A Modern American Myth A Bridge For Cultural Integration

In the history of Chinese American literature, Maxine Hong Kingston is the first female writer who has entered successfully into American mainstream literature. Her works feature best in transplanting Chinese traditional culture into English text to a large-scale extent. In her representative work, The Woman Warrior, she has greatly added and adapted Chinese myths, folk tales and historical characters. Coincidently, the archetypes of these adaptations can also be found in Greek mythology and the Bible stories. She has ingeniously grasped the root of both Chinese and western cultures and showed the common wishes of human's thoughts. In this way, Kingston has created a unique American modern myth and tried to seek for possibilities of cultural integration.This thesis deals primarily with Kingston's The Woman Warrior based on Frye's Archetypal Criticism theory. Through analyzing Kingston's displacements on Chinese myths, folk tales and historical characters, the journey of the author's identifying herself is obviously illustrated. By comparing similar myths in both Chinese and western cultures, the possibility of cultural integration is definitely elaborated. The thesis is divided into three chapters except Introduction and Conclusion. Three archetypes are discussed. They are ghosts, crazy women and exiles. And their displacements are carefully dealt with from the angle of archetypal criticism.Introduction part gives a brief account about the author, her works and the responses to her works at home and abroad, and the central argument and Frye's archetypal criticism theory applied in this thesis is also clearly stated.Chapter One aims to find out the ghosts'archetypes in both Chinese superstitious tradition and western culture, and tries to analyze the displaced ghosts represented by the ghosts in"No name woman","White tigers"and"Shaman". And the functions and values of these displaced ghosts are inferred at last.Chapter Two covers the archetypes of crazy women that have constantly appeared in both Chinese and western literatures, and gives detailed explanation of the displacements of crazy women in"At the Western Palace"and other characters in the book. Then the functions and values of these displaced crazy women are introduced.Chapter Three discusses the archetypes of exiles in both Chinese and western cultures. It also scrutinizes the displacements of exiles in"A Song for the Barbarian Reed Pipe". The functions and values of the displaced exiles are disclosed.The last part of this thesis concludes Kingston's strategy and functions of displacing Chinese and western myths. It points out that her myth displacement aims to create a new form of"American myths". Kingston successfully achieves her pursuit of cultural identification and integration through the displacement of Chinese and western myths.