The document discusses the literary technique of autobiography and how it is used in Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir The Woman Warrior. Autobiography relies on the identity between the author, narrator, and protagonist. Kingston uses this technique to explore her search for identity as she investigates the stories from her childhood that helped shape her through the tales of women like Fa Mu Lan. The memoir examines Kingston's struggle between two worlds - that of her mother/Chinese culture and America. Through autobiography and these stories, Kingston works to understand what parts of herself are from her upbringing versus her Chinese identity.

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Adriana Hanson
Dr. Kevin Brazil
Literary Techniques
2/12/15
Autobiography in The Woman Warrior
According to Phillipe Lejeune, Autobiography is the “retrospective prose narrative
written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life,
in particular the story of his personality.”1 Much like the metanarrative, autobiography relies
on self-reflection, however, instead of the novel philosophizing about itself, the author now
becomes the philosopher. Autobiography consists of four major elements: The form of
language as prose narrative, the subject as the individual life/story of a personality, the
situation of the author as identical to that of the narration, and the narration as retrospective
and identical to the principle character.
In The Woman Warrior, all five stories reveal to the readers something that helped
shape Kingston into the woman she is. The first story about the No-Name-Woman reveals,
not only Kingston’s vivid imagination, but also her feelings of being an outcast. In the story,
Kingston describes the “outcast” table, and how shamed relatives are forced to sit at this
table, eating the family’s scraps while they are stared at in judgment. Though Kingston never
has to sit at the outcast table, she understands how these people probably felt as she too feels
as though she doesn’t fully belong. In the first chapter, she asks, “Chinese-Americans, when
you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to
childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with
1 Phillipe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact,” On Autobiography, (Minneapolis:
University Press, 1989), 4.

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stories, from what is Chinese?”2 Throughout this book, Kingston investigates her childhood,
in an attempt to understand herself, and she uses the stories of the No-Name-Woman, Fa Mu
Lan, Brave Orchid (her mother), and Moon Orchid (her aunt) to try to piece together what
parts of her are Chinese and what parts are a result of her childhood, her family, and her
mother’s stories.
One thing that makes autobiographies distinct is the relationships between author,
narration, and protagonist. I have talked in previous essays about the relationship between
narration and subject, and how they are many different forms it can take. In the case of the
autobiography, the relationship between narration and subject is identical. However,
autobiography introduces a new concept, the role of the author within the story as more than
just a distant creator. In an autobiography, “the author, the narrator, and the protagonist
[subject] must be identical.”3 The protagonist of an autobiography must be the author (or it
wouldn’t be a true autobiography). An autobiography therefore is the author talking about
him/herself. The narration is merely who/what talks to the readers. This means, that the
author takes on the role of both narration and subject. This is the number one criteria for
identifying an autobiography. “An identity is, or is not. It is impossible to speak of degrees,
and all doubts leads to a negative conclusion.”4 If the identity of these three elements is not
identical then it is not an autobiography. Furthermore, this relationship between the author,
narration, and subject must be made clear to the readers in some way. This could be done in
the title and/or in the character’s name. If it is an autobiography then the character’s name
will be the same as the author’s (that is if the author decides to mention themselves by name).
2 Maxine Hong Kingston, The woman warrior: memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts, (New
York: Vintage International, 1989), 6.
3 Lejeune, On Autobiography, 5.
4 Lejeune, On Autobiography, 5.

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The protagonist is “linked, by a social convention, to the pledge of responsibility of a real
person.”5
Is it possible, then to change the name of the protagonist and still be considered an
autobiography? The answer to this is no, even if every event that happened to the author
happens to the protagonist, because by changing the character’s name you are distancing the
author from the protagonist. In this case, the protagonist will resemble the author, but he/she
is not the author. “Identity is not resemblance. Identity is a fact immediately grasped—
accepted or refused, at the level of enunciation; resemblance is a relationship subject to
infinite discussions and nuances, established from utterance.”6
“The autobiographical genre is a contractual genre,”7 and the identity of the author as
both the narration and the protagonist is the reading contract established between the author
and the readers.
We see moreover, the importance of the contract, in that it
actually determines the attitude of the reader: if the identity is
not stated positively (as in fiction), the reader will attempt to
establish resemblances, in spite of the author; if it is positively
stated (as in autobiography), the reader will want to look for
differences (errors, deformations, etc.). Confronted with what
looks like an autobiographical narrative, the reader often tends
to think of himself as a detective, that is to say, to look for
breaches of contract (whatever the contact). It is here that the
myth of the novel being ‘truer’ than the autobiography
originates: when we think we have discovered something
through the text, in spite of the author, we always accord it
more truth and more profundity.8
If the literary technique of autobiography is so heavily concerned with identity, then it
is only appropriate that the author/narration/protagonist would be as well. Kingston reveals
her search for an understanding of her identity throughout the book. She contrasts herself to
social customs when she identifies with her disgraced and “forgotten” aunt. She compares
5 Lejeune, On Autobiography, 11.
6 Lejeune, On Autobiography, 21.
7 Lejeune, On Autobiography, 29.
8 Lejeune, On Autobiography, 14.

