Jeffrey Meyer's Blog - Posts Tagged "new-freedoms-of-the-1920s"
Women in THE GOOD EARTH
No doubt that traditional China was a patriarchical society. Pearl Buck's novel, The GOOD EARTH, documents this clearly, yet shows great sympathy for the plight of women in it. O-Lan is Farmer Wang's first wife, and the author portrays her as hard working, loyal, intuitive, and though slow to speak, sometimes wiser than her husband. In traditional China, women had to leave their birth family and become "daughters" of their husband's father and mother. The only route to domestic power was through giving birth to sons. In Farmer Wang's concubine, Lotus, we see an second route to status and power--turning the heads of men with their beauty and cleverness.
In my novel, THE CALL TO CHINA, I tried to indicate two other ways that women might seek to escape domination by a man and his parents, and both are religious in nature. A women could achieve a position of power and independence by becoming a Buddhist nun, joining a society of women, and rising to whatever level of competence that their personal merits might achieve, such as Abbess Gaoyun. There is also the route to status as portrayed in the character of Guzhi, who is the co-leader along with FourOnes Daoist sect. She has achieved this position because she has the ability to work as a medium between sect members and the spirits.
The character of Mingling intersects with the time when the old patriarchal Confucian order is challenged by Chinese youth of the May Fourth Movement. She is a sort of Chinese Eliza Doolittle, but does not marry her teacher. She is strong and independent, realizing that her teacher is impractical, idealistic and haughty. She goes through life skeptical of institutions, even those like Buddhism and the FourOnes, which have given her support. It was a joy to develop her character in this new world that began about 1920, realizing that if she had been born just twenty years earlier, her life would have had to be completely different.
In my novel, THE CALL TO CHINA, I tried to indicate two other ways that women might seek to escape domination by a man and his parents, and both are religious in nature. A women could achieve a position of power and independence by becoming a Buddhist nun, joining a society of women, and rising to whatever level of competence that their personal merits might achieve, such as Abbess Gaoyun. There is also the route to status as portrayed in the character of Guzhi, who is the co-leader along with FourOnes Daoist sect. She has achieved this position because she has the ability to work as a medium between sect members and the spirits.
The character of Mingling intersects with the time when the old patriarchal Confucian order is challenged by Chinese youth of the May Fourth Movement. She is a sort of Chinese Eliza Doolittle, but does not marry her teacher. She is strong and independent, realizing that her teacher is impractical, idealistic and haughty. She goes through life skeptical of institutions, even those like Buddhism and the FourOnes, which have given her support. It was a joy to develop her character in this new world that began about 1920, realizing that if she had been born just twenty years earlier, her life would have had to be completely different.
