Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [156]
All around him, Wang Lung hears talk of revolution, but it is a word he has never heard and does not understand. As far as he can tell, the enemy is not the emperor or the economic system or Confucianism or any abstract ideology. The enemy is drought, an unfriendly fate, and bad luck. Wang Lung does not want to overthrow the established order, he wants to find the money that will enable him to return to his farm and rebuild his life.
Ironically, it is a revolutionary uprising that restores Wang Lung's fortunes, though only in an accidental way. When an army smashes open the gates of a rich Nanking house, Wang Lung and O-lan join the looters, not for any political reason, but out of curiosity and desperation. Recalling what she had learned in her years as a slave in a similar house, O-lan discovers a cache of jewels hidden behind a loose brick in a wall. With the money he gets from the sale of this treasure, Wang Lung can go back to his farm. The same blind chance that brought him to the edge of starvation has restored his fortunes.
The middle third of the novel documents Wang Lung's increasing prosperity, a rising affluence that reaches a symbolic climax when he buys, the great house of the Hwang family and moves into it with his own sons and grandchildren. He sends his two oldest sons to school so that they will be more efficient stewards of his property. Tired of O-lan, he purchases a young singsong girl named Lotus, and installs her in a separate apartment in his house.[7] The new arrangements lead to trouble almost immediately. When Wang Lung discovers that his eldest son has visited Lotus secretly, he banishes the young man, an act that arms his authority but threatens the stability of his family. As if to signify the family's increasing disorientation, O-lan dies after a long illness.
In the novel's final section, a chronicle of natural calamity and political turmoil, Wang Lung's familiar world is turned upside down. His farms are mined by a flood of unparalleled proportions; shortly afterward his house is occupied by a unit of the revolutionary army. He survives these upheavals, end regains a measure of prosperity. However, the book's last scene is a prophecy that disaster lies ahead because his sons do not share his commitment to the land. These are modern men, contemptuous of their peasant father and his antique values.
PEARL BUCK would publish another seventy books during a long, productive career, including many bestsellers and fifteen that were selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Nonetheless, The Good Earth would prove to be her most enduring. The critical response to the novel was virtually unanimous. In particular, reviewers saluted the novel for rigorously avoiding stereotypes and for rendering Chinese life as recognizably human and even ordinary.
The notice in The New York Times argued that Buck had presented "a China in which, happily, there is no hint of mystery or exoticism. There is very little in her book of the quality which we are accustomed to label 'Oriental.' " Similarly, Florence Ayscough, in the Saturday Review of Literature, said that "the China of fantasy so often exploited is absent from its pages."[8] The anonymous reviewer for Britain's New Statesman and Nation made the same point more elaborately: The Good Earth represents the Chinese peasant absolutely free of "those screens and veils and mirrors of artistic and poetic convention which nearly always make him... a flat and unsubstantial figure of a pale-colored ballet."[9]
Buck's treatment of Christianity illustrates the pains she took to remain inside her Chinese characters' point of view. Though she had spent years in missionary communities, she knew that Christianity was invisible to the vast majority of Chinese. Consequently, the Christian religion is almost completely absent from her novel. The Chinese characters routinely invoke their traditional gods, praying for rain or a good harvest of sons, but their lives are fundamentally secular, and Western religion has no effect