After reading just the first two sections of Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel The Woman Warrior, it is apparent how reliant on external stories this novel is. By intermingling different stories, so far: several different explanations for her aunt’s suicide and a retelling of the Fa Mu Lan tale, the narrator incorporates aspects of these stories into her identity and uses the main points of these stories to reflect aspects of her own life and her own doubts in the Chinese societal and gender norms that are forced upon women. These stories help develop her as a warrior; the stories themselves become the weapons. This is implied literally in each of the two stories, with physical aspects of dead relatives transforming into tangible aspects of the living.
In the chapter, “No Name Woman,” the narrator’s aunt drowns herself and her child in the drinking water. “I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water” (16). Her aunt’s rebellious nature, from the way she styled her hair to the place where she committed her final act as a living being, reflected the fact that she was dissatisfied with the role that was forced upon her as a woman and she sought change and recognition. By drowning in the drinking water, anyone who later drank from that well, even if it was years and years later, has incorporated a physical part of the, “no name woman,” and her no-name child into themselves. Not only this, by they will have incorporated a physical reminder of everything their death stood for.
Within the chapter, “White Tigers,” this incorporation of the dead is much more deliberate. When Fa Mu Lan is fighting greedy, treacherous, leaders of society who have assisted in the oppression of women and the poor living conditions under which people live, the specific leader she is fighting has a sword that is made up of the blood of his deceased sons. “So I had done battle with the prince who had mixed the blood of his two sons with the metal he had used for casting his swords” (42). In this case, the blood comes together with metal to form a literal weapon. Though this weapon is being used by the opposing side, the notion of taking the memories of the dead and using their stories as weapons is still extremely relevant. This is the function of these interspersed stories: to create weapons with which the narrator will fight.
you'd easily be able to expand this into a paper. and you might work with the complexities that you outline here - that it's not just about writing as a weapon, but also writing as linked to incorporating those who have in the past been excised/exonerated. i'm interested, too, in the incorporation of the no name women into the bodies of those who drink at the well...
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