The women of the House of Wu
The Women of the House of Wu is a novel by the American author Pearl S. Buck about the emancipation of a Chinese woman. The original title is Pavilion of Women and appeared in 1946, the first German-language edition came out in 1948 in translation by Justinian Frisch at Bermann Fischer in Stockholm.
content
The novel is about the powerful feudal family Wu, who lead a luxurious life in their residence with the lease income from their large estates. The individual family members and the many servants live in a network of numerous interconnected residential courtyards ( Siheyuan ). In contrast to her husband, who is not very enterprising and more interested in pleasure, Madame Ailian Wu is the clever organizer of this family business and acts in all forms according to the traditional roles of man and woman, parents and children. Her husband leaves the cautious leadership up to her, and she politely and ceremonially gives him the decisions she has prepared.
On her 40th birthday, and thus the novel begins, she is celebrating a big party, which at the same time marks a turning point in her life, because she gives up her marital duties. She does not want to have any more children, chooses the young concubine Chiuming for her husband and leaves the management to her eldest son Liangmo, whom she has already married to Meng, a daughter of her friend Meichen Kang. Now she is repeating this arrangement for her third son Fengmo and Linyi, Meng's sister. Her image of society is shaped by tradition: like her own marriage, agreed by her parents, which is less based on love and more on mutual respect and duties, she also imagines the relationships between her children. She herself sees her sexual tasks fulfilled and, after his initial, brief refusal, takes care of her husband with another woman for his needs. She wants to retire to her own courtyard for the second half of her life, but from there she will continue to pull the strings as the first woman in the house.
But she has to learn that times have changed. Her second son Tsemo and the self-confident Rulan, who grew up in Shanghai , have already achieved a love marriage, and this modern daughter-in-law criticizes Ailian's decision with reference to the ban on cohabitation in the Republic of China . Madame Wu knows, however, that the old power structures and traditions still work in the province, that the farmers, if treated well, obey the landlords, and she believes that with her insight and knowledge of human nature she can make the right decisions and implement them skillfully. But she gradually realizes that the obedience of her sons and daughters-in-law to her is only formal and that it conceals dissatisfaction and wishes for reform. Chiuming, who fell in love with Fengmo, is also unhappy with the much older man, does not want to give birth to Wu's child and tries to kill herself. Sons and daughters-in-law want to lead their own lives and not take on traditional tasks. The women do not want to spend their everyday life with their small children and wet nurses in the shielded Siheyuans and be available to the men at night. Linyi wants a man of his own equals with a knowledge of foreign languages. Fengmo therefore receives English lessons from an Italian priest, Brother André, and this contact with the humanistic European has great consequences for everyone. Ailian falls in love with him and his message of universal charity, which spans the various religions and denominations. She is now discovering that her marriage to the cozy and uneducated Wu has always lacked a spiritual bond. André teaches her that in order to be happy, she has to free herself from her role model by thinking about the needs of others. With the help of the platonic relationship , she is breaking more and more of her traditional ideas and allowing her children to gain their own experiences. Fengmo and Tsemo separate from their wives for some time. Fengmo, influenced by André, studies in America, Tsemo becomes a civil servant in Beijing . The fourth son, Yenmo, wants to work in agriculture in the village. Chiuming is allowed to part with the unloved Mr. Wu, and he looks for himself a lover among the prostitutes of a "flower house" and, on Ailian's advice, brings Jasmin into his courtyard as the third wife. Two tragic accidents overshadow this development: Tsemo is killed in a plane crash and André dies in an attack by a gang of young people. He leaves a house with foundlings , mostly abandoned girls, for whom he has financed accommodation and food. Madame Wu takes on this task and brings the orphans into her house.
In the last phase of development, some protagonists succeed in liberation. Chiuming returns to her family and marries a merchant in Beijing. Fengmo, Linyi and Rulan find a life task that fulfills them: They set up a school in the main village of the Wu family and teach the children and some adults interested in education in reading, writing and arithmetic. Madame Wu takes care of brother André's orphans in emotional connection and arranges husbands for marriageable girls, whom they can vote on.
Historical background
Dates and historical events are not mentioned in the novel, but there are clues. With the "people of the Eastern Sea", the Chinese coastal areas, etc. a. around Beijing and Shanghai attacked, the Japanese are meant, and this suggests a classification of the plot before and during the period of the Second Sino-Japanese War . These skirmishes were barely noticed from the distant home of the Wu family in inland China. On the other hand, Rulan's family probably fled Shanghai from the Japanese attack in August 1937. Also in the early autumn of 1937, the seat of government was moved from Nanjing to Chongqing , which Tsemo mentions. After the liberation of Beijing in 1945, Chiuming was able to live there with her family. The dating is also supported by a legal reform, to which Rulan points out: In 1930, the Republic of China fundamentally changed family and marriage law: women and men were legally equated. In 1931 cohabitation was banned.
filming
There is a film adaptation from 2001 with Willem Dafoe as brother André and Yan Luo as Madame Wu.
- Deviations from the book
- Brother André is not American, as mentioned in the film, but Italian (he speaks of Venice as the place of birth).
- André and Madame Wu have a purely platonic relationship in the book, they never touch each other.
- Chiuming is in love with Fengmo in the book, but nothing happens between them.
- The Japanese invasion does not play a major role in Buck's novel.
Individual evidence
- ^ Bernice June Lee: The Change in the Legal Status of Chinese Women in Civil Matters from Traditional Law to the Republican Code . Sydney 1975. Referred to in: Mechthild Leutner (Hrsg.): Women in China: The long march to emancipation (= argument study booklets. No. 70). Alfa, Göttingen 1987.