SOURCE: "Naming the Unspeakable: The Mapping of Female Identity in Maxine Hong Kingston's 'The Woman Warrior,'" in International Women's Writing: New Landscapes of Identity, edited by Anne E. Brown and Marjanne E. Goozé, Greenwood Press, 1995, pp. 223-32.

Goldman has taught women's studies at the University of Victoria and Canadian literature at the University of Toronto. In the following essay, she assesses The Woman Warrior as a postmodern work that offers a distinctive sense of female identity.

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf raises questions concerning women's identity and the problem of inscribing this identity in literature. Such questions must be addressed if women writers are to convey a sense of their own experience, rather than simply reiterate a male perspective. In particular, Woolf argues that, due to the differences between men and women's experience, women cannot expect to utilize traditional literary forms: there is "no...