Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior"

            While reading The Woman Warrior, Hong Kingston’s word choice struck me. For example, in the recounting of “White Tigers,” after the woman warrior leads her army to Peiping and beheads the emperor, they attack Mongols “en route” to visit the Great Wall. This French expression inserted into a Chinese tale pulled me out of the narrative for a moment. My immediate reaction was to criticize such discordant language, but soon realized that this was the author’s attempt to reify the central theme of the novel: the anxiety induced by attempting to reconcile two distinct cultures. 

Specifically, Hong Kingston recounts the experience of immigrant children navigating the culture and language of their parents’ homeland and those of their surroundings. The wisdom supplied by their parents does not translate onto their new experience. For instance her incomprehension of her mother’s explanation for why she tastes sugar in her mouth when she has not eaten any (that her grandmother in China is sending her candy) emphasizes her disconnect with Chinese legends. This anecdote leads to the conclusion that to her parents, “home” meant China, a word that “suspended America." The inclusion of motherline symbols (umbilical cords, midwives, women storytellers, string, circles, loops and hoops) further emphasize the tragedy of a mother not able to teach her daughter how to live and survive. Instead of retelling the woman warrior stories to empower her daughter, she uses them to dismiss her victories. Therefore when Hong Kingston earns straight A’s, her mother retorts that it is nothing compared to a girl who saved her village. From the first line of the novel, she tells her daughter directly “you must not tell,” and symbolically has cut her tongue. In order to find her voice, Hong Kingston must break free from matriarchal control, beginning a new motherline that will provide strength to her daughters.

Chaucer: Neither Feminist, Nor Sexist, Yet Both and Neither

Geffrey Chaucer is one of the most important authors in the English language, probably only second to Shakespeare. He wrote during the Middle Ages, so before Shakespeare, often playing with earlier legends, fairy tales, and serious books. By "playing with," I mean he adapts the story to make it more ironic, funny, or to make a point. In many ways his style was very post-modern. Sometimes he inserts himself into his stories (he is one of the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales, for example) and sometimes he interrupts his narrative to address his readers. Just the practice of recreating a story that already exists, is rather post-modern. Case in point:

For my Chaucer class, I wrote an essay on how we can't know if he was a feminist or a sexist because of his ironies. In fact the debate does not only rage among opposing camps, but amongst feminists themselves. He engages in the antifeminist rhetoric (Example: Emulate the Virgin Mary, Avoid Eve-like behaviour like the plague), but also allows his female characters to combat this rhetoric. The most powerful example is the Wife of Bath (Alison) whose fifth husband reads to her from a book called "The Book of Wicked Wives" which records evil women from Eve, passing by Delilah, and several women from Greek mythology that murdered their husbands. Of course, he's trying to show Alison how women are inferior to men and much more evil.

One day she can't take it anymore and rips out three pages from the book. This leads to a physical fight, which leads to Alison's deafness in one ear...BUT, although she's hurt, she wins her point. Her husband agrees to stop reading his favourite book and even more remarkable, he agrees to let her have control over their house and land. (Ironically, the house and land were hers to begin with, but by marrying him, she had lost her rights to them simply because she was a woman). Furthermore, he grants her complete "maistrie" (mastery) and "soveraynetee" (sovereignty) in their relationship, telling her she can do as she wishes for the rest of her life.

Sounds like Chaucer is advocating women's equality, right? Not exactly. His description of her is far from flattering. She is much more sinful than saintly: sensual, unfaithful, deceitful, proud, lustful, frivolous, manipulative....On top of that, she takes biblical passages out of context to defend herself. As one critic, S.H. Rigby, asks, is she in fact just "a debunker who is herself being wittily debunked?" Her argument for the equality of women, or more accurately their superiority over men, may be Chaucer's farce of the feminist point of view.

In the end it is impossible to know. As another critic, Priscilla Martin, put it Chaucer's "ironies, ambiguities and multiple narrators present a hall of distorting mirrors" so Chaucer can be seen as sexist or feminist, neither, or both.


The Wordle:

(click to enlarge)