Pearl S.Buck’s Presentation And Distortion Of Chinese Culture In The Good Earth

Pearl S.Buck(1892-1973)was an American writer who grew up in China.She lived in China for around forty years.Her novel The Good Earth is set in China and portrays Chinese characters as the main characters.This thesis uses the analytical technique of close reading in discussing and evaluating Buck’s presentation of Chinese culture in the novel.This thesis points out the similarities and differences between the Chinese image presented in the novel and the real China,and analyzes the reasons behind the Chinese image Buck chose to present in the novel.Buck grew up in China,and she was familiar with Chinese people and Chinese culture.She employed the approach of cultural relativism instead of cultural imperialism to view and to present Chinese culture in the novel.Buck accurately portrayed many details of the Chines customs in the countryside from the Chinese perspective,and sympathetically portrayed her Chinese peasant characters,which to some extent corrected Americans’ earlier oriental stereotypes against China and made China and Chinese people more familiar to the American public.But Buck failed to reflect in the novel the contemporary Chinese social reality and the Chinese struggle for national liberation in the early 20 th century,because her intended readers were the American public,and the degree to which the author reveals the real and complex China affects the novel’s popularity among the American readers who are from outside of Chinese culture,and the presentation of the complex social situations in China would lose some of the novel’s readership;Buck deliberately chose to approach Chinese culture in a simple way and to lose some of the contemporary social,political and historical truth in order to promote the understandability and the readability of the novel for the American readers.Buck artistically shaped her Chinese materials into a story of universal themes that would speak to readers of different cultures and deliver the novel to a wider audience.The Good Earth is one piece of Buck’s artistic creation that does not correspond to the Chinese historical truth.The Chinese elements in the novel are the superficial layers over the novel’s main pattern of a universal story of the whole humankind.