Subversion,Containment And Negotiation:Fashioning Of Identity Through Rewriting In The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior occupies a pivotal position in Chinese American literature,exploring the conflicting roles and the grow-up stories of a Chinese-American girl with multiple identities,namely the female identity,the American identity and the Chinese identity.In The Woman Warrior,Kingston retells her own experiences and her family stories,and rewrites some Chinese legends through imagination,combining autobiography with fiction.This paper focuses on how Kingston presents her experiences and her family’s stories and how she rewrites Chinese folk stories,attempting to analyze the ideologies inherent in such narrative strategies and the identity construction process reflected by them.This paper employs Stephen Greenblatt’s new history theory,particularly his theory on self-fashioning,and negotiation,to specify the effect of the narratives in the book on the fashioning process of identities and analyze the interplay of different elements constituting the author’s identity using some concepts theorized in Greenblatt’s works such as authority,alien,subversion,containment and negotiation.To be more specific,the paper discusses the narrator’s three identities as reflected by the text,namely the female identity,the American identity and the Chinese identity.As a female,the girl suffers devaluation from her families and the villagers.Moreover,she learns from her family tradition that girls must stand oppression from the other sex.Instead of accepting the suppression of the hierarchy of the patriarchal society,the narrator draws revolting spirit from the no name woman and Fa Mulan,whom she deems as forerunners,and tries to achieve her subjectivity and freedom as a woman.As an American,the girl seeks to be assimilated into American society and enjoy a normal American citizen’s rights.However,her inheritance of Chinese culture and Chinese tradition often renders her silent in front of the Americans.What’s more,America’s exclusion law targeted at Asians adds to the alienation of Chinese people living in America,leading to the girl’s marginalization.In the book,the narrator claims her American identity and rights by adopting an American perspective in relating her stories and identifying with American values.As a Chinese descendant,having inherited Chinese culture and Chinese tradition through her family,the girl deems her Chinese identity and the Chinese values she inherited from her family as authoritative to some extent.However,the authority of the Chinese values meets challenges in the confrontation with American social culture and values.The girl,therefore,has to re-estimate her Chinese inheritance when encountering cultural conflicts between Chinese and Americans and finally learns to communicate well as an ethnic minority in a multicultural context.As exhibited by these identity fashioning processes,the paper argues that,in the book,the author constructs a new identity through rewriting the stories and negotiating different identities.