Maxine Kingston's The Woman Warrior

In the “No Name Woman” section of The Woman Warrior by Maxine Kingston, the family punishes the aunt for adultery by acting as though she never existed and ultimately dehumanizing her to the point of a fate worse than death. This is expressed in the following quote, “Don’t tell anyone you had an aunt. Your father does not want to hear her name. She has never been born” (Kingston 1515). Kingston’s father went from a family of brothers and one sister, to a family of nothing but brothers. The family completely strips every aspect of the aunt’s identity away. “Rather than physically murdering her as punishment, the family forcefully sup-presses the linguistic representation of her name, dehumanizing her by symbolically denying her existence (although