Ghosts in Maxine Kingston’s The Woman Warrior Within or Without Ideology 1

Ghosts in Maxine Kingston’s The
Woman Warrior:
Within or Without Ideology?
Mahdi Shafieyan
Abstract
The concept of ―ideology‖ has always been one of the pillars
in critical research and evaluation. Although this term as a
general and frequent word for impressionability of the author
and his/her writings to the dominant system was proposed by
Althusser, many other critics and theoreticians have suggested
a similar notion by using different terms; Gramsci‘s
―hegemony‖, Foucault‘s ―panopticon‖, ―discourse‖, and
―episteme‖, along with Lacan‘s ―Other‖ and Greenblatt‘s
―self-fashioning‖ are in this line. In this study, the attempt is
made to present this concept in The Woman Warrior through
the specific definitions Kingston had probably in mind, albeit
the researcher is going to reveal the contradictory points to the
theory. In essence, this essay is both an ideological reading of
the ―ghosts‖ in the novel and at the same time a critique of
―ideology‖. A marginalized writer usually tries to focus on the
cruelty of the dominant system in her residential country;
however, the novelist here, living in the U.S., mainly criticizes
her native country, China. Still, one may say that this
approach is incited by the American "ideological" system;
Kingston, nevertheless, appears to call some of the latter's
structures into question as well. In this way, as findings
confirm, according to the researcher's reading one apparent
opposition comes out to become the verification of the same
system.
Keywords: ghost, ideology, Chinese-American fiction

Ghosts in Maxine Kingston’s The Woman Warrior… 2
Introduction
The Modern Language Association has reported Woman Warrior
(1989) by Maxine Hong Kingston, the Chinese-American writer, as
the most commonly taught text in modern university education.
Winning various prizes and appreciated by many critics, the novel in
addition to the novelist, as the most anthologized living writer in the
United States, invite us to read the former in order to observe the
latter‘s multifarious perspective toward different problems. While
reading the piece, the repetition of ―ghost‖ informs one of the
paramount importance of the word, even if (s)he is unaware of the
subtitle, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts.
The researcher in this article, hence, will take the palimpsest of ghost
meanings in Kingston‘s novel into consideration. He will examine the
significations of the term as ideologies1
exposing themselves in three
different levels: family, village, and country. Theoretical notions such
as literary canon and influence, authorship, naming, memory, along
with interpretation are embedded in the last rubric, titled "Critical
Concepts". Since "ideology" is a well-known keyword in literary
criticism and its definitive features have been described by many
scholars, in the argument it is taken for granted that the reader is
totally familiar to such points and no further explication is provided.
Argument
I. Family
The first chapter, ―No-Name Woman‖, begins with the story
about Kingston‘s aunt whom she never knew she had because the aunt
had brought disgrace upon her family by having an illegitimate child;
then, she drowned herself and her baby by jumping into a well. After
hearing the story, which is told to her as a warning, Kingston is never
allowed to mention her aunt‘s name aloud again; therefore, she
decides to create a history of her aunt in her own memoir. This is to
represent both the presence of familial ideology, which in
Althusserian term ―interpellates‖ the writer, and the vulnerability of
the theory of ideology, for Kingston now has spoken the secret aloud.
Maxine‘s mother is the next ―ghost‖ or ―shaping power‖ in her
life. Addressing other Chinese-Americans, Kingston declares that it is
―your mother who marked your growing with stories‖ (6). The
memoirist states, ―she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa

