Abstract

The research contains the introduction which sheds light on Buck’s career and literary background. The second part deals with the status of women in the ancient Chinese culture. The third part presents women’s trauma through the practices of keeping concubine, foot binding, female infanticide, and selling daughters as slaves. The fourth part concludes the findings of the research on the subject.
Pearl S. Buck was an enduring feminist, and she took a feminine tone towards the suffering of women in China. She depicted the inferior status of women in traditional China with sensitive impressions.
Buck’s The Good Earth clearly portrays the cruelties and unfairness suffered by Chinese women. She uses the character O-lan to illustrate the extreme injustices suffered by Chinese women and the lack of options they have in life. Buck’s primary source for The Good Earth can be traced back to her own experience in rural China.
Pearl S. Buck was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, on 26 June 1892. She was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938. When she was three months old, her missionary parents brought her to China where she spent most of the first forty years of her life. She was raised by a Chinese nurse who told her popular tales and myths, and she could speak and write both English and Chinese by the age of four. Her life in the rural areas of China gave her deep understanding into the thinking of the Chinese people. Peter Conn, Buck's scholarly biographer, says that Buck lived in two distinct worlds “the small white clean Presbyterian American world of [her] parents and the big loving merry not – so – clean Chinese world” (Conn, 1998: 24). Consequently, she grew up a bilingual.