Loss And Regaining Of Women’s Voice In The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston is an outstanding Chinese American woman writer whose works are mainly about the experiences of Chinese immigrants living in the United States. Her first novel The Woman Warrior, which discusses gender and ethnicity and how these concepts affect the lives of women, has attracted attention of critics and scholars since its publication in1976. Telling the experience of a Chinese girl who grows up in the U.S, The Woman Warrior reveals the conflicts between Chinese and American cultures, conflicts between Chinese-Americans and Whites, and the oppression and resistance of Chinese-American women. Kingston has depicted various Chinese-American women in the novel, and is called a woman warrior struggling for women’s right.The Indian-American woman scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reveals in her Post-colonial theory that it is the oppression of patriarchy and imperialism that deprive the third-world women of their rights. Based on Spivak’s theory of Post-colonial feminism, this thesis explores the loss of women’s voice under the pressure of sexism and imperialism, and analyzes the protagonists’efforts to help women regain their voice.This thesis discusses the loss and regain of women’s voice from three aspects:the manifestation and reasons of the loss of women’s voice, and the way of women’s voice regained. The first chapter focuses on the loss of voice of different women-the mothers and daughters. Although they have different life experiences, grow up in different countries, they have the same loss-both of them are deprived of the right to speak. The second chapter analyzes the reasons of this loss, holding that it is the oppression of both imperialism and sexism that makes the Chinese-American women lose their right to speak. The last chapter explores the protagonists’attempts in regaining their voice:the speaking ghosts, new woman Mulan, delirium of the women and the peaceful song of Ts’ai Yen all representing women’s voice. Silence is finally broken in various ways and women’s voice is regained.