Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature

11. When Dead Women Don’t Talk: Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman”

 Once we begin to account for all the dead women talking in American literature, we also notice when dead women don’t talk—even when we might wish them to. After all, anything is possible in the realm of literature, so it should be conspicuous when corpses simply remain silent. When dead women don’t, won’t, or can’t talk, this may crimp or even foreclose literature’s ability to confront the past. On the other hand, as I suggest in this brief concluding chapter, we might find unexpected value in such impediments. A telling example is Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1975 feminist blockbuster The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. “No Name Woman,” the inaugural chapter, famously begins with a command for silence and willful forgetting: “‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you.’”1 Many have noted the core irony in this printed utterance of a spoken injunction against speech. The narrator first relays the bare facts of a fabled aunt who drowned herself in the family well after having been marauded , then banished, for becoming pregnant years after her husband left rural China for America. In its brevity, focus on secrets, and inability to piece together incongruent details, the ensuing narrative instills an urgent desire to recover this dead woman’s story. We struggle to make it comprehensible, or in Kingston’s phrasing, “to name the unspeakable” (5). As we see in any number of stories about women who die unjust deaths, language and voice arise as antidotes to the silence and shame that so often surround those who defy community conventions, be it having a child outside of marriage or not showing adequate penitence for social transgressions of any sort. This has led countless readers and critics, including Kingston herself, to celebrate The Woman Warrior under the long-standing feminist banner of “breaking the silence.”2 The trouble is that the aunt is not there to tell her story. She is a silent, 11 When Dead Women Don’t Talk Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman” When Dead Women Don’t Talk 177 hungry ghost forever banished from the family table. The problem becomes one of both social justice and the genre of memoir. In terms of social justice, the aunt’s death is a direct result of patriarchal structures and the community ’s intolerance for women who defy convention, which leads to silence and banishment from sanctioned family lore. In terms of genre, on the other hand, the narrator must speak from experience and that which she can infer from secondhand stories. In this, the narrator is deliberate about the importance of confronting her familial past to make sense of her present. “Unless I see her life branching into mine,” the narrator notably asserts, “she gives me no ancestral help” (8). Despite the narrator’s best efforts to recreate her aunt’s story and to connect it to her own, this dead woman does not, cannot, and will never talk. In the end, Kingston’s narrator can only ventriloquize her dead, inert, absent aunt. She must sift through possible versions of the story to seek not the truth, but the version that is most satisfying. Is the no-name aunt violated, defiant, compliant, romantic, savvy, or responsible? She becomes not a dead woman talking but a dead woman talked about. This leads to the most striking , even terrifying, moment in the story. The narrator belatedly considers, “I do not think she always means me well” (16). Up to this point, the narrative compellingly portrayed the collective punishment of silence as a conspiracy of the highest order against women who flout patriarchal expectations. Now the narrator realizes that turning silence into voice is not necessarily a feminist empowerment narrative. If she ventriloquizes her aunt in an attempt to make the dead speak, that may be a further betrayal and another form of punishment. As a whole, The Woman Warrior is immersed in matters of death, haunting, memory, and how characters interact with figures and relics of the past. The dead aunt who may not wish to talk sets in motion a series of ghost stories, a genre also signaled in the subtitle, Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. Some sections hew closely to conventional ghost stories, such as the stories Brave Orchid, the narrator’s mother, tells of fending off ghosts in a deserted section of her dormitory while a medical student in China...