Wang Lung And O-Lan Quotes

Wang Lung's social rise shifts him from predominantly producing to predominantly consuming, and to the the addictive pleasures of a more culturally marked set of activities. The acquisition of wealth infuses Wang Lung's world with increasing signs of chineseness: silk garments, polygamy and concubinage, opium, culinary delicacies, bonded female servants, and a generally increasing hierarchization of gender relations. In their early peasant existence, Wang Lung and O-lan have a marriage that is, despite its obvious inequalities, paradoxically more companionate, based as it is upon a united passion for the land. An image of the two tilling the soil by each others side evokes some sense of partnership. In the course of events we transported form the transcultural terrain of open wheat and rice fields and placed within confining, ornate interiors.
Opening with a description of the farmer as he prepares to take a bath, the novel shows us a body that is robust, “dark”, and “slender”( 5). Later as Wang Lung's succumbs to mental corruption, his skin turns “yellow as clay”(132). Bucks moral distinction between poor and rich folk is shaded in browns and yellows. In contrast to the farmers children, who “tumbled like brown puppies upon his threshold”(146), Old Lady Hwang's skin is “stretched over her little bones as smooth and as yellow as the gilt upon an idole”(16); yet another rich in Kiangsu had “great yellow rolls of... flesh doubled over his belly”(139). Accompanying the adaptation of orientally marked customs, Wang Lung's epidermal re-coloration carriers racial, not just health, connotations.Depicting the metamorphosis of the universal farmer into an oriental lord, the good earth is ultimately less a celebration of upward mobility than a populist declamation against