A Rhetorical Study Of Pearl S. Buck’s The Mother And Its Women Images

Pearl S. Buck, as an American writer, grabs global attention for her literary works of the Chinese subject matter. Widely spread and translated into various languages, her works help Americans know China better. The Mother:A Novel is one of the works that gained for her the1938’s Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel is set in a hamlet in Anhui Province and successfully creates a Chinese rural "mother". Per Hallstrom, in his award ceremony speech, praised that "The mother is the most finished of Pearl Buck’s Chinese female figures, and the book is one of her best." Afterwards, scholars start researches about its women images from different perspectives and the researches are mainly on Chinese culture, history, women characters and so on, while there is still a lack of achievements in the study of its narrative and rhetorical techniques.Therefore, this thesis adopts the rhetoric theories of novel. Wayne C. Booth was the first who applied Aristotle’s rhetoric into analyses of novels and became the founder of the rhetoric of fiction. Chinese scholar Li Jianjun learns from Wayne C. Booth, James Phelan, Mikhail Bakhtin and other scholars and divides rhetorical techniques into macro and micro levels. The macro-rhetoric studies all techniques of narratology, which include conversion of viewpoint, control of narrative distance and so on. The micro-rhetoric mainly researches on figures of speech in novels, which are irony, symbol, metaphor, etc.This thesis just researches from both macro and micro rhetoric levels to explain that the women characters in the novel are carriers of Chinese culture. In addition, by finding out how Pearl S. Buck’s choices of rhetorical techniques contribute to female characterization and help readers from western countries better understand Chinese culture, the thesis also probes into how literature in alien cultural and linguistic contexts realizes cultural communication between China and America.