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herself to Fa Mu Lan the woman warrior when she recounts the story using first person
pronouns. Her grammatical first-person self takes over the legendary woman’s story: “I am a
female avenger.”1 At the end of the chapter Kingston says of herself and Fa Mu Lan:
The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. May my people
understand the resemblance soon so that I can return to them.
What we have in common are the words at our backs. The
idioms for revenge are ‘report a crime’ and ‘report to five
families’. The reporting is the vengeance – not the beheading,
not the gutting, but the words. And I have so many words –
‘chink’ words and ‘gook’ words too – that they do not fit on
my skin.9
Here Kingston reveals that she has left her village (her neighborhood of emigrants) in order
that she can save them. Though she uses her words as her weapon, not a sword.
Kingston continues on to depict the controversial relationship she has with her mother
in chapter two and chapter three when she switches back and forth between her mother’s past
(or rather the stories her mother tells about her past) and the relationship between Brave
Orchid and herself. “She [Kingston’s mother] said I would grow up a wife and slave, but she
taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior
woman.”1 And in fact, Brave Orchid, had an adventurous life as well. She got her medical
degree and graduated the best in the class, she fought ghosts and won, and she managed to
find her own identity. However, once her husband shipped her out to America to live with
him, she seemed (on the outside) to lose all of that independence. Kingston both admires her
mother and despises her. The lack of outward affection shown by her mother, makes
Kingston restless and discontent. Kingston wants to be like the warrior women her mother
tells her about, and she also wants to be like the woman her mother used to be, but the
oppressive atmosphere stifles her. However, after Kingston tells her mother she can’t move
back because the ghosts there make her ill her mother shows her some of the affection and
encouragement she needed to become that warrior woman she desperately sought to become.
9 Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 64.

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“The world is somehow lighter. She has not called me that endearment [little dog] for years –
a name to fool the gods. I am really a Dragon, as she is a Dragon, both of us born in dragon
years. I am practically a first daughter of a first daughter.”10
Kingston is torn between two worlds, the world of her mother and the Chinese, and
the world of America. Her mother, from a young age taught her to look at the Americans
around her as “ghosts.” And for a good portion of her childhood, she did. But as she broke
out on her own she started to see her mother become more ghost-like. These ghosts scare her
and they follow her around, and like her mother before her she struggles to fight against
them.
To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights
before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the
deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language
of impossible stories. Before we can leave our parents, they
stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with
homemade underwear.11
Despite how most of the book recounts narratives about other women (excluding the final
chapter), all of these stories affect her. Her life is shaped and transformed by these stories.
She starts by fighting against these stories, these ghosts. But by the end she comes to embrace
them by becoming a teller of stories just as her mother was. This does not mean she has all
the answers by the end of the book, but she has come through her training and is prepared to
begin her warrior’s journey. Autobiography relies on identity, and Kingston is fighting to
understand hers. So her use of this technique has become her tool. “I continue to sort out
what’s just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies,
just living.”12
10 Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 129-130.
11 Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 103.
12 Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 244.

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Works Cited
Primary Source
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The woman warrior: memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts. New
York: Vintage International, 1989.
Secondary Source
Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. Realism and Consensus in the English Novel. Edinburgh:
University Press, 1993.
Genette, Gerard. “Focalization,” Narrative Discourse. Oxford, Blackwell, 1980.
Lejeune, Phillipe. “The Autobiographical Pact,” On Autobiography. Minneapolis: University
Press, 1989