Analysis Of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs Of A Girlhood Among Ghosts

Writing is one of the many ways people try to understand their identity. In the book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston, she reveals that voice, through the use of talk-stories and her words, allows her the freedom to own the independence needed to reach a closer understanding of her own identity. Talk-stories, defined by Jenessa Job in “The Woman Warrior: A Question of Genre,” are “…verbally relayed stories based upon Chinese myth and fact” (83). Kingston uses talk-story to retell her aunt, No Name Woman, and her mother, Brave Orchid’s, stories. As well, she talk-stories her life, to give readers a better understanding of her identity as an American-Chinese woman.
In the first section of The Woman Warrior, Kingston's mother talk-stories of "No Name Woman", Kingston's aunt. Her mother gives little
She tells Kingston this story when she starts her menstrual cycle, to keep her from embarrassing the family. In the story, No Name Woman was married to a man who went to America. While he was away she became pregnant with another man’s child, putting shame on her and the family. After the child was born, she killed herself and the child. No one is to speak her name; they are to pretend she never existed. Since Kingston knows nothing of her aunt she makes up stories to fill in the blanks bring back to life her aunt. In “Treading the Narrative Way between Myth and Madness,” by Mary Zeiss Stange, she also explains how Kingston filled in her aunt’s story. “However, Kingston cannot rest satisfied with this fragmentary, cautionary tale. She fills in the outline of the story, imaging a variety of possible scenarios, suggesting a number of conclusions as to what happened to her aunt, and why” (20). This helps her find her identity through giving her aunt a