A work like Pearl S Buck’s The Good Earth is by its very nature orientalist in the Saidian sense Because it was created within the structures of Orientalism as both a genre and as an epistemological category. Buck was born the child of an American missionary in China and spent much of her formative years there. Buck’s early life and experiences as an American and the child of a missionary informed her preconceptions of China, its people, society, and culture. Orientalism in this sense isn’t just a literary genre: an orientalist work is not just, a work that talks about the orient, in this case, China and describes the life of its characters in a neutral manner. Orientalism is a power structure in which the Westerner projects his or her own feelings and judgments about Asia and its history, society and culture onto the actual objects of their works. Buck in The Good Earth does this by creating a story where the poor farmer, the Chinese every man, somehow transcends all of the hardships in his life and achieves what seems to be a simulacrum of the American dream. Wang Lung is a portrait of a “rags to riches story” that is in itself very American and symbolizes Buck’s values and preconceived notions about class and wealth.
The Orientalist novel, of which The Good Earth is one, posits literature as an Imperial project; one of domination and control. In the past two or three decades, we have become inured to the language and constructs of the postcolonial novel, works that have their origins in questioning what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls the “epistemic violence” that was done during the days of cultural imperialism portrayed by works like The Good Earth. (McAlpin 49) Spivak is a kindred spirit with Said when she asks the famous question. Can the subaltern speak? (Spivak) Said and Spivak are among the most famous and cited scholars in the turn that defined the discipline in a post-structural, postcolonial direction. Said in Orientalism, posits that Orientalism, as practiced by nineteenth century Europeans was not strictly an academic exercise, but much more than that one that had real implications in creating and reproducing power relations between the West and the “Orient.” Said points out that by studying how Europeans designed their version of the Orient created a necessary synergy between society and intellectual/artistic production. (Said 27) Said calls this the “nexus of knowledge and power, creating ‘the Oriental’” while at the same time “obliterating” his humanity. This is particularly important for our discussion of The Good Earth and its characterization of Wang Lung and his family as something essentially foreign and exotic to the reader’s Western sensibilities.
Similarly, The Good Earth portrays life in rural China as something foreign and exotic something that her audience couldn’t possibly understand. Buck in The Good Earth “others” Chinese rural life in all of its aspects. She highlights the poverty, the cultural differences, the struggle and the exotic. Nothing about Wang Lung’s life in the Chinese countryside is ordinary. The novel is littered throughout of examples where Buck somehow makes her characters and China “less than.” When Wang Lung and his family go to leave the countryside and they must take a train to the city, they call the train a “firewagon.” (Buck 96) This shows an ignorance by Wang Lung and his family of modernity and of things that symbolize it like, trains and other technology. Buck, by calling the train a “firewagon” insults the intelligence of her characters and tries to essentialize them as premodern and backwards. Buck furthermore, throughout her novel creates differences between China and the West. The scenes where Wang Lung and his family are living in the city particularly work to create a contrast between the values of orient, premodern, traditional, slow, and unchanging and the values of modernity which are all in opposition to those traditional values. (Buck 118-122) Wang Lung is portrayed in this urban environment as nothing more than a simpleton and as a symbol for what China was and the city represented what China would become, a hive of discontent and revolution. (Buck 122) Buck’s treatment of Wang Lung and his family as mere representations of Chinese history instead of full human beings can easily be considered a very Orientalist move and something which informs her superiority as author and the westerner who holds the knowledge and power of her objects, their attitudes and histories.
One way in which Buck highlights the difference and creates a sense of othering rural China is by pointing out how different life is. She does this by pointing the difference in the landscape, in the buildings and all of the things that the reader would associate with life in China. The Good Earth is an Orientalist work because it fits within so many of the tropes and categories defined by Edward Said in his book Orientalism. Buck’s upbringing as the daughter of a Christian missionary to China injected not only a sense of superiority to how she treats the characters in her story she is also very sympathetic about the conditions of Chinese peasants and workers. This is made very plain by the scene where a Western woman hires out Wang Lung’s rickshaw and she pays him double the usual fare. Buck, literally puts herself in the story in the guise of the benevolent Westerner who wants to improve the life of China’s wretched classes.
Another way in which Buck very clearly shows how sympathetic, she is to the plight of the poor Chinese peasant, is shown throughout chapters eight and nine, where the effects of a terrible drought are portrayed. One of the most striking scenes in this section of the book is the conversation between Wang Lung and his father about killing the ox which was used for plowing the family farm. Although Wang Lung was at first hesitant to kill it, the old man said in his wisdom with calmness “Well, it is your life or the beast’s and your son’s life or the beast’s and a man can buy an ox again more easily than his own life.” (Buck 75) This was clearly a very big decision and a very emotional moment for Wang Lung, the ox symbolized the farm, the harvest and everything that had happened which was good in his life. Killing the ox meant Wang Lung surrendering to the circumstances and giving up on his life that had been so good and blessed before the great disaster befell his family and his village. One may very well read Buck and The Good Earth as a work of ethnography, where the “dynamics of cultural power at play in her observations of another culture are indeed important in understanding her depictions.” (Esplin 14) Although it's much fairer to attempt to excise these judgments about power structures and knowledge and try to explicate Buck as a writer who was attempting to introduce Chinese culture to Americans without value claims about the nature of knowledge and Chinese society and traditions.
