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Kathleen Brogan’s focus in her article “American Stories of Cultural Haunting: Tales of Heirs and Ethnographers” is to prove how not all hauntings are by the physical manifestation of an entity, as seen in a majority of gothic haunting literature (Brogan 149, 150). Brogan explains how “cultural hauntings” are a haunting by several different means. These can range from the haunting of an action of the past, or, an internally haunting ghost (Brogan 152), to hauntings by ghosts of cultural assimilation and translation. Brogan states how cultural translation acts as its own ghostly exorcism, where the translator finds themselves haunted by the ghosts of there cultural past, while trying to assimilate to the target culture, in which many cases, is American culture.
Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel The Woman Warrior is a direct relation to Brogan’s ideas about a person being haunted by their cultural past. There are several moments in the novel, where either Maxine herself, or her mother (Brave Orchid) are plagued by their past Chinese culture after moving/living in the United States. One example is in the section of the novel titled “White Tigers.” In this section, Kingston reminisces about a story her mother told her about Fa Mu Lan, The Woman Warrior. She explains how Fa Mu Lan trained to become a warrior for several years and upon her return home, took her fathers place in war, and murdered the battle baron harming her village. When Kingston is reflecting on this moment, saying, “My American life has been such a disappointment” (Kingston 45), she is comparing her current bland American life with that of the adventurous Woman Warrior. This is an example of how she is haunted by her Chinese Culture while striving for an American life. Even when she is merely speaking the American language, she is reminded of the Chinese words for certain American words. When Kingston says the word English “I,” she is reminded of the female I in Chinese, which translates to the word slave (Kingston 47). When Kingston thinks about this, she stops cooking correctly and burns the food; she even breaks a couple of dishes when she is washing them (Kingston 47). Brogan states, “authors of haunted narratives transform both source and target cultures, reshaping the past to answer the needs of the present and, implicitly, the future.” This is exactly what Kingston is doing when she starts rebelling like this. She remembers what her Chinese culture (now in the past) demanded of her as a female, and she is now choosing to reshape this Chinese image into something better for herself and for her future.
I personally did not see too many differences in Brogans ideas and how Kingston used these ideas to narrate her story. If anyone has recognized a difference in the ideas I would be glad to hear it!
In her journal article, Brogan’s main point regarding the need to be able to separate intellectually the concept of cultural hauntings from other forms- namely physical hauntings involving ghost stories in the most direct sense of the phrase. She contrasts Cultural haunting, which is primarily involved in shining a light on societal and historical issues to older stories in the genre which were more concerned with the individual (Pg 151). While the two are similar thematically, cultural hauntings can often “reflect the crisis of a larger social group” which is generally beyond the scope of it’s gothic counterparts (Pg 150).
There are a number of instances in which scenes from Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior” notably reflect idea’s championed by Brogan, but the one that jumped out at me the most was her ideas about ghosts and culture being interminably linked. This theme is present throughout the book, with the most clear cut example being in the way Maxine’s mother re
acts, and in turn teaches Maxine to deal with, those not of Chinese descent. In the third chapter of her novel, Maxine relates that her mother considered everyone without chinese heritage to be ghosts, meaning that they were inherently ‘less than’ and in turn, were to be feared and derided. She relates a number of stories, some about how her sister and her would feel compelled to hide whenever someone who wasn’t chinese was nearby. This is directly reflective of Brogan’s idea when she (quoting Frederick Barth) talks about how social and cultural groups establish and maintain their identities by what they’re not- namely, the other groups in the area (Pg 157). By harping on their differences from the metaphorical and literal ‘other’, groups are able to form cultural bonds that keeps the community tight knit. The fear tactic instilled in Maxine by her mother that led her to firmly believe that the ghosts (others) were out to get her were theoretically intended to foster this sense of kinship with the fellow members of her group while maintaining the groups identity simultaneously.
Another similarity is found in Brogan’s assertion that cultures partake in something she calls “narrative memory” across generations (Pg 155). This idea is present in Maxine’s story about the woman her mother refers to as “No Name”, who we later discover is her aunt. Her mother refuses to discuss her because she believes she has brought great shame to her family through her actions and by doing so essentially denies her existence and rewrites her life to destroy any impact she may have had on her family. Without passing her story down to the next generation she narratively ceases to exist.
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