Articles & Essays   Book Reviews Creative Writing

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Volume 12 Number 1, April 2011

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Interpretative Strategies in “No Name Woman”

by

Quan Wang

Beihang University

It is no longer a question simply of saying what was done…and how it was done; but of reconstructing, in and around the act, thoughts that recapitulated it, the obsessions that accompanied it, the images, desires, modulations, and qualities of the pleasure that animated it.

—Michel Foucault The History of Sexuality Vol. 1

Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman” is a short story about Chinese immigrants’ life in the USA. The mother, in order to educate her daughter about sexual relations, tells a story about her aunt’s shameful pregnancy. However, from her mother’s fragmentary narrative, the American daughter infers a different story: that of an awakening feminist figure instead of a humiliating counterexample. This is unmistakably demonstrated by the title of the short story collection, The Woman Warrior, which begins with “No Name Woman”.  Critics have expressed conflicting views on the controversial heroine. According to

Diane Simmons, [1] the no-name-woman is a passive victim, and a foil leading to the preparation of the skilled fighter protagonist  in “White Tigers,” who has gained knowledge in the miraculous martial art, the very thing the story’s aunt is lacking. However, Sidonie Smith regards the nameless aunt as a “truly transgresssive and subversive” figure (154), who expresses “female identity and desire.” (153) Is it a tragic story of a misfortunate female victim or a paean of the awakening woman warrior? I would argue the latter view is built on the daughter’s reconstructive interpretation of the former. Amy Ling has provided a penetrating analysis of the imaginary nature of the narrator’s story: “‘reality’ is created through words, and words are ripe with possibility.” Moreover, she claims the importance of the multiplicity and rich fiber of Kingston’s text and dismisses the “truth” behind the plurality. “Where the ‘truth’ lies is not her concern; her [Kingston’s] delight is in the richness of possibilities and in her own creativity in imagining them” (172). However, this essay would argue that the very underlying “truth,” invisible as it is, has an omnipresent influence upon the fiction, and determines its superficial complexity. On the surface, the maternal narrator is secretly revealing a family skeleton to her daughter. However, in retelling the story, the daughter-narrator comes to detect a warrior spirit in the supposedly condemned aunt. To explicate the matter, I would borrow the Derridean concept of the “inscriber” to refer to the mother narrator: “the inscriber of a text which recounts something for us, or rather which makes a narrator speak” (“Purveyor” 179). Derrida argues that the inscriber must “provoke the narrator and the narration” and “there must be event—and therefore appeal to the narrative and event of narration” (Given Time 122). In recounting the inscriber’s story, the daughter is not only interpreting the content of the story but also the reading strategy of an inscriber. Likewise, in our reading of “No Name Woman”—the narrator’s reading of the aunt’s story-- we can find great discrepancies between the mother’s narration and the daughter’s representation which compel us to reflect on the narrator’s corresponding interpretative strategy.

First of all, the mother tells a simple and “factual” story: in China, the aunt committed adultery during the absence of her husband and gave birth to an illegitimate child. This is tantamount to a curse on the villagers who ransacked the family’s house. However, the way the mother/inscriber represents the story invites our careful consideration. In recapitulating the aunt’s story, she focuses her narration on the villagers’ attack: the depiction of their marching towards the house, the slaughter of domestic animals, the meticulous damage they caused to the family, etc. Then, another salient message protruding at the beginning and towards the end of her story is: “You must not tell anyone. […] Your father does not want to hear her name.” In fact, within the three-page narration the actual account of the aunt’s misbehaviour which resulted in the above mentioned punishment occupies only an extraordinarily small proportion—just one paragraph: there is no detailed description of her sinful crime but only the inevitable result, her pregnancy (3). What kind of reading strategy drives the inscriber to recount the story in this way? The statement “Necessity, a riverbank that guides her life” (6) is interpreted by the daughter as the survival principle of the struggling emigrants: my mother “plants vegetable gardens rather than lawns” (6). “After the one carnival ride each [melting ice cream cones and a movie on New Year’s Day], we paid in guilt,” because “our tired father counted his change on the dark walk home” (6). What does the principle of bare “necessity” mean in the economy of verbal representation? It suggests a strategy to employ only the indispensable elements to achieve the final aim: to educate the daughter. In other words, the necessity principle dictates the maternal inscriber to pay exclusive attention to what the story does or performs, rather than what the story is, to paraphrase Austin’s illocutionary and perlocutionary force of performative statements (1-22).[2] This is unequivocally explicated by the mother toward the end of her narrative: “Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don’t humiliate us.”(5) Thus to accomplish this instructive mission, she organizes the story carefully: the pregnancy itself is hardly mentioned, and the focus is on the devastating effects upon the family and on the severe punishment for the transgression.

