The Trauma Writing In The Woman Warrior And China Men

Maxine Hong Kingston (1940-) is a well-known contemporary Chinese-American woman writer, whose writing focuses on Chinese-Americans’life and experience in the US society. Among her limited works, The Woman Warrior and China Men are the earliest and most famous ones with the fame of autobiography sister books, widely discussed by feminists as well as by post-colonial scholars. The two novels show abundant traumatic facts in Chinese-Americans’ history and life, which, however, are often ignored in academic research. This thesis analyzes the trauma issues of the two with trauma theories on the basis of previous study, hoping to demonstrate what traumas are told and how they are expressed by Kingston, while exploring the purpose and value of her writing trauma.This thesis consists of five parts. The first part summarizes previous studies of Maxine Hong Kingston and The Woman Warrior and China Men, while introduces trauma theories and viewpoints related to my research.The second part concentrates on the retelling of traumatic events in the two books. In analysis of how the heroine retells the death and insanity of woman individuals in The Woman Warrior, and how China Men represents Chinese-Americans’ collective history of being slaughtered, silenced and imprisoned, a writing tendency of atrocity-exposing and tragedy-rethinking can be found in a mode of listening and response in Maxine’s work.The third part focuses on the depictions of traumatic memory of the two such as ghosts, nightmares and silences, concluding that the badgering of the aunt’s ghost and the nightmares related to madwoman in the first novel represents a kind of imprison on the heroine leading to traditional women’s fate, and that the abounding of repeated silences, slaughter nightmares and ghosts in China Men illustrates Chinese-American’s lacking a sense of belonging. The troubled and struggling states from the traumatic memories give a way to show the mental injuries and predicaments of contemporary Chinese-Americans.The forth part cares about Kingston’s exploration of curing trauma. The Woman Warrior guides women to pursue their own life by an intertextuality adaptation on stories of Hua Mulan and Cai Yan. China Men makes a symbolic writing that Chinese-Americans will recover their sense of belonging. Maxine’s efforts of working through trauma lie in these hopeful endings.The thesis finally suggests that, the trauma writing of The Woman Warrior and China Men is supposed to be a successful self-curing for Maxine Hong Kingston and declares the art’s great power of redemption.