A Dialogue Interpretation Of The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston is one of the most famous Chinese American female writers in contemporary. Her representative work, The Woman Warrior is regarded as a milestone in Chinese American literary history. This novel consists of five relatively distinctive stories and each of them has an independent plot. They are intertwined and linked together in a subtle way without division. This thesis will make a new analysis on The Woman Warrior by Bakhtin's dialogue theory. The whole structure of this novel is just like a dialogue net which consists of the dialogue between the mother and the daughter, feminism and patriarchy, Chinese culture and American culture. In the dialogue net, all kinds of different consciousness communicate and contradict with each other. Eventually, through the dialogue, the Chinese American women finish the pursuit of their own gender and cultural identities.This thesis consists of an introduction, the main body and a conclusion. Its main contents are as follows:The first part is the introduction, which will make a brief introduction to Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston and The Woman Warrior. Later it will discuss the different evaluations for The Woman Warrior from abroad and domestic critics. Then the thesis will render the reason for choosing the topic and theory to be applied.The second part is the main body, which is made up of four chapters: Chapter One will introduce Bakhtin's dialogue theory. According to Bakhtin, the dialogue no longer specifically points to the conventional dialogue within quotation marks; it is also extended to the existence of autonomous and equally signifying consciousness. According to Bakhtin's researches on Dostoevsky's novels, there are two specific forms for dialogicality to be applied in the literary text: the great dialogue and the micro-dialogue. This paper will mainly discuss the great dialogue in The Woman Warrior, therefore, here will focus on the great dialogue. According to Bakhtin, that great dialogue mainly includes the dialogue between the author and the hero, hero and hero, and between different consciousnesses.Chapter Two is the dialogue between the mother and the daughter that make the dialogue from confliction to integration. The confliction of the mother and the daughter owes to their incomplete cultural background. The mother is born in China and has the deep-rooted Chinese traditional culture. The daughter is born in America and accepts the education from western culture. When the daughter is restricted by the mother's Chinese traditional stories, she keeps silent and loses the equal position to have the dialogue with her mother. During the process of retelling the mother's stories, the daughter eventually accomplishes the dialogue with the mother in an equal position. Meanwhile the daughter recovers her own voice and self-identity as a Chinese American woman.Chapter Three is the dialogue between feminism and patriarchy. It will tell the stories of the no name woman and Moon Orchid that lose voice and self-identities under the oppression of patriarchy. According to mother's story of Fa Mu Lan, the author creates the image of the woman warrior to encourage the women who keep silent under the patriarchal oppression to pursue their liberation and equality. Through the dialogue between feminism and patriarchy, Maxine Hong Kingston deconstructs Chinese traditional patriarchal thinking, and subverts the Chinese traditional culture of male-chauvinism. Meanwhile, as a Chinese American woman warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston inherits the spirit of the woman warrior to make challenge to the patriarchy.Chapter Four is the dialogue between Chinese culture and American culture. Because of the difference between the Chinese and American ideological System, there are many cultural clashes in The Woman Warrior. Maxine Hong Kingston puts the two cultures on the platform to have an equal dialogue. During the dialogue, Kingston not only reveals the conflict and clashes between them, but also indicates the integration between the two cultures. At the end, through reconstructing the story of Ts'ai Yen, Kingston expresses her wish of looking forward to the integration of the two cultures.The last part is the conclusion, which concludes the significance of the dialogue theory in The Woman Warrior. According to Bakhtin's dialogue theory, the Chinese American women break their silence and the patriarchal oppression and finally complete the pursuit of their own gender and cultural identity through the dialogue in the novel.