Female Life Consciousness In Pearl S. Buck's Works

Pearl S. Buck is one of the most famous and controversial figures ever to influence American and Chinese cultural and literary history. Her novels break new ground in subject matter, especially in her representations of Asia, and above all in her portraits of Asian women. As a woman herself, she writes about female figures with compassion and sympathy. The female characters in her works differ from those by the male authors. She advocates love, equality, liberty, and harmonious relationships between man and woman. Her works exude strong feminine consciousness about individual identity, self-worth, and above all about life. 1 call this female life consciousness. Life consciousness first originates from man' s love for life and for the living. American psychologist Erich Fromm calls it as the love for life and the living, biophilia. Life is not merely an existence, but a state of being with meaning and significance. If man loves life, he must seek meanings in life. Thus life consciousness should be a self-awared consciousness, with which one seeks self-worth, seeks identity and tries to realize one's being as a meaningful individual, to fulfill self-actualization. Female is differed from male mainly because of her reproductive ability, which is sufficient enough for her to have a completely different experience of life and death. Her distinctive experience directly touches her consciousness of self, of existence and of life.In this paper, I will mainly discuss Pearl S. Buck's four novels: East Wind: West Wind, Pavilion of Women, The Good Earth, and The Mother. They should be valued more highly and dug more deeply. On the one hand they are not like extreme feminist works which focus on dualistic conceptions. On the other hand, they are more moderate and focusing more on harmonious relationships between the two sexes. By analyzing her novels we will find that the female figures in her novels are so vivid, not just because she herself is a female, but more significantly, she has deep in her heart the compassion for the women, the strong life consciousness that makes her sympathize with all the suffering women.