The Bildung Of A Word Warrior

Since the publication of Maxine Hong Kingston's semi-autobiographical work,The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts in 1976, it has been thefocus of intense critical debate. There are some misreadings by white scholars andsome male authors' criticisms from her own community. Most of the criticisms arefrom the angle of postmodernism, feminism and racism. But by now few of them arefrom the Bildung's angle, except for Pin-chia, Feng who has made an analysis aboutthe narrative features in The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and MaxineHong Kingston: a Postmodern Reading.Bildungsroman, as a literary subject, has a long creation history and manyclassical works. Bildungsroman from the minority groups expresses more of themarginal and ethnic features. The little girl in The Woman Warrior is a marginal rolefrom dual cultural backgrounds, whose experience of Bildung is thus morerepresentative. This thesis mainly probes into the confusion and dilemma the littlegirl has to face, due to different cultural backgrounds. Faced with the confrontationbetween the Chinese community and the mainstream society, the narrator has tosolve the identity problem. It is the aim of this thesis to find out in what way and towhat extent, the Bildung process of a Chinese-American girl from a minority groupreveals more sufferings.The present study is based on text-analysis, making a thorough research intoexisting criticism and materials, aiming to trace the process of the Bildung of aChinese-American girl living in two different cultures and to delineate the difficult Bildung of minority women in a society full of racial, class and genderdiscriminations. Through the analysis of Maxine Hong Kingston's The WomanWarrior, this thesis intends to illustrate the dual oppression on minority women andtheir struggle for setting up their real identity.