In this thesis, I will analyse the themes of The Woman Warrior that are silence and voice, especially women’s silence and voice. Silence, on one hand, illustrates the situation of Chinese women in the old Chinese cultural and also in the modern American society. Voice, on the other hand, represents the feminist awareness of Chinese American women, since Western feminism, as traditionally understood, is speaking up,demanding women’s identity and rights, refusing to be dimised, which is the oppsite of silence.源]自{751^*论\文}网·www.751com.cn/

2. Literature Review

During the past thirty years, a great number of articles and books have been written on Kingston and The Woman Warrior. Most of the critics praise Kingston’s contributions to the formation of a new Chinese American identity for women who were long oppressed by Chinese patriarchal tradition. In addition, her skills of storytelling is said to continue the Chinese arts of “talk story”, which actually advances the oral traditions of literature into a written treasure. And The Woman Warrior won the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction. For scholars of autobiography, Kingston's story represents an important break from past writings; her complex, multi-layered and quasi- fictional narrative flies in the face of traditional autobiographies, which tend to follow a linear-chronological pattern and maintain a stable narrator—an “I”—throughout(Wikipedia). Kingston's memoir, on the other hand, is a blending of voices and styles, often contradictory, that use many of the techniques of postmodernism: ambiguity, incoherence, pluralism, and irony. Many critics point out Kingston's literary strategy of articulating silences by exploding the stock image of the quiet Oriental damsel. One of Kingston's major concerns is the way gender roles and femininity are redefined in Asian American culture. The space occupied by the modern woman warrior is thus between the two poles of different cultures. Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, is a unique and successful literary work of the 1970s in the United States. Among the many features of the book, one which made it popular is the ethnic identity of the author who tells the stories of female Chinese Americans. As The Woman Warrior is a narrative of a feminist who has an ethnic background, therefore, by narrating their silences and voices she expresses the oppression of Chinese American women and also represents their feminist awareness as minority Americans. Because of the differences in ethnic, social, historical and cultural backgrounds, the development of Asian American feminism differs greatly from the white mainstream feminist movement in the United States. From my point of view, The Woman Warrior is about women, but it is primarily about the Chinese American’s attempt to sort fact from reality in order to come to terms with the paradoxes that shape fact from her life as a member of a racial minority group in America. Kingston uses traditonal Chinese stories and combined with Amercian language, which creates this marvellous art work.