The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

I remember when our new principal arrived three years ago, the kids did an interview with her and decorated a bulletin board in the front hallway with information about her.  The reasoning behind this, of course, was to give the students a little bit of a preview of what the new boss was like.  One of the questions placed on the bulletin board was, "What is your favorite book?"  I honestly can't think of a better question to ask someone you are just getting to know.  What a person loves to read can tell you a lot about their character.  I'm sure you can tell where this is going by now.  The new principal's answer to this question was The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck.  I'd never read the novel before, so I couldn't infer much from her answer at the time, but the fact that she loves this novel has always stuck in my mind.  Since it fits in well with my reading theme for the month of reading about characters who are different from myself, I decided to make this Pulitzer Prize winner my last book of February.

The Good Earth tells the life story of Wang Lung, a rural farmer in the late 1800s/early 1900s in China.  The novel begins with the young man going to the house of a rich family from his area to pick up a slave to be his wife.  From there, the plot follows the course of Wang Lung's entire life as he attempts to support himself and his family by farming his piece of land.  The reader watches Wang Lung in times both good and bad as he suffers failures and reaps successes from the earth.  The narration style is simple and unadorned, making the novel feel like a parable about the dangers of wealth and excess. Ultimately, The Good Earth delivers a message about how important it is to stay connected to your roots and appreciate where you came from.

I have very mixed feelings about this book.  The writing style was lyrical in its simplicity.  I liked reading it, and I wanted to see how things turned out for Wang Lung at the end. However, I was also consistently appalled at many of the plot points in the novel, especially at how the protagonist treated his wife.  I get that women were considered as little more than property during this time period, and Wang Lung's actions were most likely normal when viewed in the proper context, but I was having a hard time divorcing my own feelings and opinions from the work while reading. 

Wang Lung's wife O-Lan is perhaps the most hardworking and dedicated woman I have ever seen in a work of literature, and as repayment for her unwavering loyalty she endures a life full of emotional abuse. Among other slights, her husband complains that she is ugly, complains that her feet aren't bound, takes a prostitute as a second wife, and fails to notice that she has a tumor the size of a man's head growing in her stomach for several years, until she can no longer serve his food and clean the house without moaning in pain.  Wang Lung feels sorry at the end of O-Lan's life, but I'm not a fan of plot devices in which a woman must be sacrificed in order for a male character to grow up. The novel tells the story exclusively from Wang Lung's perspective, but I couldn't help but consider how O-Lan must have felt throughout the novel.  It was disturbing to consider what she had to go through, and I didn't enjoy reading about her mistreatment.      

One of the aspects The Good Earth is praised for the most is how it gives the reader a glimpse into what life was like for people in China's past.  I question the authenticity of this novel.  The simple narrative style in which it is written makes it seem historically accurate, but how would I know if it wasn't?  I don't know anything about the history of China, so I can't tell for myself.  Pearl S. Buck spent a huge portion of her life living in China as the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, so a lot of this is probably accurate.  On the other hand, however, she assuredly wasn't living in mud huts with farmers during her time there, so I don't think that the fact that she lived in China is incontrovertible proof that she got every detail right. The back of my version of book contains excepts from different critical reviews of The Good Earth, so I read through those, hoping for some answers to my accuracy question.  Some of the reviews praised its historical accuracy and others claimed that Buck got a lot of details wrong.  Well, which is it? 

If I am judging The Good Earth on it's own literary merit, then I suppose it doesn't really matter if it is an accurate portrayal of Chinese life during this time period.  The question nags at me though, because I get the sense that there are some stereotypes running throughout its pages.  Did Chinese women really produce one child per year, and refer to the act as "breeding?"  Were female children and wives really called "slaves?"  Did Chinese men regularly pluck second and third wives from among their slaves or prostitutes and all live together in one big house?  At times, I got the feeling that the descriptions of certain cultural practices in the novel were how a white person that considers themselves "above" the culture they are describing would say things.  I might be being unfair, however.  The book did win the Pulitzer and I have no special knowledge about China.  I do think that Pearl S. Buck loved China and the Chinese people.  I suppose I am at a bit of a loss as to how to take this novel.  It was very different.

In the end, I have to admit that I don't quite get the praise for The Good Earth.  I enjoyed reading it well enough, and I appreciate its literary significance.  Its message about the importance of hard work and the difficulties that come with wealth are still relevant. However, I don't know what a modern woman will gain from its pages, because everything is so sad and hopeless for the female characters.  Thinking back to that bulletin board from three years ago, I'm not sure what my principal found to love about this novel.  I will have to ask. I'm sad that I wasn't quite able to connect with this story.  I liked it, but didn't love it.