Blooms Literary Themes - THE HEROS ... - ymerleksi - home

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts 221speaker throughout the book. She talks all night to the Sitting Ghostthat finally releases her from the bed, and she instructs the otherstudents in the exorcism. Bargaining shrewdly with the slave trader,she admires the girl slave who catches on to her game of words andplays along (80–82). She appropriates the voices of weaker women.For instance, she puts words in the mouths of her reluctant sister andher recalcitrant daughter, scripting Moon Orchid’s ultimately ineffectualconfrontation with her wayward husband (124–127, 129–131,143–144, 150–153) and dictating to the narrator the words she is tosay in English to shopkeepers (82) and the bemused druggist (170).Even when the narrator bursts out of her silence and shouts at herparents for several hundred words, she reports, “My mother, who ischampion talker, was, of course, shouting at the same time” (202).For Kingston, female silence equals female invisibility; havingno name means having no identity. The narrator is caught in a webof contradictions. Her Chinese culture values the silent, virtuous,passive woman, though it celebrates legends of avenging swordswomen.Her mother is domineering and dynamic, trying to acculturateher through talk-stories of family culture and trying to makeher speak English as the mother would. Her American culturepresents images of the desirable Chinese woman as whispery, exotic,and erotic. She and most of the other Chinese-American schoolgirlsare silent in public school surrounded by “ghosts,” noisy in Chineseschool where they and their families are known. It is no wonder thenarrator feels anxious about speaking and about claiming an identity,a Chinese-American identity, separate from her mother’s.“If you don’t talk, you can’t have a personality” (180), says thenarrator to the Chinese-American girl in the midst of a gruelingscene of seven pages in which she pinches, shakes, yanks, and shoutsat the girl in a frenzy to try to make her speak. “‘Say ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Hi.’Like that. Say your name. Go ahead. Say it. Or are you stupid? You’reso stupid, you don’t know your own name, is that it? When I say,‘What’s your name?’ you just blurt it out, O.K.? What’s your name?”(177). She uses her mother’s bewildering technique of simultaneouslyprohibiting and demanding speech, telling the girl when not tospeak, when to speak, and what to say: “‘I’m doing this for your owngood,’ I said. ‘Don’t you dare tell anyone I’ve been bad to you. Talk.Please talk.’” (181). The narrator’s rage at the soft, pretty, demure, and