The Good Earth

I finished The Good Earth, so I deleted it from the Books I am Currently Reading list. I also looked up some of the criticism of it. It is hard to believe that the book was such an international sensation when it was first published! It is just difficult for me to fathom how the story of Wang Lung found such international appeal in 1931.

I did like the book. I did not love it, but I was intrigued, and read through it fairly quickly. I was very interested and wanted to know how it all would turn out. Wang Lung was both someone to admire and someone to pity, a paradox of a man. His growth from a poor peasant farmer just hoping for an ugly wife to give him sons to a wealthy landowner with concubines was paralleled by the downfall of the wealthy landowner Hwang. At the end of the book, one has to wonder if the same thing would happen to Wang Lung's sons that happened to the house of Hwang. It seemed to foreshadow that it would.

The criticism that I scanned said that the elements of the book are factual with the Chinese culture of that time, such as treatment of women, ignorance of modern inventions (the "firewagon") by the peasant farmers, and even the constant cycle of plenty and starvation that the farmers experienced. I did have to wonder, however, if Wang's rise from poverty to wealth was really something that could have happened. I have studied that in most societies with a clear lower and upper class that there really was no way to move out of your class; you were stuck where you were. But that is not so with Wang.

One reviewer wrote that Pearl Buck was very critical of Chinese treatment of women, but she did include those things, like the selling of young girls into slavery and the taking of young women as concubines by the wealthy, purposely to make the story realistic. However, Wang Lung desperately loves his retarded daughter and does not allow her to be sold. Also, he does take concubines, but regrets his treatment of O-Lan later. He even realizes that he loved O-lan all those years. These feelings of Wang's, not typical of the Chinese man at that time, show Pearl Buck's disdain for the Chinese regard of women as property. I even read that Buck was an ardent feminist! I was very impressed by that.

Overall, it was a good book. It was a classic that I have never read, and now I have read it. What shall I read next? Hmmmmm......