Mahdi Shafieyan 3
Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman‖ (24). Like her
mother, who was a doctor or midwife as well as a ghost destroyer, she
has the ability both to give birth, as keeping her newborn baby in a
sling under her armor while fighting, and to take life in a ―male‖
warrior's armor.
To carry on with this bifurcation, Kingston in order to illustrate
the possible struggles between individuals and ideologies sets up a
number of dichotomies and conflicts. On the one hand, she is not
ready to take on the mantle of mother or wife and rejects the things
her family thinks women must be capable of; she burns food and
refuses to clean dishes, for instance. Being a wife, on the other hand,
she welcomes her husband into her tent when he arrives. When a
combatant, she ties up her hair, but she lets her hair down at the time
of wifehood to cover the revenge tattoo on her back. She has the
capacity for love and gentility, as where she takes pity on her defeated
foes‘ wives, and the ability to divorce herself from emotion, as when
she chooses to forget her brother and husband during her training. In
essence, she is torn between two presumptions for women in the
Chinese culture: being strong and being emotional.
The dichotomies fade up in the third and fourth chapters, but
pop up again in ―A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe‖, which depicts
speech versus silence, the individual versus community, and Chinese
people versus Americans. Chinese-American families frequently
forewarn their children not to tell anyone outside the community about
their lives. They should keep quiet to Americans about everything,
especially matters such as crime and unemployment, lest any of the
Chinese be deported. The emigrants want to keep their community as
insular as possible; meanwhile, many of their daughters are trying
their best to assimilate; for instance, in junior high school they make
an effort to tape their eyelids to appear less Asian. This is like male-
female relations, explicated below, that on the one side include
assimilation and on the other confrontation.
As the subject is forbidden, Kingston knows nothing about her
aunt beyond the generality of the story and instead she must translate
her own thoughts about her into fiction. This forced fabrication
presents us with another dichotomy, that is, of fiction versus reality.
The ambiguous nature of the ―talk-story‖, a blend of the fantastic and
the real, surfaces repeatedly throughout the book. Indeed, reality like a

ghost just touches and every so often haunts the memoir. Fiction, in
the same way, comes to being through a person‘s imagination; this
imaginary representation itself is an ideology (Althusser 712).
To come back to the mother, her representation as a suppressive
force of sexual desire is a preeminent motif in women‘s
autobiographies (Frame and Cardinal 118). Kingston‘s mother recites
her aunt‘s cautionary tale in the years her daughter begins to
menstruate. She warns her to be careful lest the same fate befall her.
The central problem in mother-daughter relationships is the former‘s
denial of the latter‘s sexual being that causes the daughter‘s repression
of sexuality. This could refute the gender ideology according to which
women are for venereal pleasure, but Nancy Friday claims, ―The first
lie - the denial that a woman‘s sexuality may be in conflict with her
role as a mother - is so upsetting to traditional ideas of femininity that
it cannot be talked about‖ (7).2
The mother as a sacred being, in this
case, tries to avert her daughter‘s mind from her own sexuality.
On the other hand, Kingston seems to gain inspiration from
Brave Orchid, who escapes her traditional role as a homemaker and
mother. As a ―ghost destroyer‖ which implies someone who negates
ideological traditions, Brave Orchid like Fa Mu Lan is a woman
warrior in her own right. She repudiates many of the negative
stereotypes insinuating that Chinese women are useless and
disappointing: she is a doctor and a midwife. Brave Orchid, moreover,
is willing to overstep any social code when she tells her sister, Moon
Orchid, ―The law doesn‘t matter‖ (144).
II. Village
In a greater scale, Kingston‘s account of her ancestral village
portrays a place of ghosts: ―In the Village Structure, spirits shimmered
among the live creatures, balanced and held in equilibrium by time
and land‖ (12-13, emphasis added). The inhabitants at the time of the
aunt‘s birth-giving come after dark and in masks to smash the family
possessions and splash the walls of their house with blood. Stripping
the woman of a name and denying her a place in time and memory
represents an attempt by the villagers to sustain their traditional,
patriarchal system. Kingston rejects the idea that her aunt was a
woman of loose morals; she, instead, identifies with her greatest
crime, which was acting on her private interests and stepping out of
the role the society had proscribed for her. She is contrasted from the

