Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

1988

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Nathan, Norman

Abstract

Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts share the common themes of the restrictions placed on women, daughters of recent immigrants, who suffered from poverty, discrimination, and sexual repression both from within and without their cultural milieu. Woman Warrior is an epic poem, history mixed with myth, while Bread Givers is a fevered morality tale. Yezierska's world was full of Jewish patriarchal edicts, Kingston's bore the weight of matriarchal definition of her Chinese ancestor's beliefs. The mutual and overwhelming need to break the barriers of enforced silence created two rich human documents which by their very nature mediate the seemingly irreconcilable. Whether they are considered fiction, memoirs, or elegies, both books' outstanding contribution is reinforcement of the concept of self-determination which was attained without destroying either author's ethnic or cultural heritage.

Extent

71 p.

Comments

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters|Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 1988.|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

Identifier

FADT14473

Format

pdf

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