The American Culture And Spirits Of The Good Earth Series

Pearl S. Buck is a controversial winner of Nobel Prize for literature. Her novels about China invited many different opinions both in China and in America. These novels gradually draw the attentions of the academic circles after a long time's absent treatment. In the age of information, communication between different nations becomes more and more frequent. Advocated in Pearl S. Buck' novel, the understanding and tolerant attitude on cross-cultural (national) communication are appreciated nowadays. Therefore, the research on Pearl S. Buck and her works are more meaningful in modern society.There are many different opinions on Pearl S. Buck' religious position, values and writing situation. After carefully reading and analyzing the text, we can find that this great female American writer, who spent most of her life in China, had never escaped the influence from her family and American culture. The Good earth describes the life of Chinese farmers and indicates their unique feeling towards earth. From this point, this paper analyzes the life and the fate of this Chinese farmer family in Pearl S. Buck' novel, discusses the evolving meaning of "earth", the transmitting and inheriting of their family belief in the family history. Pearl S. Buck always insisted that China was her motherland and Chinese novels influenced her literature achievement. It is true that she did a lot of work in promoting the understanding and communication between China and America. It is also true that she, as an outsider of Chinese culture, tried her best to adopt a posture and perspective that differ from other contemporary Orientalism works. However, her works, in the end, was enveloped in the American ethos that belongs to the Christian culture system.While analyzing the Good earth trilogy, this paper also gets information from the contemporary novels on the same subject (farmers in country) to find out differences between Pearl.S and Chinese writers in the aspect of national character and writing position. By analyzing and discussing these differences under the background of cultural difference between East and West, this paper unscrambles Pearl S. Buck' understanding about Chinese society, Chinese farmers and their "earth" and shows the Orientalism narrative structure lurked in Pearl S. Buck' The good earth trilogy.Although The good earth trilogy was enveloped in Western values and American spirit, Pearl S. Buck did not escape the latent influence of Orientalism when she arranged the fate of this family. On one hand, the description was from the writer's own experience, oh the other hand, maybe from her self-imagination of the writer as an outside of Chinese culture, who was influenced by the two different kinds of culture.