Interpretation Of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth From The Perspective Of Archetypal Criticism

As one of the most eminent women writers of the 20th century in American literature, Pearl S. Buck, who has created a lot of literary works, is not only profoundly popular with those readers all over the world but also controversial. By virtue of the famous novel The Good Earth, she wins the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938, which describes the story of peasant Wang Lung in Huaibei District around the turn of the 20th century. Through transition between peasants and land, the author reveals hardship and distress of Chinese peasants in the old time, traditional value concept and clinging pursuit of land in her novel.The thesis will adopt the textual analysis and Frye’s archetypal criticism theory to interpret Pearl S. Buck’s novel The Good Earth. Archetypal criticism is a type of momentous theory that is popular in the 1950s and 1960s and once forms a situation of tripartite confrontation with Marxist criticism and Psychoanalysis criticism. It attempts to dig out the recurring motif, characters, plots, images and narrative structure in literary works and to find out the basic forms behind archetypes. It wields multifarious archetypes to the analysis and interpretation of literary works, presenting a new perspective for literary studies. The innovation of this thesis is to use archetypal criticism to reinterpret the novel The Good Earth from the four aspects of archetypal motifs, archetypal characters, archetypal plot and archetypal images to do the archetypal analysis. The displacements of archetypal motifs, such as mother earth, the sacrificial scapegoat and the quest, enrich the theme of the novel. As for archetypal characters, Wang Lung, O-Lan, Ching and Lotus correspond with Odysseus, Penelope, Damon and Helen in classical mythology respectively. In terms of archetypal plot, that the family escapes to the south accords with Ruth in the Bible. The novel is rather rich in archetypal images. Meanwhile, the thesis will explore and analyze time narrative structure of four cycling seasons and its theme through archetypal process.By analyzing diverse types of archetypes in this novel, the author of the thesis holds that Pearl S. Buck creatively exerts the Greek and Roman mythology and the Bible story, enriching implication of the novel. Through the narration of ups and downs of Wang Lung family, Pearl S. Buck wants the readers to comprehend the hardship and struggle of Chinese peasants in the thirties and shows sympathy and praise to them.