An close reading essay I wrote for Asian American Literature on Kingston’s No Name Woman.
Although I did the assignment, I still am not confident in my ability to analyze literature closely. For this assignment, rather than perform a close reading, I relied on the gimmick of finding a small detail and extending it beyond what I believe the author’s intention to actually be. While I feel that the argument is clever, I do not feel that the conclusion is convincing nor do I believe it to be true. It was, however, entertaining to write.
Choose a short passage and make an argument for a particular interpretation of the passage. Your argument should be supported by a combination of textual evidence and your analysis of this evidence. You can refer to other parts of the work and the argument should indicate your knowledge of the work as a whole, but your paper should draw primarily from the selected passage.
In No Name Woman, Maxine Hong Kingston’s beloved and critically acclaimed essay, the narrator’s mother tells her an ominous allegory about her aunt’s suicide immediately after giving birth to a child out of wedlock. Unhappy with the limited information conveyed in her mother’s story, the narrator attempts to fill in the details in her own retelling. In the end, when the narrator reflects on her retelling, she cryptically suggests that her aunt is haunting her out of spite; she claims that the Chinese have a premonition that drowned ghosts, like her aunt, wait to pull down substitutes. This seemingly ambiguous conclusion presents itself as a mystery whose solution is carefully embedded into the overall structure of the narrative. The significant clues are found in the critical section in which the narrator transitions from offering her mother’s story to telling her own variation. In this section, Kingston leaves readers a starting point when she has the narrator mistakenly name the actress of Oh, You Beautiful Doll. The narrative and historical context of this mistake and the other references in this passage reveal a theme of substitutions and replacements that helps in understanding the conclusion.
No Name Woman is comprised of two distinct sections. One section is her mother’s version of the aunt’s suicide and the other is the narrator’s version. The sections are bridged by some commentary by the narrator. In it, the narrator emphasizes her dissatisfaction with the sparseness of her mother’s version.
If I want to learn what clothes my aunt wore, whether flashy or ordinary, I would have to begin, “Remember Father’s drowned-in-the-well sister?” I cannot ask that. My mother has told me once and for all the useful parts. She will add nothing unless powered by Necessity, a riverbank that guides her life. This frustration motivates her own retelling, as she fills in the many details she hopes she could know. Given this character motivation, the author leaves for the reader an unusual clue in the form of an intentional mistake. The narrator, when describing what movies she watched on New Year’s Day, mistakenly names the incorrect lead actress in Oh, You Beautiful Doll as Betty Grable instead of June Haver. While this could be a mistake that is intended to illustrate the unreliability of the narrator and her memory, the context of this inaccuracy is unusual because the narrator’s fascination with specifics was only previously discussed. This contradiction between the narrator’s personality and her commentary marks the first clue that Kingston leaves for the reader.
In order to better understand this clue, one needs to get a sense of the relationship between Betty Grable and June Haver. Betty Grable was an actress and model for 20th Century Fox. At the time, she was the biggest box office draw and the highest paid entertainer. June Haver, on the other hand, was seen largely in relation to more established stars. 20th Century Fox had plans to use June as a stand in or replacement for Betty Grable and other actresses. As a result, it may be understandable that the narrator in No Name Woman incorrectly identifies June Haver as Betty Grable. But this choice by the author augments the various themes of the short story.
This mistaken reference helps to underscore the feministic aspects of the short story. Mistaking the lead actress of Oh, You Beautiful Doll but not the lead actor, John Wayne, of the second movie listed, provides commentary on how the movie industry and society at large views women as interchangeable goods rather than individual beings. Even the main character, relatively aware of the systemic gender injustices, still falls victim to the same substitution mentality that 20th Century Fox exhibits when it tries to groom replacements for its leading female stars. But this reference to Betty Grable and June Haver also contributes to another major theme of No Name Woman, that of substitution.
Earlier in this transition section, the narrator hints at “paper sons and daughters” when she says, “The Chinese I know hide their names; sojourners take new names when their lives change and guard their real names with silence.” Paper sons and daughters are immigrants who lied about their names and pretended to be relatives of previous immigrants in order to pass customs. This practice effectively treats familial bonds as consumable and transferrable goods, essentially replacing one’s kin with strangers. This reference, along with the collusion between movies and stories and the substitution of Betty Grable with June Haver, informs a reading of the remaining parts and ending of No Name Woman. Indeed, Kingston wants readers to understand movies and stories similarly.
Kingston draws the connection between movies and stories for the reader. The narrator implores of the reader,
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 stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?
The structure of her questions exhibits some parallelism. Her mother’s stories are paired with Chinese culture in one question. In the next, Chinese tradition is being paired with movies. Thus, Kingston has related both the stories the narrator’s mother tells to the movies the narrator watches. The theme of substitution should be understood with this relationship between movies and stories in mind. With these connections in mind, the remainder of the story can be read as the narrator substituting herself in place of her aunt.
The remainder of the story becomes strengthened if the narrator is understood as substituting herself in her aunt’s place. In her retelling, the narrator grapples with the various implications of changing the details of the world around herself and her possible behaviors. In certain variations, the narrator finds her behavior to be unbelievable or futile. In this sense, the narrator is grappling with the society that surrounds her. She also addresses her own personality and behavior. These themes were originally exhibited in her commentary. The frustration that the narrator expresses with the narrative demonstrates that she has been effectively trapped within the story that her mother and her have built up around her.
In the end, the narrator remarks that, “the drowned one, …, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute.” The framing of this remark reveals a clear implication. The narrator has been pulled down into the metaphorical well of the narrative. The same walls that surrounded her aunt now surround her. Kingston’s unique structuring of No Name Woman as stories within a story allows her to layer various stories and themes on top of one another. As a whole, Woman Warrior both examines culture but it also examines narratives and stories themselves and No Name Woman is no different. Ultimately, when reading No Name Woman, it is hard not to substitute oneself in for the narrator who then substitutes the reader in for the aunt.
You point out that what begins as an empathic connection between narrator and aunt becomes a rather dangerous imaginative practice. A couple of things to work on: 1. The editing work in this paper is quite slipshod; I don’t really mind a few mistakes, but a lot is different. 2. Your close reading skills surrounding a single detail are quite accomplished here, but I would have liked a little more work with the specific, quoted details of the rest of the passage – how they’re told (in terms of word choice, sentence arrangement and flow, etc), why the parts of the story are arranged the way they are.