Power In Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior
The Power in Storytelling
The idea of power takes an entirely new meaning in Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, The Woman Warrior. Rather than power insinuating a political or social advantage, power in Kingston’s writing relates to her recurrent childhood experiences of being told stories and listening to “talk-story” from her mother. The importance and impact that the stories have is stressed from the first page of the memoir until the last story, which demonstrates the way Kingston uses and displays power her writing. This is part of the reason Kingston describes power as the ability to tell your own story; with this definition, power and the lack of power can be seen in Maxine and other characters in the memoir.
[Difference in power between Kingston and her nameless aunt, the No Name Woman, is apparent right from the beginning of the novel.] The novel begins with Maxine’s mother warning her: “You must not tell anyone … what I’m about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself” (3). Without any other information, readers can already see the power that storytelling has in Kingston’s life as she is bound to secrecy based on the …show more content…
The idioms for revenge are "report a crime" and "report to five families." The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words” (53). [While the Warrior Woman and Kingston live vastly different lives, one aspect of their lives that overlap are the impact of words and stories.] The words on Fa Mu Lan’s back are the names - and thus the stories - of the dead in her village, while the “words” on Kingston’s back are the stories that people tell her or the stories that she creates. For both characters, stories have an impact on each of their motivations and their
The idea of power takes an entirely new meaning in Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, The Woman Warrior. Rather than power insinuating a political or social advantage, power in Kingston’s writing relates to her recurrent childhood experiences of being told stories and listening to “talk-story” from her mother. The importance and impact that the stories have is stressed from the first page of the memoir until the last story, which demonstrates the way Kingston uses and displays power her writing. This is part of the reason Kingston describes power as the ability to tell your own story; with this definition, power and the lack of power can be seen in Maxine and other characters in the memoir.
[Difference in power between Kingston and her nameless aunt, the No Name Woman, is apparent right from the beginning of the novel.] The novel begins with Maxine’s mother warning her: “You must not tell anyone … what I’m about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself” (3). Without any other information, readers can already see the power that storytelling has in Kingston’s life as she is bound to secrecy based on the …show more content…
The idioms for revenge are "report a crime" and "report to five families." The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words” (53). [While the Warrior Woman and Kingston live vastly different lives, one aspect of their lives that overlap are the impact of words and stories.] The words on Fa Mu Lan’s back are the names - and thus the stories - of the dead in her village, while the “words” on Kingston’s back are the stories that people tell her or the stories that she creates. For both characters, stories have an impact on each of their motivations and their