Essays on The Woman Warrior

Published in 1975, The Woman Warrior turned autobiographer Maxine Hong Kingston into one of the most prominent female voices of her generation. As gender/feminist studies programs developed at major Universities across the United States, professors added Kingston’s story to their curricula as an example of...

Hidden within “No Name Woman” are many underlying symbols and motifs, or reoccurring patterns, that work to shape the story into what it is and to help craft not only the characters’ personalities but also the overarching plot of the story. One motif that seems...

Maxine Kingston’s The Woman Warrior wrestles with the importance of language for Chinese-American women, using Kingston’s own life experiences as the novel’s foundation. In the book’s final chapter, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” she details her developing relationship with silence and language. Kingston...

In its creation and consumption, literature involves an inherent contract between reader and author. The parameters of this contract are often set by the work’s genre, and help the reader to determine whether the text should be interpreted as truth or imagination. When an author...

The Woman Warrior is the memoir of Maxine Hong Kingston’s experience growing up as a first-generation Chinese American. In it, she tells the stories of several other women to reveal the struggles and issues that have affected her own life. In telling their stories, she...

Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoirs do not share the focus of typical memoirs- biographical details of friends, siblings, favorite pastimes. Rather, Kingston examines the social influences that have shaped her life, view of herself, and the world. The author looks predominately at the “talk-story” of her...

Stories and narratives are ubiquitous in both Chinese and American culture. These stories are often used as warnings or to teach a lesson to those who cannot or have not experienced something firsthand. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston is a patchwork of narratives...

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s semi-autobiographical memoir Woman Warrior and Alice Walker’s short essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” the mother figure, the “Woman Warrior” in each tale, plays an important role in shaping the author’s understanding of personal or racial identity. Nonetheless, although Kingston’s...

American women played important roles during World War II, both at home and in uniform. Not only did they give their sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers to the war effort, they gave their time, energy, and some even gave their lives. Reluctant to enter the...

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, conflicts involving hunger are clearly of significance, appearing throughout every chapter of her memoir from “No Name Woman” to “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe.” Paul Outka’s “Publish or Perish: Food, Hunger and Self-Construction in The Woman...

There are few identities that fit neatly within conventional, binary systems of thought. Binary oppositions that exist within the spheres of race and gender are exclusive of individuals who occupy intersections of these identities. In The Woman Warrior Kingston’s goal is not to write off...

“We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth,” stated the French philosopher E.M. Cioran. Though seemingly counterintuitive, this statement is undoubtedly true, begging us to question what it is about silence that is so powerful. Silence is,...