ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior that has received far more attention from literary scholars than the other autobiographies. Kingston’s unique narrative structure attracted some critics to write about The Woman Warrior. Yet, for the most part, literary scholars have chosen to write about Kingston’s work in order to relate it to contemporary feminist critical theory and the on-going debate about a woman’s place in a patriarchal society such as the United States. Elizabeth Ordonez examines The Woman Warrior’s structuring as part of a “textual coding” that “becomes both the means and embodiment of modifying and reshaping female history, myths, and ultimately personal and collective identity”. Early in The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Kingston uses a literary device to show just how much her mother’s stories affected her psyche. Kingston begins her memoirs about her childhood by recalling a story about her menarche.