Mahdi Shafieyan 5
other Chinese villagers, who ―efface their sexual color and present
plain miens‖ (11). Living in a superstitious village, the denizens
attribute baby defects to ghosts, so that Brave Orchid, the midwife,
could not choose which kind of babies to deliver: ―One child born
without an anus was left in the outhouse so that the family would not
have to hear it cry‖ (101).
Imagining what the village was like, the novelist paints a
picture of a repressive, strictly ordered society in which people were
essentially unable to have private lives. Everything had to be done for
the sake of the family‘s or village‘s well-being, what Kingston calls
―Necessity‖ (6). Brave Orchid never stops referring to it as ―home‖
(104), yet every week she receives reports of the Communists killing
her kinfolks for their land.
All said apart, the first and foremost censure of the village
culture is about gender roles, specifically women uselessness.
Kingston believes that her aunt decided to kill herself and her babe in
order to spare the infant a life without family, especially when she
guesses that the baby will probably be a girl, who as such would
already have been considered practically useless to the society. Brave
Orchid‘s talk-story frequently involves an equation of women to
slaves: ―[My mother] said I would grow up a wife and a slave‖; or,
livestock to be sold off or killed at birth: ―There‘s no profit in raising
girls. Better to raise geese than girls‖ (24, 54). In fact, when she first
proposes that No-Name Woman must have been raped, the reason is
that ―[w]omen in the old China did not choose‖ (6). Clearly, the "old
China" represents the village due to the point that it is mingled with
ancient superstitions and is differentiated from "China" as a single
word.
The next "ghostly" feature is presented by metaphors, especially
in the first chapter; as they bear a similarity to the literal meaning, the
researcher takes them as ―the ghost of meaning‖. Avoiding villagers'
rebuke, as mentioned above, the mother by her cautionary tales turns
into a powerful metaphor for the cultural silencing of female subjects
(Oh 315). Here, the most interesting metaphors are the round cakes
and doorways meant to represent the ―roundness‖ of Chinese life and
the responsibility of all villagers for one another‘s lives, hence a
panoptic structure:
The round moon cakes and round doorways, the round tables
of graduated sizes that fit one roundness inside another,
round windows and rice bowls – these talismans had lost

their power to warn this family of the law: a family must be
whole, faithfully keeping the descent line by having sons to
feed the old and the dead, who in turn look after the family.
The villagers came to show my aunt and her lover-in-hiding
a broken house. The villagers were speeding up the circling
of events because she was too short-sighted to see that her
infidelity had already harmed the village, that waves of
consequences would return unpredictably, sometimes in
disguise, as now, to hurt her. (19-20)
The final talk-story in The Woman Warrior is also a fitting
metaphor for Kingston‘s own project. Just as Ts‘ai Yen had to
translate the songs of Barbarians to her people, so must Kingston
render the incomprehensible culture to her readers. The question, of
course, remains that which culture we are talking about, Chinese,
American, Chinese-American, or even American-Chinese, which will
be illuminated in a minute.
III. Country
As it seems to be obvious that China is a phallocentric society,
Kingston uses her imagination to reverse roles. For example, in
chapter two we should note how Kingston‘s husband leaves battle to
return home and care for her son, how the men conscripted in the
army are described as ―lowly as slave girls‖, or how ladies with bound
feet go on to form a ―mercenary army‖ (53). Another case could be
this part: ―I have been drafted‖, my father said. ‗No, Father,‘ I said. ‗I
will take your place‘‖ (40). The significance of Kingston‘s fantasy is
that it transcends the rigid customs with which she grew up.
Stylistically, the second chapter is told as if the writer were
actually the warrior herself since the ―I‖ is she. Hence, the story of Fa
Mu Lan can be compared sharply with Kingston‘s own life in
America, in which she cannot stand up to her racist bosses. Her life in
the U. S. is also depicted in stark contrast to her fantasy, which is a
common theme in feminist literature (Snodgrass 586). In the fantasy, a
woman could be the liberator of a nation; in reality, among the
Chinese emigrants, a daughter is a disappointment. In the fancy, her
family appreciates her skills; in actual fact, her parents and the
community around deride and even consider them useless. In her
imagination, Kingston beheads the baron who speaks about raping and
stealing women; in reality, she meekly struggles against her racist
boss and is fired. To sum up all these, she says, ―My American life
has been such a disappointment‖ (54). Even her mother taught her that

Mahdi Shafieyan 7
all white Americans around were ―ghosts‖: ―Once upon a time the
world was so thick with ghosts, I could hardly breathe; I could hardly
walk, limping my way around the White Ghosts and their cars‖ (113).
The young American-born Chinese girl in The Woman Warrior
ostensibly lives in a world doubly split: ―Normal Chinese women‘s
voices are strong and bossy. We American-Chinese girls had to
whisper to make ourselves American-feminine‖ (172). She is not
allowed, that is to say, to be fully Chinese, yet never completely
Americanized either, although she wants to be neither since she is
quick to objecting to the repressive sexual standards of America,
where feminine submissiveness is prized in different ways. Another
paradox is Brave Orchid‘s experience of making the transition from
China to America. In the former, she is a doctor, able to live the
―daydream of all women‖, that is to have a room and a job of her own
in a respected and powerful way (72). In the latter, however, Brave
Orchid must toil first in a laundry and then in a tomato field, fulfilling
the roles of a wife and mother at the same time.
How can we reconcile such a contradiction that from some
vantage points China and from others America bears the ―ghosts‖?
One possible response is that ―ghosts‖ in the story change depending
on the point of view. To Brave Orchid, everyone in America, being
not a Chinese, is a ―ghost‖, and the most important world is of the
Chinese emigrants around her. Nevertheless, to Chinese-Americans, it
is often the reversed case: ―In China my parents would sell my sisters
and me. My father would marry two or three more wives [who] would
give food to their own children and rocks to us. I did not want to go
where the ghosts took shapes nothing like our own‖ (116).
The second reply is made by Kingston herself who asks:
―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 … from what is Chinese? What is
Chinese tradition and what is the movies?‖ (65). Kingston questions
precisely the possibility of maintaining a clear-cut identity when
subjectivity is shaped by various elements. So to speak, the process of
identification is itself always generating difference and sameness
(Cheng 27).
The last reaction is expressed by Richard Gray who is of the
opinion that delineating both sexism in the Chinese culture and racism
of the American, Kingston recounts the childhood experiences of a

