The good earth

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The good earth (English original title: The Good Earth ) is a novel by Pearl S. Buck . The book, first published in 1931, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and the William Dean Howells Medal in 1935 . The good earth is the first part of a novel trilogy that also includes the books Sons and The Divided House .

action

Buck traces the life story of Wang Lung from his wedding to his death. He lives with his old father as a farmer on the yield of a small piece of land and can therefore only afford the ugly O-lan, who serves as a slave to the respected urban Hwang family, as a wife. O-lan proves to be a capable worker and gives birth to two sons and two daughters. Fortunately, Wang Lung was able to buy good land from the Hwang family, but the famine that broke out as a result of the drought hit him too. The emaciated family decides to go south; O-lan kills her fourth child immediately after birth before leaving. Wang Lung sells furniture and equipment on the advice of his wife to finance the trip, but not his land. While his wife and two sons are begging in the city in the south, he works as a rickshaw driver and learns about the life of the wealthy Chinese and the white people who live there. The daughter turns out to be moronic , possibly due to malnutrition . A return home is out of the question because of the low income until Wang Lung and O-lan participate in the riot of the revolution in the plunder of a wealthy family's house and steal a lot of money and jewelry. This not only allows them to return, but also to buy more land from the Hwang family on a large scale.

Wang Lung becomes a large landowner who can no longer cultivate his land alone. His wife gives him a pair of twins. He decides to take a sensual and pampered woman from the house of joy into his house, which makes O-lan bitter. His hated uncle also moves in with his wife and son, who, however, protects the family from being stalked by members of a gang. After O-lan, Wang Lung's father also dies. While his two older sons attend school, work as "scholars" or merchants and get married, he has planned his youngest son as his successor. However, the latter refuses to become a farmer or landowner and joins the revolutionaries. At the instigation of the eldest son, the family moves into town and takes over the house of the impoverished Hwang family. Wang Lung, who had a late love affair with a slave, continues to see "the good earth", that is, his land, as the foundation of his wealth, but the two eldest sons plan to sell the land after his death.

people

  • Wang Lung, poor farmer who rises to become a large landowner
  • O-Lan, first wife and mother of his children, former slave, simple and hard working
  • Lotus, beautiful concubine, status symbol, former prostitute
  • Cuckoo, their slave, skillful in negotiations and sly
  • first son, scholar, lives on his father's money
  • second son, thrifty and enterprising, works his way up to become an independent trader with his own company
  • third son, intended by his father to be his successor on the farm, rebels against it and becomes a soldier and diplomat
  • Pear Blossom, slave and later girlish concubine or nurse of old Wang Lung
  • Poor Fool, oldest mentally challenged daughter of Wang Lung and O-Lan

Historical background

No dates or historical events are mentioned in the novel, but there are indications that the plot dates back to the time of the Xinhai Revolution in 1911 and the subsequent civil war : the flight of the nobles and the storming and looting of their homes during Wang Lung's stay in the south, the participation of the nephew in military actions, the rebellion of the youngest son against his father: "A revolution will come and fights and wars like none has ever experienced, and our country will become free!" (Cp. 32)

interpretation

The novel is often wrongly associated with Pearl S. Buck's life as a missionary and feminist . There is only one passage in the book about the Christian religion: when Wang Lung receives some papers in which a crucified Christ is depicted. His family's only comment on this illustration is that this man must have been angry, that he was tortured and executed this way. Buck hardly takes a critical look at the practice of tying the feet , which was widespread in China at the time of the story . She only mentions that this was attractive for men and painful for women.

Life in the country and in the city is consistently described from a Chinese perspective and is shaped by the needs of the times. The detailed characterization of pre-revolutionary Chinese society and especially the situation of women makes the novel a classic. However, the book also tells the story of a man who rises from a poor farmer to a respectable patriarch - a process in the course of which his relationships with all other people also fundamentally change.

reception

In her essay in Wilson Quarterly, Sheila Melvin summarized the different reception of the novel in the USA and China:

For many American readers in the 1930s, The Good Earth was their first encounter with the unknown, exotic land. The novel met with a great response and was the best-selling fiction book in 1931 and 1932. Some scholars even suggest that the story of the Wang Lungs family helped repeal the 1943 Chinese Exclusion Law, which had prevented virtually all Chinese emigration to the United States since 1882. In addition, Buck's works would have changed the way many Americans thought of the Chinese people as kind, thrifty, hard-working, godly farmers that they sided with China in the war against Japan. Later, when the country became opposed to the United States after the Communists' victory, the FBI monitored Buck for her community involvement and understanding of the Chinese people. In the almost 300 page long file, J. Edgar Hoover accuses them of communist sympathies.

Another aspect of the reception in the USA was the classification of the novel into the category of trivial literature because of its traditional structure and the simple narrative style and character drawing . When Buck was surprisingly awarded the Nobel Prize for literary critics in 1938, the renowned writer William Faulkner , who would not be honored until 11 years later, wrote to a friend that he would rather not win the prize than join “Mrs. Chinahand Buck ”. Its devaluation by the literary establishment also resulted in the novel appearing on high school reading lists but not on college curricula. This assessment has changed in recent years: the boundaries between trivial and high-level literature have become porous and Buck's novel is praised as a contribution to understanding the cultural history of China, precisely because of its realistic descriptions.

For a long time, reception in China was shaped by national pride in the country's image and by political and ideological interests. The novel was translated at least eight times in the 1930s and 40s, but the politicians of the nationalist governments between 1911 and 1949 did not like the portrayal of the luxury life of drug-addicted landowners with their courtiers in the city residences, including spoiled concubines and raped slaves, and, in contrast, , starving, hard-working farmers who have to sell their daughters and are ambushed and robbed by bandits. One of the first Chinese translators accused Buck in his foreword of painting a bad picture of his country and he asked if she had a white feeling of superiority, and the writer Lu Xun said it was more authentic for a Chinese to write about China. For the film adaptation of the novel by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), the government made the conditions to shoot in a sizable village, to dress the actors cleanly and to replace the buffalo with tractors. In the end, strangers, Buck accused government officials, set the director's studio in Shanghai on fire and destroyed the films.

After the communist victory, the negative attitude intensified further because Buck had described communism as a "foreign" philosophy that was unsuitable for the Chinese. Because of her family missionary background, she has a wrong political stance. In 1950, a Chinese literary magazine called her a “reactionary writer” who belongs to the “avant-garde of imperialist US cultural aggression”. In 1972, her application to travel to China with Richard Nixon was rejected on the grounds that she had adopted an attitude of falsification, defilement and slander in her works towards the people of the new China and its leaders.

In the past two decades, as China opened up to the Western world, Buck's assessment has changed. New translations of her novels have appeared, as well as academic articles and several TV documentaries about her life and works. Her monuments and Buck museums were built and her former homes in Zhenjiang , Lushan and Nanjing were renovated , where Buck wrote Good Earth in the attic .

Adaptations

Audio book

Stage play

Owen Davis and Donald Davis adapted the novel for the stage. The play premiered on October 18, 1933 in New York City . The main roles were played by Claude Rains and Alla Nazimova .

Movie

output

  • Pearl S. Buck: The good earth . Roman (OT: The good earth ). dtv, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-423-13207-8

Secondary literature (web links)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sheila Melvin: The Resurrection of Pearl Buck . In: The Wilson Quarterly, Washington DC Wilson Quarterly Archives, Spring 2006. [1]