The Good Earth

“This was the last morning he would have to light the fire. He had lit it every morning since his mother died six years before. He had lit the fire, boiled water, and poured the water into a bowl and taken it into the room where his father sat upon his bed, coughing and fumbling for his shoes upon the floor. Every morning for these six years the old man had waited for his son to bring in hot water to ease him of his morning coughing. Now father and son could rest. There was a woman coming to the house.”

As per tradition, Wang Lung is subservient to his father, which accounts for his not taking a wife before his father gives approval. While great transitions take place in the lives of all the characters, the one constant is the complete subjugation of women, as first expressed here: The men in the novel universally believe women fit into a few irrevocable social roles. In this case, once married, O-lan is to become the servant of Wang Lung and his father.

“This woman came into our house when she was a child of ten and she has lived until now, when she is twenty years old. I bought her in a year of famine when her parents came south because they had nothing to eat. They were from the north in Shantung and there they returned, and I know nothing further of them. You see she has the strong body and square cheeks of her kind. She will work well for you in the field and drawing water and all else that you wish. She is not beautiful but that you do not need. […] Neither is she clever. But she does well what she is told to do and she has a good temper. So far as I know she is a virgin. She is not beautiful enough to tempt my sons and grandsons even if she had not been in the kitchen.”

This quote comes from Mistress Hwang, the wife of an important landowner. She runs the house, including buying and selling women to serve as servants. Here, Wang Lung meets O-lan, whom he’ll marry that day. As he stands, listening to Mistress Hwang, he doesn’t turn to look at his bride. O-lan has no say in the matter at all. Just as her parents sold her to the household when she was 10, so she must accept the matriarch’s decision to sell her to a stranger.

“There was straw in her hair when he roused her, and when he called her she put up her arm suddenly in her sleep as though to defend herself from a blow. When she opened her eyes at last, she looked at him with her strange speechless gaze, and he felt as though he faced a child. He took her by the hand and led her into the room where that morning he had bathed himself for her, and he lit a red candle upon the table. In this light he was suddenly shy when he found himself alone with the woman and he was compelled to remind himself,

‘There is this woman of mine. The thing is to be done.’”

With his meager resources, Wang Lung throws a wedding party, inviting his relatives and family friends.