The Woman Warrior Presentation

For a long time, our group had considered a variety of possibilities to present on The Woman Warrior. There was some speculation on whether or not we would decide to formulate it based on the infamous game-show, Jeopardy. As a group, we all agreed that this would probably be the best option, considering it would hopefully make fellow peers more excited to participate in the conversation. Who wouldn't want to win fake money, after all?

After spending a couple of hours together at a local restaruant fiddling with the template and coming up with basic questions for the first two sections in the book, we decided to email each other ideas to place on the board later. For the group presentation, I presented my group with the following questions for "Mad Women in Jeopardy":

Shaman:

"...During the war, though, when you were born, many people gave older girls away for free. And here I was in the United States paying two hundred dollars for you." (83)

"...Human beings don't work like this in China. Time goes slower there. Here we have to hurry, feed the hungry children before we're too old to work....I can't sleep in this country because it doesn't shut down for the night." (105)

A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe

"I cut it so that you will not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language. You'll be able to speak languages that are completely different from one another. You'll be able to pronounce anything. Your frenum looked too tight to do those things, so I cut it." (164) Consider the language of women in Gilbert and Gubar and also consider the ideal of language in Borderlands.

"...I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl." (166) She specifies that silence and being a girl go hand-in-hand. Is it more because she is Chinese or is it more because she is a woman?

"I could not understand 'I.' The Chinese 'I' has seven strokes, intricacies. How could the American 'I', assuredly wearing a hat like Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight? Was it out of politeness that this writer left off the strokes the way a Chinese has to write her own name small and crooked?..."(166-167) In Borderlands, there is a a thought that "I am my language" and if we don't understand our language, we necessarily don't understand or embrace ourselves.

"No Chinese women's voices are strong and bossy, We American-Chinese girls had to whisper to make ourselves American-feminine."(172) Not only is a biological body of woman trapping, but the social constructs of femininity are also binding. Again, how would Butler respond to this?

"I thought every house had to have its crazy woman or crazy girl, every village idiot. Who would it be at our house? Probably me." (189) The paragraph following this line could be our final Jeopardy question as we beg the question: who is the MADWOMAN in this story?

'"A husband may kill a wife who disobeys him. Confucius said that.' Confucius, the rational man." (193) The paragraph before this has a woman standing on a chair singing, "Beat me". Refer to Simon de Beaviour and the slave theory between men and women.

"Not everybody think I'm nothing. I am not going to be a slave or wife." (201) Implies that marriage is a patriarchal construct which enslaves women.May refer to Gilbert and Gubar and the images men paint of women, or Simon de Beauvoir.


At The Western Place:

"'You want a husband, don't you?...Do you want him to see you with your eyes and nose swollen when that so-called wife wears lipstick and nail polish like a movie-star?'" (151) Consider Gilbert and Gubar's theory on self loathing or are ideals of feminism a universal social construct or perhaps...because she is now American, does the culture put an even greater mark on her feminism?

"'She has had food. She has had servants. Her daughter went to college. There wasn't anything she thought of that she couldn't buy. I have been a good husband." (153) This is a basic feminist question concerning Moon Orchid's husband, is he really being a good husband by sending her money and providing for her? Is that not what social constructs suggest a man do?

"But each day Moon Orchid slipped further away. She said that the Mexicans had traced her to this house. That was the day she shut the drapes and blinds and locked the doors. She sidled along the walls to peep outside." (157) In the second chapter of Mad Woman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar suggest that the patriarchy drives a woman to keep to herself and she builds an agoraphobia. Is this agoraphobia due to the fact that she has been rejected from her domestic place or is it because she has lost her identity living in America?

Not all questions made it to our single round game of Jeopardy, but they were highly considered. Some were also reformatted for the sake of space-saving for our digital Jeopardy template.