SPECTRAL WOMEN: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON GHOSTS IN KINGSTON’S THE WOMAN WARRIOR

Abstract

Ghosts are the most common sight in Maxine H. Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Ghosts exist in the writer’s childhood memories and her country of origin, China. They also populate the writer’s present life in the American society. Ghosts keep hovering in the writer’s memory and text, appearing in different shapes and communicating different meanings. Ghosts cannot be decided to be human or subhuman, pertaining to the past or to the present, Chinese or American, male or female. They cannot easily be anchored in time and space. They cannot even be confined to language since they trespass words and become an invisible power that controls the writer’s memory and feelings. The focus of this paper is to detect ghost images in Kingston’s text and to give meaning to such a metaphor, referring to feminist theories.