The exclusive focus on how to achieve the desired narrative effect naturally leads to another question: is the mother reporting an actual family skeleton or just conjuring up a fiction to inculcate some womanly virtues, as is reasonably doubted by the daughter? “Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on” (5). Derrida’s persuasive argument in his interpretation of Baudelaire’s “Counterfeit Money” can shed much light on our understanding of this point. Like the counterfeit money, “the fictive narrator produces his narrative as the true narrative and therein consists the fiction—or the simulacrum produced by the author. This is what it seems to share with the phenomenon of counterfeit money (to pass off a fiction as ‘true’).” (Given Time 93)  In fact, whether the inscriber’s telling is fictional or factual does not matter very much, as long as it can produce certain “effects and speculations” which provoke the daughter’s reflections upon the “simulacrum” (93-6). If we scrutinize the maternal narration, the fictional traces will be revealed. In response to the mother’s story, the daughter is eager to materialize the aunt’s abstract moral character: “I want to learn what clothes my aunt wore, whether flashy or ordinary, …” but “she [the mother] will add nothing” because “my mother had told me once and for all the useful parts.” (6) As a result of creating a fiction to teach some lessons to her daughter, the mother cannot be specific about the details of the fictional character. This may explain how she could be ignorant of the dress of a sister with whom she shared the same bedroom: “your aunt’s [room], which was also mine.”(4) “I remember looking at your aunt one day when she and I were dressing.”(3) Some readers might counter-argue that the refusal of details is due to the “necessity principle” of the maternal inscriber. However, we can also see the other side of the coin: the great necessity of convincing the daughter of the authenticity of the story by providing some specific and “necessary” details, as the painstakingly elaborated delineation of the villagers’ destruction of their house. In a similar vein, Kingston also endeavors to widen the “border between fiction and nonfiction” (“Conversation with Maxine” 35). Not only the real people in our daily life, but also their imaginative creations should be included in her writing, and the latter appears to be much more important to Kingston. “I am taking into consideration I am writing about real people and these real people have powerful imaginations. They have minds that make up fictions constantly…” (“Conversation” 35). Whether the materials employed in the story are “the dreams” or real persons does not matter, and what really matters is that they can reveal “truth.” “I tell the dreams that they have and then when I do that, that border becomes so wide that it contains fiction and nonfiction and both going toward truth.” (35)

Another noteworthy fictional detail is that “no one said anything. We did not discuss it.”(3) This fictional construction is contrary to the real life situations in China in the 1920s, or even to the logic of the constructed imaginary world. As members of a big family, they had close relationships with each other, and even minute gestures were hard to escape the surveillance of patriarchal parents and the watching eyes of other family members. The protruding pregnancy of a woman during her husband’s absence is bound to disgrace the family honor, shaming everyone. Thus it is really doubtful that the whole family would just let it be without taking any action to prevent the impending disaster. On the other hand, if they had taken measure to stop it, then, from “the realistic point of discourse” (178), there would not have been a story to educate the daughter, and no woman warrior in the daughter’s imagination. This logic is beautifully described by Roland Barthes: “it seems that Sarrasine has the freedom to choose to go or not. However, if he were to heed it and refrained, there would be no story. Thus Sarrasine is forced by the discourse to keep his rendezvous” (135). To serve “the story’s interest”, that is to say, the principle of fiction, “the implacable constraint of the discourse” (Barthes 135) demands that “no one said anything” about the eye-catching pregnancy of the No Name Woman (3).

