From Silence to Utterance: The Construction of the Narrator’s Ethical Identity in The Woman Warrior from the Perspec-tive of Literary Ethics

Abstract

The Woman Warrior is narrated in the first person and presents the growth experience of Chinese-American women in the context of family ethics and cultural differences. This article introduces the perspective of literary ethics criticism and combines relevant viewpoints of narrative ethics to discuss the ethical choices and identity changes of the narrator “I” at different narrative levels. The article focuses on analyzing the narrator's retelling of the story of the “No Name Woman”, the rewriting of the Hua Mulan myth, and the deviation from the family ethics training of her mother. The article points out that the narrator is not simply resisting tradition, but rather forms her own ethical judgment through continuous narration and revision. The narrative behavior thus becomes an important way for the formation of ethical consciousness and also provides a new perspective for understanding the construction of the female subject in The Woman Warrior.