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西安外国语大学 英文学院 陕西 西安 710128
The Woman Warrior is a representative work of Maxine Hong Kingston, a distinguished contemporary Chinese American writer. In this novel, she rewrote some ancient Chinese stories, legends, history and represented those images to American readers in a new way. This work has caused a great sensation among literary scholars and researchers due to its distinctive way of writing since its advent. Frank Chin has ever stated, “Their [Kingston, Hwang, and Tan] elaboration of this version of history, in both autobiography and autobiographical fiction, is simply a device for destroying history and literature” (3). As an American, though, she has her right to write in an American way and her rewriting is only a reflection of her personal experiences of being stuck in the middle of two cultures. This paper is going to give a detailed analysis of those transplanted images in The Woman Warrior.
First, the traditional Chinese image of Hua Mulan has also been changed into a westernized woman warrior Fa Mu Lan as a combination of a Chinese story with American reality.
基金项目：西安外国语大学研究生创新基金项目，课题名称：“美国各少数族裔文学作品中精神家园的跨民族性研究”项目编号：syjs201607
In China, Hua Mulan is a widely known heroine of traditional folk tales. All Hua Mulan has done was based on her duties to show filial piety to parents, to honor her family, or even to maintain the feudal imperialism rather than to achieve individual heroism, so Hua Mulan could be taken as a model for traditional Chinese woman.
In The Woman Warrior, the original personal experiences, heroic activities and narrative backgrounds have been adapted or rewritten to a great extent. Differing from the traditional image of spinning, Fa Mu Lan was guided by a bird to learn massive sorts of magical martial arts in White Tiger Mountain. After being trained for several years, she went down the mountain to take revenge for both her family and villagers. Disguising as a male, she was so brave and overwhelming in the battles. Now we can see that the traditional war against invasions has been changed into a story of self-worth, independence and subversive revenge. Fa Mu Lan has nothing to do with family or national duties, instead, she embodies the spirit of feminism, which happens to show Kingston’s creative motive of deconstructing the patriarchal system of traditional Chinese society.
Kingston adapts this Chinese story for her own woman warrior as a rejection of the popular social values in Chinatown, like “[b]etter to raise geese than girls” ( Kingston 43), etc. In the army, Fa Mu Lan is not only a powerful soldier but also a wife with a baby unborn. Kingston has never meant to present women’s hardship and strength, instead, she targets her weapons directly at the feudal society. Thus here comes a Chinese American Fa Mu Lan who is equipped with western feminist awareness and racial consciousness.
Second, the adaptation of Ts’ai Yen is another call for cultural integration in the multicultural circumstances.
In the last chapter “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”, Maxine narrates another Chinese female Cai Yan’s story. Kingston’s version of Cai Yan’s story shifts the emphasis on dramatizing inter-ethnic harmony through the integration of Chinese and American art forms. Although being far away from the Chinese land, Ts’ai Yen was deeply moved by the barbarian’s music. Here music worked as a means to promote her understanding on the spiritual world of barbarians. After living with the Hsiung-nu for twelve years, Ts’ai Yen was ransomed and she brought back from the savage lands her songs, including “Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”. When Ts’ai Yen’s song, as a cross-cultural product, is composed under the influence of two cultures and enjoyed by two ethnic groups, Kingston foresees the possibility to combine Chinese and American culture in her between-worlds life. So as an ethnic writer in a multicultural society, Kingston has seen the possibilities to reconcile with two cultures through rewriting the story of Ts’ai Yen. It is clear that Kingston dreams of universality as a way to deconstruct the essence of marginalization.
It can be sensed that those two adapted images are actually the representative experiences of Chinese Americans in 20th century, so it is necessary for them to figure out an appropriate way to deal with their practical issues, that is, to tolerate cultural conflicts, keep themselves as well as merge into another culture, and then shape their own ethnic identities as Chinese Americans. This kind of idea echoes the spirit of “Third Space” by Homi Bhabha. The culture of the “minority” derives from the recognition of both their traditional and foreign cultures. Thus, cultural integration is proposed by Kingston as an effective way for those Chinese Americans to get out of their cultural dilemma.
Work Cited
[1]Chin, Frank. “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake.” The Big
Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature. Ed.
Jeffrey Paul Chan et al. New York: Meridian, 1991. 1-91. Print.
[2]Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of A Girlhood Among Ghosts.
London: Vintage, 1977. Print.
[3]Toming. A History of American Literature. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and
Research Press, 2008. Print.
作者简介：郝慧敏，1993年1月10日出生，女，汉族，山西省忻州市人，现就读于西安外国语大学英文学院2015级英语语言文学专业，研究生，主要研究方向：美国文学。
论文作者:郝慧敏
论文发表刊物:《文化研究》2017年5月
论文发表时间:2017/8/29
标签：西安论文; 外国语大学论文; 英文论文; 美国论文; 忻州论文; 基金项目论文; 汉族论文; 《文化研究》2017年5月论文;