The Warring Voices of the Mother. Maxine Hong Kingston's Tale of the Mother-Daughter Story

Abstract

Postmodern feminist theories of identity have warned against the use of general categories of gender in favour of more complexly structured conceptions in which gender is but one relevant strand among others such as class, ethnicity or race.
Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior is a beautiful version of the daughter's growth away from the omnipotent and powerless mother within the patriarchal family, a well known female plot, or subplot, in Western literature. This paper explores the ambivalence of the mother's voice carrying the fantasies and deceptions of feminine power, autonomy and authority. The powerfully compelling female images the mother builds through her story-telling are eventually contradicted either by the story itself or the bare facts of life, revealing the mother's uneasy collusion with patriarchy while voicing ways of overcoming it.
I wish to point out how the novel shows that for all the nuances and idiosyncracies allowed by the Chinese familiar background and the childhood in a working class immigrant milieu, gender traits socially constructed in a relational matrix loom the largest in the constitution of the girl's subjectivity.