The story appeals to the daughter, but not in accordance with maternal expectations. In the reproduction of the inscriber’s story, the daughter has narrated a seemingly different story, a product of her unique reading strategy: her reflections on the mother’s narrative strategy, the speculations of the possible reasons for the aunt’s pregnancy, which were totally absent in the mother’s story: ranging from possible rape to passionate love; the elaborate fantasy of the aunt’s “flashy clothes,” and the painful delivery of the new life. Realizing the mother’s narrative strategy which is to “build on an invisible world […] around our childhood,” the daughter decided to “get things straight” and “to name the unspeakable”(5) by reinventing a story which can correct the “confused” things and cover the missing links in the maternal narrative. In other words, if the mother’s narration is strictly gauged by the Procrustean bed of the necessity principle of achieving a desirable educative purpose, the daughter, no longer confined by economic straits, follows the “extravagance” guideline, and is not satisfied with only “what the story performs,” but also eager to know “what the story is.” In the very process of reconstructing the fiction, she comes to a totally different conclusion of the same story, which also reveals, to our readers, her interpretative strategy: she is creating another imaginary fiction to illustrate her feminist purpose. E. D. Huntley points out the charming power of the oral tradition of story telling: “young Maxine was profoundly impressed not only with the effectiveness and malleability of stories,” because the storytellers have the right to “change a story with each retelling to fit the circumstances of that telling and the audience that is listening.” (35) As is shown in the text, the Chinese mother is telling a story to her daughter, who is fully aware of her American contexts and mainstream white readership.

Apart from the mother’s story in quotation marks, the bulky part of the daughter’s speculation focuses on the possible reasons of the aunt’s pregnancy. Kathleen A. Boardman points out that the narrator’s inference of the maternal story is very significant. “Kingston portrays her struggle to establish realities, to ‘infer’ her mother’s attitudes and her Chinese roots from bits and pieces of stories and customs.” (89) The first idea popping into her mind is rape. In such a seemingly barbaric and lawless land, rape naturally becomes the best candidate excuse to explain the aunt’s tragic fate. “Women in the old China did not choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil.”(6) Violence and terror abound everywhere. “If you tell your family, I’ll beat you. I’ll kill you. Be here again next week.”(7) This mysterious image of the Other is needed to build up the positive image of American identity and superior psychological sense of self: the maternal lesson is less instructive for the narrator who lives in the lawful land of America. Gotera informs us that in her classroom research survey of American students’ responses to the story of “No Name Woman,” many students feel that “women in Chinese culture are different from American culture—treated in some respects as slaves” and express the opinion that this kind of barbaric violation would not occur in the USA. (69)

However, on second thought, this explanation only accounts for the aunt as a passive victim, a terrible fate potentially threatening to every woman living on that backward land, thus it makes the aunt more an object of sympathy than the counter example of an evil woman, especially for budding young girls at the start of menstruation. Therefore, “for the interest of the story,” as Barthes terms it, the aunt had to take some initiative to attract men, to do something horrible to be eternally silenced by the family. Even that is not enough. For “my aunt,” to be “my forerunner”(8), she must demonstrate her feminist courage in boldly declaring her illicit love for her beloved man, and be willing to pay any price for protecting him. “She kept the man’s name to herself throughout her labor and dying; she did not accuse him that he be punished with her. To save her inseminator’s name she gave silent birth.”(11)  The silence of the nameless aunt is viewed as a courageous “act of will” by Huntley.  “No Name Aunt maintains total silence throughout the months of her ordeal: she does not cry out when the villagers ransack her home; she refuses to identify the father of her child; she gives birth without a sound; and she dies without a word. Her silence is an act of will, while by contrast, the wordless Chinese American girl displays the silence of inaction, of an overprotected and weak woman who depends on others to speak for her.” (87) To reverberate the warrior spirit of Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the narrator imposes elaborate feminist gestures onto the aunt while the reason for the rape fades from the readers’ attention. “It could very well have been, however, that my aunt did not take subtle enjoyment of her friend, but a wild woman, kept rollicking company. Imagining her free with sex doesn’t fit, though.”(Emphasis mine 8) This description provokes our memory of a slightly modified version of the sex-rampant Sula of Toni Morrison’s titular work, whose painful awakening is incarnated into her sexual transgression of patriarchal order in the village.

