Woman Warrior Essay

959 Words4 Pages
Analyse the ways history and memory generate compelling and unexpected insights. In your response, make detailed reference to your prescribed text and at least one other related test of your own choosing. History and memory work together in order to generate unexpected and compelling insights into the past. In Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, blends history, memory, myth and imagination in an exploration of Kingston's struggle to find belonging in two completely different cultures and ultimately, discover her own individual identity. In her novel Kingston has challenged the traditional way in which to write an autobiography. "Kingston reconciles the Chinese collective identity and the American individuality through reinventing the autobiography: she creates herself through (re)creating the stories of others." This book is most commonly classed as non- fiction though it is infused with fantasy and imagination. She is trying to recreate her mothers talk stories which doesn't help the idea of it being a non-fiction novel as it has too many unreliable, imagined, variable and undocumented components. It is also not written in a linear timeline and if we look at the way in which it was written it becomes clear the Kingston is in fact unclear on many facts and has a tendency to either guess or make up what may have happened. In No Name woman she has been told the story of her aunt by her mother and doesn't understand the whole story and is left with many holes she needs to fill. She imagines different scenarios for the aunt; did she want the relationship with the man or was she forced into it? It is things like these that make is question her stories and wonder just how much of it is fact and how much is fiction. Then there is also the idea of whether Kingston is actually a character or a presence in the story. The
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