No Name Woman Analysis Essay Example
No Name Woman Analysis Essay Example

No Name Woman Analysis Essay Example

Available Only on StudyHippo
Topics:
View Entire Sample
Text preview

1. In What sense did the narrator participate in her aunt’s punishment? The narrator participated in her aunt’s punishment by not speaking of her and acting, like the rest of her family, as if she had never existed. Even though she thought of her and wrote of her, she never tried to find out anything about her or tried to convince her family to accept the fact that she had existed.

2. What evidence in the essay supports the view that the Chinese villagers favored males over females? In the essay it says that “to be a woman, to have a daughter in starvation time was a waste”. Also in another part it says that the parents practically sold their daughters to their would be husbands in order to marry them off, then in turn the husbands family coul

...

d sell, mortgage or stone the women if they were thought to be a burden.

3. Why does the woman enter the pigsty to give birth? She enters the pigsty to give birth, because after she was thrown away from her home she remembered that old fashioned women gave birth in pigsties in order to fool the jealous, pain-dealing gods who snatch child but not piglets. She may have also gone to the pigsty as a last act of responsibility; she was protecting the child as she had protected its father.

4. Under what circumstances did the woman get pregnant? What does this say about the Chinese society at this period in time? The woman was raped by someone in the village. In those times it wasn’t considered rape because she was just doing what the man had told her

View entire sample
Join StudyHippo to see entire essay

to do. In tose times in China women had to do whatever a man asked them to do no matter what it was. The society gave the men everything and the women were nothing more than possessions that men could do with what they pleased. Women were worth nothing back then.

5. Describe the nature of the No Name Woman’s sin. Was it a sin against the absent husband of her hastingly arranged marriage, against her extended family, against the village, against the gods?

The sin that the No Name Woman committed was adultery. It was considered a sin against everyone, her husband, the husband’s family, the villagers, and even the gods. It was believed that the spirits of the dead were among the living and all lived in perfect harmony, but a sin of this kind would disturb that harmony and it would endanger the future of everyone in the village.

6. Can you justify the villagers’ communal attack on the house? Defend your response. Yes, because it was their belief that she needed to be punished for her sin in order to restore harmony to the village. They thought that if they didn’t do this the gods would be offended and their future would be in harms way. If her family hadn’t disowned her and acted as if she was never born they too would have been punished. What I don’t agree with is the fact that, even though it was their belief, the man who raped her and was responsible for getting her pregnant received no punishment at all just because he was a man.

Get an explanation on any task
Get unstuck with the help of our AI assistant in seconds
New