The courageous declaration of female desire and individuality is further unambiguously proclaimed in the following lines: “To sustain her being in love, she often worked at herself in the mirror, guessing at the color and shapes that would interest him, …she wanted him to look back.” “At the mirror my aunt combed individuality into her bob.”(9) An exaggerated feminist consciousness is thus ascribed to the poor aunt who was living in the 1920s China where the concept of feminism hardly existed. “Such common loveliness, however, was not enough for aunt. She dreamed of a lover for the fifteen days of the New Year, the time for families to exchange visits, money, and food.” (10) The excessive primping of the aunt is also overstated to threaten the very fundamental order of patriarchy — the incest taboo. “Uncles, cousins, nephews, brothers would have looked, too, had they been home between journeys. Perhaps they had already been restraining their curiosity, and they left, fearful that their glances, like a field of nesting birds, might be startled and caught.” To avoid incestuous love, the men had to leave the home, as is suggested, “[b]ut another, final reason for leaving the crowed house was the never-said.”(10)  Lee Quinby argues that the nameless aunt challenges the Foucauldian concept of the code of alliance and pursues the uncontainable sexuality. “In her public disclosure she [the narrator] too transgresses the code of alliance and thus allies herself with her aunt.” (134) John Paul Eakin also maintains a similar view, regarding the actions of the nameless woman as “the violent consequences of the aunt’s assertion of her individuality, […] the quest for selfhood.” (257-8)

This is not to deny the validity of the daughter’s narration; rather it demonstrates the process of her narrative strategy. “The readability of the text is structured by the unreadability of the secret,” Derrida argues (Given Time 152). That is, “the inaccessibility” of the inner psychology of fictional characters [here referring to the voiceless aunt whose real reason for adultery could not be ascertained][3] has created much creative room for speculations on the part of the narrator and drives her to write her imaginative version of the story. Apart from the mother, the father is the only possible source to verify the authenticity of the story in this new land of America, however, this access is totally foreclosed, as is repeated by the mother: “Don’t let your father know that I told you, he denies her.”(8) Thus anything shameful appearing in the parental conversation is imagined by the daughter to be linked with the aunt. “On nights when my mother and father talked about their life back home, sometimes they mentioned an ‘outcast table’…” Consequently, the daughter believes that “my aunt must have lived in the same house as my parents and eaten at an outcast table” (7), implying her unconventional behaviour.

The final birth scene is also pregnant with symbolic meanings, in line with the suggested feminist consciousness. “The black well of sky and stars went out and out and out forever; her body and complexity seemed to disappear, she was one of the stars, a bright dot in blackness.”(14) According to Chinese culture, only those great figures with extraordinary achievements can be incarnated into stars after their death—the very warrior spirit of “my aunt, my forerunner.” (8) However, this painful awakening, in contrast to the cozy sleep of getting accustomed to the long established patriarchal ideology, doubles in its agony.  As “a tribal person alone,” she is “a bright dot in darkness, without home, without a companion, in eternal cold and silence.” (14) Just like the painful delivery of the new baby, her rebellious idea, brilliant but ephemeral, could not become a viable subject in such a suffocating environment—the feminist flavor is revealed to the fullest degree. Likewise, Smith maintains that this symbolic description of vastness of the black sky suggests the potential possibilities of female identity undefined by patriarchal society: craving but also fearful. “While the endless night proposes limitless identities being the confining borders of repetitious patriarchal representations, it promotes the ‘agoraphobia’ attending any move beyond the carefully prescribed boundaries of ancestral, familial, and community paradigms of female self-representation.” (154)

