A Feminist Interpretation Of Women’s Power In The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston, the second generation of Chinese American, is a highly acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She acquires close attention as a Chinese American woman writer from American dominant literary circles. Her three novels and several works that concern the experiences of Chinese immigrants arouse people’s attention. She contributes to the feminist movement as well with the work The Woman Warrior. And it is considered to be the most successful one among all of her works. Gender and ethnicity issues are also discussed in this novel.This is a work that includes rich connotation; it mixes the cultural, familial and personal context together. For the blending of Chinese traditional folktales and memoirs, it is hard to tell the genre of The Woman Warrior, therefore it has been under a severe dispute for a very long time. It consists of five interconnected chapters, and there is a female protagonist in each chapter. The theme of The Woman Warrior concerns the role of women in Chinese society and grown-up Chinese Americans. Kingston also records her confusions and struggles of finding identity between two worlds and two cultures in it. This book is an overnight success, because of its popularity and academic value; it soon becomes the subject of college courses, journal articles and dozens of scholarly books. There are so many scholars who are interested in and study it from various different perspectives, and there are also an immense number of relevant books and papers. The situation just shows that The Woman Warrior consists of infinite possibilities and deserves more profound study.This thesis tries to discuss the power of women and nature through the relationship between women and nature and the images of female protagonists in The Woman Warrior from the perspective of feminism, and then demonstrates Kingston’s attempt of constructing a harmonious world between man and woman, human and nature. Chapter one reveals that nature is the source of women’s power by discussing the relationship between women and nature. In chapter two, women’s rebellious power will be discussed. At first, readers will have the root of women’s rebellious power and the influence of traditional misogyny in The Woman Warrior reviewed, then the discussion of two models of rebellious women will be followed. In chapter three, readers will see the a short introduction to Virginia Woolf and her important literary critical term "androgyny". The following two sections are concrete discussion about two androgynous women, Hua Mulan and Brave Orchid. The purpose of the thesis is to highlight women who possess two different kinds of power make their endeavor to resist gender oppression and realize self-value with the support of nature.