Dialogic Voices in The Woman Warrior

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper revisits Maxine Hong Kingston’s ground breaking novel The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory on dialogic discourses, the paper examines multiple voiced discourses of The Woman Warrior that reveal intricate conflicts embedded in various types of oppressions the Chinese American female narrator faces in America. Through a close reading of the text, the paper attempts to discover multiple voices hidden in The Woman Warrior and examine how these voices prevent the reader from settling in absolute truths from the text. Kingston allows the text to have these heterogenous dialogic voices by first challenging and deconstructing any authoritative discourses that demand unconditional allegiance from listeners. Instead of these authoritative narratives, Kingston makes the narrator create playfully multiple and even conflicting voices that allow the room for heteroglossia to emerge. Examples of these carefully crafted dialogic voices are examined as Kingston’s narrative strategy to create heteroglossic world in The Woman Warrior. In the process, the paper argues that Kingston’s strategy of using dialogic voices enabled her to effectively represent heterogeneous nature of Chinese American women’s lives in the 1970s.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• I. Introduction
• II. Heteroglossia of “No Name Woman”
• III. “The White Tigers”: Creation of Alternative Voices
• IV. “It Translated Well:” Accepting Dialogic Voices
• Works Cited
• Abstract