Despite the overwhelming suggestive tone of feminist awakening intended by the daughter narrator, some contradictory details does not escape the careful reader: “Sometimes a vision of normal comfort obliterated reality: she saw the family in the evening gambling at the dinner table, the young people massaging their elders’ back”(14). What she is much hungrier for is a name remembered in the family tree: “No one would give her a family hall name.”(15) If we define her feminism as transgressing the patriarchal conventions concretized in traditional family life, her longing for “a family hall name” at the dying hour is symbolic of her acknowledgement of the mainstream value and her past “wrong deeds.”  A scrutiny of the textual details will make the point more salient. “Don’t tell anyone you had an aunt. Your father does not want to hear her name. She has never been born.” (15) Not to be mentioned in the discourse is a frequently employed patriarchal way to relegate the challenging behaviours to silence, disappearance and ontological non-existence. Judith Butler’s insightful discussion of homosexuality is also applicable to the no-woman case. “[O]ppression works not merely through acts of overt prohibition, but covertly, through the constitution of viable subjects and through the corollary constitution of a domain of unviable (un)subjects—abjects, we might call them—who are neither named nor prohibited within the economy of law.”(126) The social purpose is to make the rebellious figures “a domain unthinkability and unnameability […] the exclusion from ontology itself” (127). Therefore, if the aunt desires her name to be carved in the “family hall,” she has to be a “virtuous woman” (meeting the patriarchal expectations), the very thing she is short of and regrets. In this sense, her innermost craving for “giv[ing] her a family hall name” at the doom hour has totally erased the seemingly feminist awakening.

The final denouement is always of supreme importance in interpreting the significance of the protagonist’s behaviour. Sula, until the moment of her death, still maintains her rebellious belief against traditions and conventions; Hester Prynne, in her tenacious persistence on her own belief, has transformed the villagers’ reading of the letter A from the shameful adultery to her Angel-like virtue. On the other hand, Moll Flanders, towards the end of the novel, repents her previous challenging behaviour. To borrow the terms from Deleuze and Guattari, after the deterritorialization (the denouncement of mainstream cultural values), the final re-territorialization implies a reconciliation or acknowledgement of the validity of dominant ideology. In this line of thinking, no-name woman’s longing for conventional family comfort and her desire for the recognition in the “family hall name” suggests her re-territorialization into the patriarchal system and an implicit acknowledgement and repentance of her transgressive behaviour.

Works Cited

Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words, NY: Oxford UP, 1965.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z.  Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.

Boardman, Kathleen A. “Voice and Vision: The Woman Warrior in the Writing Class”. Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Shirley Geok-lin Lim (ed.). NY: The Modern Language Association of America, 1991.87-92.

Bromley, Roger. Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2000.

Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” The Judith Butler Reader. Ed. Sara Salih with Judith Butler. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans and foreword by Brian Massumi. London: The Athlone Press, 1988.

Derrida, Jacques. "The Factor of Truth."  The Purloined Poe. Eds. J. P. Muller & W. J. Richardson. Baltimore: Hopkins UP, 1988. 173-212.

---. Given Time.  Trans. Peggy Kamut. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992.

Eakin, John Paul. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985.

Foucault, Michel.  The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley vol.1. New York : Pantheon Books, 1978.

Huntley, E. D. Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion. Westport, Connecticut   and London: Greenwood Press, 2001.

Gotera, Vicente F. “ ‘I’ve Never Read Anything Like It’: Student Response to The Woman Warrior. ” Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Shirley Geok-lin Lim (ed.). NY: The Modern Language Association of America, 1991. 64-73.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York : Knopf, 1977.

---. Conversation with Maxine Hong Kingston by Laura E. Skandera-Trobley. Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston. New York: G.K. Hall& Co., 1998. 33-50.

Lim, Shirley Geok-lin (ed). Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. NY: The Modern Language Association of America, 1991.

Ling, Amy. “Maxine Hong Kingston and the Dialogic Dilemma of Asian American Writers.”  Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston. Ed. Laura Skandear-Trombley. New York: G.K. Hall& Co., 1998. 168-181.

Myers, Victoria. “Speech-Act Theory and the Search for Identity in The Woman Warrio.r” Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Shirley Geok-lin Lim (ed.). NY: The Modern Language Association of America, 1991. 131-137.

Quinby, Lee. “The Subject of Memoirs: The Woman Warrior’s Technology of Ideographic Selfhood.” Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston. Ed. Laura Skandear-Trombley. New York: G.K. Hall& Co., 1998. 125-145.

Skandear-Trombley, Laura E (ed.) Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston. New York: G.K. Hall& Co., 1998.