girl who is stuck between her Chinese inheritance and her American
upbringing (790). However, the researcher believes that she takes side
with the American; in ―Cultural Mis-readings by American
Reviewers‖, she says,
We ought to leave out the hyphen in ‗Chinese-American,‘
because the hyphen gives the word on either side equal
weight, as if linking two nouns. It looks as if a Chinese-
American has double citizenship, which is impossible in
today‘s world. Without the hyphen, ‗Chinese‘ is an adjective
and ‗American‘ a noun; a Chinese American is a type of
American. (qtd. in Huang 3)
Guiyou Huang agrees with the latter that as an adjective, ―Chinese‖
assumes a qualifying function and gives considerable weight to
‗American‘ since the noun designates geographical and national
affiliations (3).
IV. Critical Concepts
The final set of ―ghosts‖ are literary concepts; here, the matter
of "influence", which implies both the presence and absence of a
writer's style or thought in another writer's work, is similar to ghosts.
The writer imagines the ways her aunt attracted a suitor, made love
with him, and so rebelled against the community. She at the end of
chapter one imagines her aunt as a wandering ghost, begging for
scraps from the gifts--Althusser‘s notion of ―hailing‖ (699)--given by
their loving relatives. Here, her ghost is intruding in others‘ lives and
influencing them, from which Kingston‘s life is no exception: ―My
aunt haunts me--her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years
of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her‖ (16); the quote
discloses her influence on Kingston‘s writing. Similarly, we find
Maxine‘s intent to break ideologies; consequently, the title, The
Woman Warrior, refers to herself who has girt up her loin to stand up
to the constitutions. By saying the sentence, she reminds us of her
artistic weapon, words, by which she exposes her lived experience and
at the same time counteracts what her family and society forbade. This
point is highlighted in the second chapter, ―White Tigers‖, when she
informs us, ―The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar … What
we have in common are the words at our backs. The idioms for
revenge are ‗report a crime‘ and ‗report to five families‘. The
reporting is the vengeance - not the beheading, not the gutting, but the
words‖ (63). Kingston narrates something that her family never

Mahdi Shafieyan 9
related to her; in reality, this account is just the product of her
imagination. Indeed, she is doing what her aunt did with the difference
that she is speaking it out.
The same chapter is based on another talk-story about the
mythical female warrior Fa Mu Lan. She, whose story is told through
Kingston‘s first-person narrative to represent herself, leads an army of
men and even pretending to be a man herself against the forces of a
corrupt emperor. This inseparability of men and women in everything
even in a ―manly‖ job, that is battle, is reminiscent of the two parts of
the novel.
This is of paramount importance to know how the background
impacts one's writing delicately since in an interview the novelist has
expressed her appreciation for Whitman as an influence:
I love that throughout Leaves of Grass he always says ‗men
and women,‘ ‗male and female.‘ He‘s so different from other
writers of his time, and even of this time. Even a hundred
years ago he included women and he always used ‗men and
women,‘ ‗male and female.‘ (qtd. in Fishkin 161)
In other words, despite the clearness of her literary influence, which is
Whitman, she gives way in her novel to the ghost of her aunt to have
an imprint on the story.
Once more, responding to her critics, she referred to the
―indivisibility‖ of men and women; she stated that men believe that
minority women writers have ―achieved success by collaborating with
the white racist establishment‖, by ―pander[ing] to the white taste for
feminist writing … It‘s a one-sided argument because the women
don‘t answer. We let them say those things because we don‘t want to
be divisive‖ (Chin 62, emphasis added).
When we review chapters, likewise, we see the author of the
sections narrating a ―real‖ story or a tale is either anonymous or a
particular person. Probably, Kingston by making her memoir a faction
(fact + fiction), as Cronin and Berger would say (57), is escaping from
the concept of ―death of the author‖ in order to make herself at least a
―ghost‖. Not only according to Derrida‘s concept of ―phantom‖ (162),
but also per avieo, meaning ―ghost word‖ as a possible derivation for
the term ―author‖ (Barfoot, Hoenselaars, and Verhoeven 2), a writer
remains present in his/her narrative.
Another aspect of such an artistic action is her rebellion against
literary rules. As J. M. Coetzee in his ―The Harms of Pornography‖

