One day, while going through some yard sale books, I found her book, Pavilion of Women. Having been a second-wave feminist, I thought it might be interesting. Pearl S. Buck spent 40 years of her life living in China in the early 1900s. During this time, the Chinese people were experiencing the dwindling of their culture and a push to accept European practices. In the novel, Pavilion of Women, the reader learns of the ancient ways of treating women compared with the new ways of the 1930s.
The main character is Madame Wu. She has married into the wealthy Wu family. They own a huge agricultural estate and mansion that houses the entire family. She is turning 40 years old and is now allowed to give up child birth. But in giving up this “privilege,” she is becoming the great matriarch of the Wu family. It is a position of power in the domestic life of Chinese culture. This means she has to devote her time to her sons and their choices of wives, the raising of the grand-children, who shall be allowed to visit and have influence over all activities in the mansion. She must also supervise the purchase of provisions, the planning of menus and holiday activities, the landscaping of gardens, and how the servants should be treated.
A priest comes to visit from a foreign land. At first, she rejects him, finds him ugly and intimidating, but he brings much change into the lives of the Wu family. This seems good and useful. She seeks to know more about the priest and his teachings. In the end she discovers his surprising truth.
This book should not be read as proof that China was worse in regard to women. Many countries and regions, including Europe, had the same concepts of women’s lower status and limited abilities. In this novel, the author gives details of women’s lives as the baby-makers of humanity. It explains how women accepted their role, their reaction to sex, childbirth and abandonment when men would seek other women. You feel what it was like to live as a woman of the past, so you can compare it to the present, in our look toward the future.
Like in most cultures of the past, women were not allowed to learn to read. By the 1900s, the modern Chinese woman was expected to read. By 1938, Pearl S. Buck was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was another step forward. And still, we are trying to liberate ourselves from ancient restrictions.
