Research Paper on:
Community in Maxine Hong Kingston's 'No Name Woman' and 'Everyday Use' by Alice Walker

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
how communities impact individual lives. Kingston in "No Name Woman" tells a story that demonstrates the dynamics of how individual actions impact that overall sense of a communitys identity.  In other words, Kingstons story is concerned with a broad perspective that shows how a sense of community is defined by the actions of the people who make up that  particular community. Walker, on the other hand, is concerned with a narrower perspective, the community at its smallest increment -- the family, as a carrier of culture. On the other  hand, both stories can be viewed as dealing with what happens when individuals deviate from the standards that define community. Beginning first with Kingstons poignant tale of her aunt  who became pregnant in a small village in China in the 1920s while her husband was away in America. It had been many years since her husband was home, so  the villagers knew that Kingstons aunt had committed adultery. When it came time for the baby to be born, the entire village attacked her aunts family home. They destroyed property,  killed animals and smeared the blood over the walls of the house. In discussing why the villagers acted in such a brutal manner, Kingston makes it clear that their violent  actions related to their sense of community. A small agricultural community generally lives on the edge of survival. What holds the community together as a whole is the commitment of  its citizens to common mores. Kingston makes it clear that the villagers saw her aunts social deviation as a very real threat to their own existence. "The villagers came to  show my aunt and her lover-in-hiding a broken house" (Kingston 13). In other words, it was important to these people that everyone should see that such deviation from cultural expectations