says, speaking of adultery, rape, and generally carnal matters has been
always kept behind the scene in classical literature (75). This is one of
the conventions of literature, in fact, that rape in canonical literary
narratives of the West is often depicted as ―unspeakable‖ (Graham 8).
For example, Philomela in Ovid‘s Metamorphosis (8 A. D.) is raped
and her tongue is cut out to prevent her from mentioning the crime
and the perpetrator. The same case applies to Shakespeare‘s Lucrece
in The Rape of Lucrece (1594). Although she names the one who
raped her, not only her account does not redeem her from being
―disgraced‖, but also it brings her death.
Because Kingston cannot ask anything about her aunt, who is
referred to as ―No-Name Woman‖, she benefits from her own
imagination why she gave in to her forbidden passions. In one
scenario, her aunt is a timid woman ordered into submission by the
rapist. In another sketch, she harbors a blossoming passion and then
attempts to attract a man‘s attention by carefully tending to her
appearance. In this way, Kingston is putting herself out of both her
family‘s and world literature‘s ideologies.
Nonetheless, she is entangled in another sort of ideology: Lynne
Higgins and Brenda Silver urge readers to challenge conventions that
represent rape, adultery, and the like, as titillation or seduction. These
critics are aware of the illustrations that transform the violence of rape
or taboo of adultery into an aesthetic encounter where the victim‘s
beauty seals her fate: ―The conventions at issue are no less than the
Western lyric tradition and the quest for beauty [to which most
feminists offer resistance], truth and knowledge associated with the
‗Grecian Spirit‘ in Western art and philosophy‖ (4-5). With this in
mind, Kingston is estheticizing her aunt‘s adultery or rape, something
that contradicts her feminist ideas.
Her mother, furthermore, tells her about the aunt‘s fate, ―You
must not tell anyone‖ (3); this is a powerfully ironic opening sentence
to a memoir. She also links the postmodern metafictional concerns of
narration and language directly to her race and gender: ―story-talk‖
which is in fact the Chinese expression for narration is what women
do (Hutcheon 70). By that, she calls the male-centered Western canon
into question. A talk-story is a performance as well; that is, her choice
of this creative medium melts down the Western regulations in which
writing is a fundamentally solitary and sober activity, in

Mahdi Shafieyan 11
contradistinction to the social and improvisatory characteristics of the
oral tradition (Morrison 84-5).
Her postmodern angle of vision adds to the problem: while
classified as nonfiction, Kingston‘s book is ―fiction at its best—
novels, fairytales, epic poems ... edges blur, the dividing line passes
unnoticed‖, the novelist Anne Tyler in the New Republic asserted (qtd.
in Kort 165). Her purpose to ―blur‖ the defined ―edges‖ of literary
genres informs us of further emphasis on ―ghost-killing‖. However,
this does not mean total submission to the postmodern ideology, for
everywhere the arbitrariness of signifiers is questioned by meaningful
strategy of naming (Limon 220), which will be elaborated in a minute.
Jago Morrison also points up that in bildungsromans readers
expect, as they follow the protagonists‘ progress toward maturity, to
ultimately come to a full understanding. Kingston‘s work,
nevertheless, suggests the opposite; toward the end, her mother
complains her naiveté, ―Can‘t you take a joke? You can‘t even tell a
joke from real life. You‘re not so smart. Can‘t even tell real from
false‖ (180). In other words, in a reversal of the conventional genre,
what we are left with at the closure of the text is not fulfillment but
disjuncture (Morrison 86).
Concatenating her life process to language and signification in
―A Song for A Barbarian Reed Pipe‖, Kingston relates that at the time
of going to school, she imagined that Americans heard the noisy
dialect of Chinese as ―chingchong ugly‖ and instead whispers to her
peers (171). She did so lest her peers should mock her; in essence,
here the ―haunting‖ of the linguistic system causes fear, albeit later on
she travels from silence and whispers to speech. Thomas Couser about
Kingston‘s autobiographical writing says,
the ethnic language is experienced as an obstacle to full
selfhood as an American: in making the transition from
private (family) life to public life (in school), from Chinese
… to English, … [she] suffered temporary speech
impediments. [However,] in writing autobiography, … [she]
broke powerful cultural proscriptions. (213)
As mentioned above, characters‘ names play a leading role.
Kingston‘s personages are either anonymous, pseudonymous, or out
of English signifying system. Being pertinent to identity (Hayes 673),
namelessness in effect ignites what we may call "inverted name
symbolism". The person, as a matter of fact, bears a "ghostly" identity:

