Character Analysis: The Woman Warrior

In The Woman Warrior, Kingston develops the image of China placing restrictive binds around her feet in order to illustrate how even though her family has been separated from China for many years, the Chinese culture and ideals restricts Kingston's rights as a woman. Since Kingston's birth after Kingston's mom, Brave Orchid, moved to America she has held high expectations for her daughter to accomplish many things while all the while juxtaposing her own stories with ancestral tales and duties of women becoming the ideal house wives. Brave Orchid stuffs her daughter's head full of stories of strong and honorable woman warriors only to drag her dream back down to Earth with the expectations that she will never be able to accomplish these feats, but must think more realistically. When Kingston thinks …show more content…
While the Kingston family is not physically in China, the cultural expectations of the Chinese woman followed them to America and still influence their day to day life. Her family and her community still expect her to be the quiet, and dutiful Chinese daughter that would have been easily married off back in China. The family does not take into account the new culture they became immersed in when they immigrated. Kingston also uses the metaphor of the double binds to describe the tight and suffocating feeling that the binds would have caused on the feet of the Chinese women. The binds are used to cause the women's feet to conform and change into the standard dainty shape expected of the Chinese similarly to how the community represented through the binds is forcing not only Kingston, but the other Chinese-born-American daughters to conform to the pressure of the cultural standards that encouraged families to rear little girls as being worthless, slave daughters who need to take care of children, cook, sew and clean for the