Kingston, Maxine Hong--Woman warrior

Maya Angelou uses an autobiographical form in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to portray her childhood. The lessons she acquires as a child are depicted in positive scenes between her and her grandmother and other female figures in her life. Likewise, Maxine Hong Kingston portrays, in an arguably autobiographical form, her life lessons in Woman Warrior. She aligns herself matrilineally with her female ancestors and heritage. Struggles between her American self and the Chinese heritage her mother speaks of become her means for finding self-definition. In contrast, Sheri S. Tepper's fantasy novel A Plague of Angels, portrays a female utopian society against a backdrop of male dominated ruin. She aligns the female protagonist with nature and ecological concerns. The turn away from society that is patriarchal and destructive is made toward a society defined in ecofeminist terms of Earth Mothers, animal rights, and the health of the environment.

This thesis is a comparative study of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, based on the imagery and theme of Borges's "forking paths." Both authors are indebted to Borges's work for providing the experimental narrative devices that made it possible for them to challenge their "ghosts." In Barth's case, he loses himself in the Funhouse, haunted by the "same old stories" (102); Kingston finds her voice in the Chinese stories and shocking images of the past. The thesis will work toward a presentation of the dramatic performances and brilliant images in Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and in Kingston's The Woman Warrior. Readers become players who surrender their conventional notions about narrative in Borges's "Garden of the Forking Paths." Fortunately, the writing of Barth and Kingston continues to keep storytelling a lively art where time and memory are the main characters.