On The Ethnic And Gender Identity Pursuit In The Woman Warrior

As one of the most influential Chinese American female writers, Maxine Hong Kingston in 1976 completed her famous book, The Woman Warrior, which aroused widespread attention in the literary circle at home and abroad. Since its publication, a great many scholars have devoted themselves to studying it from various aspects. Most of them have focused on the following research fields:feminism, culture, narration, and identity etc. It is meaningful to research the issue of identity in the book because of Kingston’s multiple identities as a minority female writer. For a long time, the Chinese American women have been faced with the identity confusion as double marginal people. On the one hand, living in the male-dominated society, they have to confront the oppression and discrimination towards women from the patriarchal world. On the other hand, since they live in a multicultural environment made up of different ethnic groups, they also find themselves unable to deal with the huge gap between the Chinese traditional culture and the foreign one around them. The Woman Warrior is about how a Chinese American girl distinguishes between fantasy and reality as well as how she reconstructs her identity as both a girl and an American. It is from both gender and cultural aspects that Kingston starts her journey of identity pursuing. Taking the pursuit of gender and ethnic identity as a clue, the whole book can be divided into the following three parts:the loss of identity, the confusion of identity, and the reconstruction of identity. It depicts the whole process of Chinese Americans’awakening of self-consciousness and their strong desires to express themselves.The thesis explores the issue of identity in The Woman Warrior from the following three aspects:the loss of identity, the confusion of identity, and the reconstruction of identity with such research methods as close textual reading, literature research, and content analysis. It is mainly composed of five chapters. The first chapter is the introduction which includes a brief description of Kingston and her works, the literature review on her works, the theory of identity, and the research significance. The second chapter centers on the loss of identity. It deals with not only the identity crisis confronted by Chinese Americans in real life but also the one some typical characters in the book are faced with. In the third chapter, the emphasis is put on the Chinese Americans’ confusion about their identities. The fourth chapter concerns how the first and second generations of Chinese immigrants establish their unique cultural identities and how Chinese American women break feudal shackles by reconstructing independent female images. The last chapter is the summary of the whole thesis. As a matter of fact, it is of great importance to the construction, development, and improvement of the Chinese American literature to analyze how the Chinese Americans define their relationship with the external living circumstance. Besides, the reflection on Chinese Americans’ identity is of practical significance to the Chinese Americans’ maturity and the diversity of American culture.