearly engages into a flawless marriage of narrative as the book provides a mixture of writing styles seen in both the Chinese and American traditions. The reader and the writer are brought together by the stream-of-consciousness writing style of Kingston. As she uses the first person point of view, the reader is drawn into the heritage of her experiences that is superbly felt with emotional intensity.
Oral traditions are used by most Asian countries to ensure passing down of cultural knowledge from one generation to the next. Woman Warrior remained faithful to this heritage as the writer juxtaposed myths and ?talking-stories? in between her own ?autobiographies?. In this way, through the five chapters of the novel, the reader is able to experience for himself the magic of the ?talking-story? as a prime identifying heritage of the Chinese.
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
The Saphir-Whorf Hypothesis principles are centered between linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. The hypothesis believes that though it is most likely that language determines a culture?s world view, whether it is ?strong? or ?weak?, there also exists the fact of linguistic relativity that accepts the reality of languages to have codes that are unique to that culture thus makes structural diversity of languages limitless. The second wave of feminists clearly supported and concretized this hypothesis as realized in the emergence of the feminist discourse.
Kingston, as she used the first person in Woman Warrior presents evidence of this hypothesis. The Chinese?s strong traditions of filial piety would always subjugate the self over elders. The language used by Chinese to call one?s name gives information that determines the person. Automatically, one would know just by how a Chinese is called if he comes from the mother side or the father side of the family, if he is the eldest, the second or the last sibling, if he is a boy or a girl. And so, creatively, she subjugates her own ideas by putting them explicitly in the fifth chapter while still using the ?I? in the first four chapters of the book like how American writing is used when narrating in the first person. Though Kingston?s cultural heritage is clearly revealed as determined by her language, she is still able to insert unique codes that are relative to being a woman who can discuss feminist issues amidst a determined language.

Importance of Girlhood and Adolescence
Writings on girlhood and adolescence emerged only in the twentieth century as third generation immigrants to the Americas found it harder to reconcile differences with their cultural identities most especially during adolescence. Kingston?s work in Woman Warrior is important in supporting Naomi Weisstein?s assertion to involve social context into the constructs of psychological theory.
The Woman Warrior presented the ghosts that haunted a girl while she was growing up from girlhood to adolescence. As a girl menstruates, there is enough trauma and physical change that happens. Adding more social pressure to women as they go through this stage is almost oppressive. So much is expected from the Chinese girl warrior as she is changing into a teenager while acclimatizing herself to a totallynew surrounding feeling like a lost Barbarian Reed Pipe, the title of the second story in the book. Kingston gives a concrete example of Weisstein?s struggle that psychologists take an active stance in redefining gender roles. Psychology held women back due to its patriarchal nature. The second wave feminist writers through their literatures challenged basic psychology until a new literary feminist theory evolved.
Mother-daughter relationship
The Chinese mother and daughter relationship is a formidable fortress that no kind of social construct can ever break. As clearly emphasized in the Woman Warrior, the young girl?s stories are more than sixty percent her mother?s stories that are her mother?s mother stories as well. The mother-daughter relationship envisioned in the Woman Warrior is a relationship that evolved amidst the hardship of immigrants to a new land. Though the mother is a highly respected healer in China, she had to remain a laundry woman in a new land. The mother had to impart the heritage that the family blood had across the demands of a new land that had new values.
This is one of the important relations where Kingston the girl growing up had to struggle in understanding her mother who grew up in another culture with different sets of gender values as against the American way of life. The stories of her mother definitely went opposite the modern constructs of gender roles. For most Chinese girls and teenagers of that era, it was both boon and bane to go against your mother or go against the basic American constructs that a patriarchal society demanded.

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