Breaking silence and constructing intersubjectivity: ways of solving the conflicts in The Woman Warrior and The Kitchen God’s Wife

Abstract

“Silence” is a form of “being invisible”. It occupies an important position in “non-native” women writers’ works in the United States. While focusing on the silence in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts and Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife, this study attempts to explore and reveal the conflicts hidden behind silence: the conflict between genders, the conflict between races, and the conflict between Chinese culture and American one. In The Woman Warrior, the narrator’s father and mother’s silence about and prohibition of the mention of the no-name aunt are reflections of the ideology of the patriarchal world; the conflict between races is revealed in the silence of the narrator in American schools, and in her whisper before the bosses who are racists. In The Kitchen God’s Wife, Winnie’s secret about her past and her silence about her husband’s wrong doings show her contempt and disillusionment of the whole patriarchal society. The obstruction in the communication between the narrator and her mother in The Woman Warrior and the silence between Winnie and her daughter, Pearl in The Kitchen God’s Wife are not only a problem of generation gap, but more importantly, the great differences between two cultures: mother represents Chinese culture while daughter the American one. The analysis shows that in order to solve the conflicts, women characters not only have to break silence, but also assert their subjectivity and acknowledge both the self and the other. Relying on Jessica Benjamin’s theory on intersubjectivity, this paper asserts that equal and successful communication between genders, races and cultures can be achieved through the construction of intersubjectivity.