Bro. Bartelby, a regular and thoughtful commenter here sent an email asking my thoughts about the revival of Pearl Buck, author of The Good Earth.  He sent along a link to a piece in the Wilson Quarterly by Sheila Melvin, which I had already seen, thanks to Frog in a Well.  Since he asked, I will oblige him.

   I read The Good Earth aloud to my daughter about two years ago.  She was then about ten and I had to orally edit out some of the sex scenes, as mild as the were.   She has also seen the movie.  So, today, as an experiment of sorts, I asked her what she thought of it and she said: "Mean people get what is coming to them."  She remembered how bad  Wang was to O-lan and that, in the end, his own sons conspired to sell the land he had always held so dear.  She also found it odd that the movie had no Chinese actors in it (chip off the old block!).

     My own sense of the book is that it is a good tale, with a nice narrative ebb and flow.  As to the Big Questions that surround the text, I do not see it as serving a significant Orientalist function. Yes, it shaped popular Western views of China for a couple of decades, but it was always in tension with other voices, some much less flattering regarding "Chinese characteristics."  Indeed, the characters do not exoticize "the Chinese;" rather, Wang’s self-interested motivations and O-lan’s virtues make them familiar, not distant and inscrutable, to Western readers.  But that’s just me, and I’m not a very sophisticated literary analyst.

     One thing I am more comfortable saying, though, is how useful the text is in complicating an overly simplistic view of "Confucian society."  On the one hand, Wang’s patriarchal power fits in quite nicely with the notion of Confucianism as a means of reproducing male power, which it was.  But, on the other hand, his greed and cut-throat business acumen, show how Chinese society always violated Confucian principles, which denigrated commercial instincts.  Buck, by drawing out these two sides of the China she experienced, reminds us that Confucianism does not capture all Chinese realities.