Transcendence Of Female Immanence:An Existential Feminist Study Of "The Mother" In Pearl S.Buck's The Mother

Pearl Buck(Pearl S.Buck,1892-1973)was the first woman writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in American history.She wrote a lot of novels based on the Chinese rural areas in her life and especially created a series of representative female images,with particular attention to the survival situation of Chinese rural women under the patriarchal society in the 1920s and 1930s.The Mother was setting at the earlier twentieth Century of rural China and the main character was the nameless"the mother" who was full of frustrations,suffered from the abandonment of her husband,her blind daughter's death,the shot of her little son's death,years of infertility of her daughter-in-law,but the strong mother with a firm belief to dominate her own destiny.The Mother shows Pearl Buck's concerning about the fate of rural women and bears her deep sympathy and compassion to them.Per Hallstrom in the speeches of Nobel Prize for literature even hails "the mother" as the most perfect of all Buck's women characters and The Mother as her best novel.The present thesis is theoretically based on the existential feminism of Simone de Beauvoir and aims to analyze the mother's ambiguous situation and these causes of the existential situation,which shows the mother's philosophy of existence in the predicament of self-salvation in The Mother.The first chapter points out the mother's ambiguous situation:she takes herself as an object paradoxically endued with subjectivity;she takes herself simultaneously as self and as other;she seeks salvation while actively demanding her sovereignty.The second chapter analyzes the causes of the mother in an ambiguous situation:confined within the limits of her femininity;bound by the limbo of immanence and contingence and not been much modified by the social structure.The third chapter mainly studies the solutions to transcending the given environment of the mother in her ambiguous situation and making an authentic choice.The mother is strong and independent who dares to challenge the patriarchal society.The mother is doomed to insincerity and all its subterfuges;she is taking religion as a compensation for her justification;she is getting ridding of attachment to economy and love.The Mother focuses on the protagonist the mother's survival consciousness,which shows the mother's survival wisdom after the loss of living justification.It reveals if women want to control their own destiny,they must find a positive strategy for survival,independence and self-reliance.To study the living conditions of the mother from the perspective of Beauvoir's existential feminism is not only of great help for a better understanding of the women characters in the works of Peal S.Buck in general and "the mother" in particular,but also for arousing more academic interest in Buck's concern about Chinese women.