Talking and Not Talking Made the Difference between Sanity and Insanity

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, there is a correlation between communication and sanity. As the narrator explains it, “insane people were the ones who couldn’t explain themselves. There were many crazy girls and women” (186). This echoes back in an interesting way to earlier in the book, when Moon Orchid is in the insane asylum and says “‘we are all women here…And, you know…we understand one another here. We speak the same language’” (160). While they all speak the same language and understand one another, no one on the outside is able to understand them. Just as the narrator supposes “the sane people stayed in China to build the new, sane society” (186), the insane women formed their own community within the California state mental asylum.

Another example of the association between communication and sanity exists in how Brave Orchid reacts to the narrator’s “list of over two hundred things that [she] had to tell [her] mother so that she would know the true things about [her] and to stop the pain in [her] throat” (197). Rather than get upset at her daughter’s list, Brave Orchid ignores her for a while before getting fed up and reprimanding her, saying “‘senseless gabbings every night. I wish you would stop. Go away and work. Whispering, whispering, whispering, making no sense. Madness. I don’t feel like hearing you craziness’” (200). Though the narrator is not literally insane, she is unsuccessful in communicating what she feels her mother should know and it is instead perceived as madness.

The worst symptom of madness however, as described by Brave Orchid, “‘is that sane people have variety when they talk-story [while] mad people have only one story they talk over and over’” (159). If a person is stuck on one story, they are likely stuck on a particular element of the past and can only move backwards and never forwards. Even if the story makes sense to others, it ceases to have meaning as it is repeated over and over without variation. Sanity then relies not only on the ability to explain one’s self, but on the ability to do so in new ways, through new stories. I found this concept interesting because as scholars and artists it is necessary that we constantly reinvent ourselves, necessary for our success even. However I had never before thought of this as part of the binary of sanity and insanity.