Woman Warrior Vs Sula

Different countries have different traditions and culture they follow and live; however, there is one thing each country has in common: restricting and bounding women by cultural and societal expectations. From the novels and articles that have been read in class so far, women were always limited and constrained to what they were allowed to do or say. Women were always degraded by their own kin or by the society they grew up in. Women were expected to live what their parents want them to be or what the society wants and expects them to do. There are a lot of similarities and differences between the novels Sula and Woman Warrior, but one of the most evident similarities and differences are the cultural expectations, illustration, and portrayal …show more content…
“I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself… I need you to shut your mouth” (Morrison 92). Sula does not care who the higher authority was and all she wants was to voice out what she wants. She does not like idea of people telling her what to do as if those people know everything there is to know. She does not want to conform to the societal norms and expectations of being a wife and a mother. Meanwhile, in Woman Warrior, female characters were always quite, “The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl” (Kingston 166). Since she was little, whether she was at home or at school, Kingston was always reminded of being voiceless when it comes to being a Chinese girl. Whether if it is within her Chinese culture or the American culture, she does not have the power to voice out what she wants. In the article about multiculturalism literary criticism, it mentioned that in novels that are multicultural there “is the tendency to think of characters as repress individual human beings” (Booker 155). This statement supports both novels and could be interpret in two ways. Readers always think that a female character should always be put on situations or should be portrayed as someone being suppressed; however, in Sula, Sula never conformed to all the societal norms and was never scared to voice out her thoughts. The Peace women were characters who defies the courtesy of being a woman who should only give herself to one man. Meanwhile, in The Woman Warrior, the women in the Chinese society were all bound to the culture. They are trapped by the expectations and traditions that were put upon them by the Chinese