Ambivalences In The Woman Warrior

This thesis attempts to explore the ambivalences in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, focusing on the ambivalences of parental and maternal conflicts in Chinatown community, that of the seeking for subjectivities of Chinese Americans, and that of the appropriation of the two figures Fa Mulan and Ts’ai Yen in traditional Chinese myths which implies the sense of Orientalizing Chinese culture and Chinese American cultural autonomy. As mother-daughter relations thread through the entire book, the misunderstandings between Chinese mother and American daughter, the daughter’s estrangement from the mother and the daughter’s identification with mother take on ambivalent flavor, implying great significance in the literature of Matrilineage. Feminism in The Woman Warrior is exhibited as a mainstream one and a postcolonial one alternatively and sometimes overlappingly, leading the Chinese Americans to the ambivalent state. Conflicts between Chinese Americans and their diasporic parents tangle with ethnical issues in American society, making the ambivalences of Chinese American subjectivity extraordinarily complicated. And for the discrimination of the yellow race has never ceased, when Chinese Americans in culture enclave seek out the answers of who is the“I”, what is the“I”and how to forge the“I”, their subjectivity is hybridized. The culture crash rips an uncrossable gap between Chinese and American culture and cultural representation uncovers that the understanding of Chinese Americans of Chinese culture and Kingston’s rewriting the myths are inconsistent with her expectation.