There is a thin line in practice between the sympathy which Buck practices in The Good Earth and a much different kind of paternalistic imperialism, which defined Britain’s adventures in Asia and Africa during the peak of empire. Arthur Balfour in a speech before the House of Commons in 1910, explains that Britain should involve herself in Egypt by describing the condition of government in the East. He starts by saying that “All their great centuries—and they have been very great—have been passed under despotisms, under absolute government. All their great contributions to civilisation—and they have been great—have been made under that form of government.” (Said 33) and that Britain’s role in Egypt would be to install a better form of government, which is there to help the Egyptians improve their lives no longer under “despotism.” (Said 33). Identifying the so-called “Orient” as a fallen civilization ruled by despots and by social backwardness is one way which Pearl S. Buck’s view of Chinese society as portrayed in The Good Earth is Orientalist.
Orientalism, according to Said was primarily a historical phenomenon, one based on power, domination and empire. The crafting of the orient in the European mind was handled first by setting it apart from Europe in what Said calls an imaginative geography in which “A line is drawn between two continents. Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant.” This was further divided into further sub-spheres of difference between the Near Orient, which was familiar yet distant and the Far Orient which was undiscovered and new. (Said 57-58) Setting of Asia as something different and foreign which could be controlled created a dynamic which set up a dichotomy of us against them and built a situation which allowed Westerners a certain freedom to define the orient as they saw fit. (Said 44) The linkage of power, otherness, and freedom to define and redefine Asia and Asians as the other is clearly very evident throughout the Good Earth.
The process of “othering” of making the Asia and its people something different and opposed to Europe or the West plays a big role in Buck’s description of the landscapes, buildings and people throughout the book. One of the most striking scenes, though is the one where Wang Lung goes to meet his bride O-lan at a great house where she was a slave. Orientalism again is meant to make the reader feel as though they are transported to a different place and this can be done by putting lots of detail which makes the scene more exotic. Buck describes the scene where Wang Lung goes to the house to meet O-lan thusly “with his face burning and his head bowed, he walked through court after court, hearing that voice roaring ahead of him, hearing tinkles of laughter on every side.” (Buck 15) Later on in the same chapter a great verandah is described as having “delicate carven posts” and roofs and spaces so large that many houses like his could have been put in the same space and they would have “disappeared” (Buck 15) One of the things that sets Asia apart from the West is the idea that it is somehow exotic and stuck in time. The description of great courtyards, “tinkling laughter” and great halls with delicately carved posts conjures up not an image of reality but instead of a “radical reality” which is given by the writer or the reader (Said 72-73) By far the most striking picture painted in this passage is the one where the Old Mistress of the house is described as sitting
Upon a dais in the center of the room he saw a very old lady, her small fine body clothed in lustrous, pearly grey satin, and upon the low bench beside her a pipe of opium stood, burning over its little lamp. She looked at him out of small, sharp, black eyes, as sunken and sharp as monkey’s eyes in her thin and wrinkled face. The skin of her hand that held the pipe’s end was stretched over her little bones as smooth and as yellow as the gilt upon an idol. (Buck 16)
Edward Said’s point that Orientalism as an epistemological project was used by Western writers, intellectuals, and politicians to actively set Asia and other lands apart from Europe is very trenchant when thinking about this passage above. Buck whether inadvertently or on purpose, spent nearly an entire paragraph of her book describing the Old Mistress and the longer the passage went on it made her less and less human and more and more the “other.” The Old Mistress is described as having both a monkey’s eyes as well as the golden skin of an idol. By the time Buck is done describing the woman she is no longer one, but she is instead a collection of ideas how people perceive Asians as being different, as the other.
Works Cited
Buck, Pearl S. The good earth. Vol. 1. Open Road Media, 2012
Esplin, Bruce W. "The Joy of Fish to Swim Freely: Pearl Buck, Social Activism, and the Orientalist Imagination." Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies 3.1 (2005): 12-23.
McAlpin, Jennifer D. Place and Being: Higher Education As a Site for Creating Biskabii-Geographies of Indigenous Academic Identity. , 2008. Print.
Said, Edward. "Orientalism. 1978." New York: Vintage 1994 (1979).
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the subaltern speak?. Macmillan Education UK, 1988.
