He used to put his naked penis on the dinner table, laughing." (P. 10)2.
In the third part of "Shaman", in describing her mother's experience as a midwife, she adopts words such as "monsters, spewings, child born without anus". Also, when she states the belief by her mother that "big eaters win" in the same part of the book, she tells ghastful stories of some people who eat all kinds of creatures such as scorpions, cockroaches, worms, slugs, frogs" and even there comes a elaborate story about how people get together and have a meal of monkey brain with it's still being alive.
Since there is comment to this book expressed as vulgar and unbearable, we should have the word "vulgarity" clearly defined at first. .
To define "vulgarity" is by no means easy. According to an electronic thesaurus,3 derived from the version of Roget's Thesaurus published in 1911, Vulgarity is closest to [Bad Taste] and its synonyms include: barbarism, Vandalism, Gothicism; mauvis gout [Fr], bad taste; gaucherie, awkwardness, want of tact; ill-breeding, discourtesy, and coarseness. Whereas, the closest word to [Good Taste] is Taste and its synonyms include: refined taste, cultivated taste; delicacy, refinement, fine feeling, gust, gusto, tact, finesse; nicety; polish, elegance, grace, virtue; dilettantism; fine art; culture, and cultivation. .
Here I want to point out that paralleling with those vulgar sections in The Woman Warrior, which have been illustrated by the examples above, there are many tasteful, refined, and aesthetic sections in this book as well. Just as some of the critics have observed: Kingston's The Woman Warrior is "powerful, experimental writing, a combination of love, frustration, and sheer beauty"4. Really we could find purely beautiful and utterly poetic descriptions scattered throughout the pages of The Woman Warrior. The following are just some of the most typical examples. .
For example, "She turned on her back, lay on the ground.
If the male characters only knew the vulgarity of Lady Macbeth and the role she played in the murder and in the eventual downfall of herself! ... Lady Macbeth also gives a speech on how she wishes she were not a woman so she could kill Duncan herself. ... Fear manipulated Macbeths every thought conforming him from a gallant warrior to a tyrannical king. ...