Blog post 4 Topic 3

Many thematic parallels could easily be drawn between Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts and Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and The House on Mango Street. Each story focuses on the thoughts and experiences of young immigrants, or the children there of, coming to terms with societies and situations which are very different from those presented to them in the cultures in which they were raised, and while it may seem easier to compare The Woman Warrior and The House on Mango Street due to both focusing primarily on the development of children placed in these situations, Woman Hollering Creek still contains the motif of isolation from one’s self as well the world around one self featured in the other two. Despite these similarities, though, the ways in which Kingston and Cisneros go about presenting these themes and motifs to their readers are relatively different from one another. Through their contrasting uses of tone and perspective within their respective narratives, these two authors manage to create worlds and characters that feel unrelated and culturally distinct from one another, despite still featuring similar subject matter.

In The Woman Warrior, a now grown narrator describes the trials and tribulations she faced when she was younger due to being the child of newly immigrated Chinese citizens in what is likely late 40s early 50s 20^th century North American society. The dialogue and tone the narrator uses within this story is all very direct and specific in its nature with specific emphasis being placed on the word “I”, as evidenced in part by the lines “I am making progress”, “I made motions”, “I could not understand I” (63,64).

In part due to the narrator’s greater focus on how the prejudices and hardships directed at Chinese citizens in American society affected her specifically, these lines create a more individualistic feel to the narrative, as if she wants us to know that this is specifically her life and what happened affected specifically her life alone. This something also enforced by the rather frank way she delivers the information within the story with line, “I hated the younger sister, the quiet one” being a prime example of this letting us know that she will not embellish her words, and will be concise and truthful as to what happened with her life (68). All of this is done with the purpose of giving us, the reader, a non-filtered look into an individual girls immigrant experience.

The tone and dialogue presented in The House on Mango Street, a story which also retells the childhood of someone whose parents recently immigrated to the States though in this case from Latin America rather than China, by contrast are in a way much more broad and general in their delivery of the setting and characters when compared to that of The Woman Warrior despite still being told in the first person.  Rather than emphasis being place on the word “I”, it is instead placed on the word “we” creating a much more familial and communal sense to narrative than that which is presented within Kingston’s narrative. “We didn’t always live on Mango Street”, “We had to leave fast”, “Then we didn’t need to worry”(79,83). The tone also presents a sort of detachment from the narrative as well with the lines “The monkey doesn’t there anymore”, and “If you give me five dollars I will be your friend forever", something which is said by “the little one” rather than the narrator, being prime examples of this as, despite the fact that they are both the introductory lines to new stories featuring the narrators life, neither statements focus directly on the narrator, yet are about her which creates a strange yet purposeful sort of disconnect between the her and the readers throughout the stories, a disconnect which implies there is something more to these narratives which the narrator wishes for us to figure out on our own. This disconnect is also present in Cisneros’s other story Woman Hollering Creek. Although the narrative is in third person rather than first, much of the same tone and diction from The House on Mango Street is still present within this narrative, something which is evidenced by lines such as, “Because Juan Pedro wants to get married right away, and “Well, did you notice the dress the mother was wearing”, two lines which similarly to those in The House on Mango Street are not directed towards the main character Cleófilas, yet still focus directly on elements within her life (74). The purpose of all of this in Cisneros’s writing is to give the reader a general idea of the immigrant experience while also leaving enough vagueness to the story and the characters that we are never quite sure of their true emotions letting us instead interpret what they are for ourselves, something which is likely meant to represent the gap between different cultures and the individuals within them.