Buried Voices, Returning Girls: The Well as Narrative Space Across Memoir and Film

Abstract

This paper discusses the repetitive image of the well in The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, Fault Lines by Meena Alexander, and the film The Ring as a narrative space in which suppressed girlhood testifies to rebirths. Theoretically, the paper relies on Leigh Gilmore’s concept of child witness, theories of speech as resistance by bell hooks, and the concept of interpellation in the work of Louis Althusser. To this is linked Kingston and Alexander’s reinstated silenced feminine voices showcased through story fragments, mythic images, and cultural memory fragments. The narrative is a point of retrieval and revelation of the traumatic events as the well serving as a site of symbolic container. Comparing the two memoirs to The Ring, the analysis shows that there are common themes of shame, erasure, retribution, and the torments of stifled voices that haunt these narratives. Collectively, these works highlight both the ideological work that narrative acts of witnessing promote and their capacity to reestablish agency and remake silenced girlhood into an effective location of truth-telling and witnessing.