she exists, but is not identified. In The Woman Warrior, the mother
makes it clear that the ultimate punishment for the aunt‘s dishonor is
neither humiliation nor death, but something even more disturbing:
banishment from time. This is operated by the insistence of Maxine‘s
father and his family that the woman‘s name must never be mentioned
again, nor is her existence acknowledged. That is why she is called
―No-Name Woman‖. Like "name symbolism" as a prominent factor in
literary canon, "inverted name symbolism" conveys significance in
spite of its apparent attempt to obliterate meaning because here such
methods indicate the society's attitude toward gender issues.
A relevant point here is the memory of the past, which stands
against the tactic for forgetfulness. Kingston says, ―The real
punishment was not the raid swiftly inflicted by the villagers, but the
family‘s deliberately forgetting her‖ (16). This intentional amnesia
results in the family‘s belief that the aunt had never been born: ―We
say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never
been born‖ (11). The No-Name aunt‘s existence is never to be
admitted, yet it is in her sister-in-law‘s story and her niece‘s text that
she once more is born and recollected. In this sense, Kingston‘s
narrative commences by outlining its pivotal opposition between
amnesia, as a weapon of oppression, and re-membering, as its means
of resistance (Morrison 82). A similitude, in truth, is engendered
between memory and ghost in that both bring past to present and wipe
out the border between absence and presence.
As the last point, interpretation of/in language is somewhat like
a ghost to postmodernism. The doubt in complete existence of
meaning in post-structuralism is as huge as someone‘s fear for a ghost.
In the novel, the ambiguity and complexity of the talk-stories are
corresponding to the status of women in the traditional Chinese
society and their growth as Chinese people in America. This point has
been criticized by the American novelist Frank Chin, claiming that
Kingston had tainted the purity of the Chinese tradition in
reinterpreting myths. Chin has accused her of ―liberally adapting
[traditional stories] to collude with white racist stereotypes and to
invent a ‗fake‘ Chinese-American culture that is more palatable to the
mainstream‖ (qtd. in Hunter 187). As mentioned earlier, repeated
border-breaking between genres, fact or fiction, and leaving the reader
dubious between Chinese and American ideologies tries hard to make

Mahdi Shafieyan 13
no room for hermeneutical certainty, which of course leads us to the
conclusion of the article.
Conclusion
In this reading, the researcher endeavored to show the various types of
―ghosts‖, the traditions, in whatever disguise, that control and dictate
themselves to one‘s life. Although Althusser believed that ―ideology
has no outside‖ (700), that is everything is under the scrutiny of the
system, the paper in some places reveals where this theory leaks,
despite the fact that he also mentions the cases in which one ideology
leads to another. Simply put, jumping out of one system, a person falls
into the next one; nevertheless, we cannot make sure in such
movements or maneuvers the literary writer is influenced by the given
ideology, critically speaking.
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Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis,
Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Oxford: OUP, 2000.
Chin, Marilyn. ―A MELUS Interview: Maxine Hong Kingston.‖
MELUS: Toward the Multiculture 4.16 (Winter 1990): 57-74.
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Mahdi Shafieyan 15
Notes
1. In Henrik Ibsen‘s Ghosts (1881) also the word signifies the
ideological ―old beliefs‖ (Sturman 28).
2. In this regard, see: Julia Kristeva, ―On Chinese Women‖, trans.
Seán Hand in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1986). 146.

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