Woman Warrior Quotes

Through The Woman Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston recounts on her life as well as her family’s past. Her cultural background calls for many unheard of customs and stories. Kingston’s mother teaches her daughter lessons through stories to show the importance of a message. Both death and ghosts reappear throughout the memoir and how ghosts never die. Kingston describes how revenge is a driving force for many actions throughout the memoir and how death seems to be answer to all issues but is not. Through narratives within the memoir, Kingston explains how hatred fuels revenge. The first narrative recollects on the No-Name Woman, Kingston’s father’s sister, a woman who committed suicide as well as manslaughter. Her aunts time leading to her …show more content…
Her aunt was forced into having sex and the man said “If you tell your family, I’ll beat you. I’ll kill you.” (pg. 7). Him threatening this once innocent woman is an act of revenge and he results in an act of violence to get away from his troubles. However, if he were to kill her his problems would not disappear because the ghost of his mistress would live on and haunt him for the rest of his life time. His crime will follow him along with the ghost of the woman he raped. The strategic placement of these quotes shows that revenge is a key driving force to actions. Putting her life on the line in an effort to keep his name clean shows that he was scared as well and did not know how the village would react. Kingston assumes those are the words he would have told her, striking fear into her …show more content…
Ghosts are born after death and the haunting will continue for eternity. The villagers expected to gain peace by their actions but in return they gained a ghost to cast over their recklessness. The family tried to forget about the No-Name Woman all together and acted as if she was never born. However, one can not simply forget a person especially if they have done something memorable. In this case, the memories attached to No-Name Woman are dark in the sense she killed herself, killed her baby, and committed adultery. The woman herself seeked revenge as well and took her own in an effort to avenge herself. Finally, Fa Mu Lan used death as a channel to avenge her family. The countless amounts of deaths she handed out turned into ghosts. The images of killing will stay in her mind and haunt her till she dies. In all of these cases death was used as a solution to the problem but, the plan backfires because of the ghosts that are left behind. The ghosts will continue to haunt the souls of the people that acted negatively towards