Religion in Huckleberry Finn
Religion is one of the most constant targets of Twain's satirical pen. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain portrays contemporary religion as shallow and hypocritical. He criticizes the hypocrisy of conventional religion by comparing it with the true religion of Huck.
Most of the characters in Huckleberry Finn, while ostensibly devout Christians, in reality behave in anything but a Christian way. Some use religion as a tool to obtain wealth. The king, who twice poses as a preacher, is the epitome of the greedy evangelist. His actions are, in Huck's words, "enough to make a body ashamed of the human race" (131). Many do not exploit religion, but most are hypocritical. For example, the Grangerfords go to church, own religious books, and say that the sermon about brotherly love is very lovely. However, they kill their neighbors and bring their guns to church.
The most significant hypocrisy in Huckleberry Finn concerns slavery. Some very devout people, such as Miss Watson and Silas Phelps, who is a preacher, own slaves. This hypocrisy ...
She even married at one point, a man from a circus-- but one day he just never came back. Anyways, Poh-Poh is always telling Liang that she is a useless girlchild.
Wang Lung allows her to keep two small pearls, but he takes the rest and hurries to buy three hundred acres of Old Master Hwang’s land. O-lan gives birth to twins shortly thereafter. The strongest and most memorable character in The Good Earth is O-lan she exemplifies the situation of women in traditional China and the sacrifices they had to make in order to adhere to cultural notions of feminine respectability. Wang Lang’s position, and she receives neither loyalty nor passion from him in return. He is annoyed when she becomes pregnant with her second child, fearing that her condition will keep her from working in the fields, and later he has no qualms about cruelly insulting her unbound feet and taking her treasured pearls to give to his concubine. O-lan spends most of the novel as victim. It is O-lan who makes many of the hardest decisions in the novel as killing her infant daughter to spare food for the family, for instance and she has these hard decisions with admirable fortitude. O-lan never complains about Wang Lung’s cruelty in insulting her feet—but she does immediately begin binding her daughter’s feet, warning her daughter not to complain of the pain for fear of angering Wang Lung.O-lan represents the dignity and courage of the marginalized
Yan Zhitui states that, "women take charge of family affairs, entering into lawsuits, straightening out disagreements, and paying calls to seek favor...the government offices are filled with their fancy silks." (Differences between north and south, 111). Yet, even in the Qing dynasty women were still restricted by and expected to uphold more traditional ideals, especially in the public eye. So, in the end, through her virtue, Hsi-Liu’s two children we able to become upright. Here, there is a split between what a woman is supposed to be according to old Chinese tradition, and the realities facing women in Tancheng. The loss of her husband, and economic hardship had forced His-Liu to behave in a different way, as if she were usurping the power from the eldest son so she could teach the two boys a lesson about being good family members. While she still maintains the ideals of bearing children, and being loyal to her husband, even after he dies, out of necessity she is forced to break from Confucian ideals of being only concerned with the domestic issues. This too put her at odds with the more traditional society around her, as the villagers pitied her sons, but vilified the Hsi-Liu for being so strict with them (Woman Wang, 65). Had she remarried, she would have been looked down upon even more because she would had broken her duty to remain faithful to her deceased
I would like to point out that Wang Lung was never the most filial of men. Early in the novel, we saw him slip up once or twice. However, at a younger age, he felt guilty when this happened and was able to hold his tongue in most situations. Wang Lung’s uncle is able to exploit Wang Lung based on his filial piety. When the uncle, a lazy man who blames his struggles on an “evil destiny”, asks his nephew to borrow money, Wang Lung explodes, saying, “‘If I have a handful of silver it is because I work and my wife works, and we do not…[let our] fields grow to weeds and our children go half fed!’” (65). But right after he lets these words slip, he “[stands] sullen and unmovable” (66) because knows that his outburst is wrong. However, later in the novel, Wang Lungs lack of sense for filial piety grows evident as he becomes more arrogant. For example, when he is nearing the end of his life, Wang Lung asks without a second thought to be buried below his father but above his uncle and Ching. Asking to be buried above his uncle makes the statement that Wang Lung believes he is a greater man than his uncle. Before his rise through the ranks of society, Wang Lung would never have even considered being buried above his uncle, even though he always had a disliking for him. However, because of his power, he feels that he has the right to disrespect his
Appreciably, Pearl S. Buck depicted her very characters on such a detail basis that everyone in her story seemed to move truly alive in each single page of the bound book in the meant time of reading and after. One of them comes Wang Lung, the main figure of being the peasant of Nanking, the son of an old man, the husband of O-Lan, the father of sons and daughters, the escaper of the famine, the looter of the great house in the south, the peasant-turn-wealthy of his town, and the old one of himself. Yet, is he a good man? Right here in this text, a negotiable one, he comes representing all of himself and lets the deep considerate and well concerning readers judge and say whether, "Wang Lung is a good man." or "Wang Lung is not a good man." through their respective points of view.
Liang’s courage is praised by her best friend, Old Wong, when he says “Liang is tiger-willed” (Choy 28) The reason Old Wong chose to use the word tiger-willed is because tigers are known to be brave and leaders. Old Wong is implying that Liang is a very similar to tigers as she is also brave and shows leadership. In the family, Liang is known as “mo yung”, which is the Chinese word for useless, because she is a girl and nothing but trouble is expected from of her. This is shown when Old Wong visits the family for the first time and due to his facial deformity, everyone keeps their distance from him, out of fear, except for Liang. Liang runs to him and does something no one else would have the courage to do, hug him. In Chinese culture, women are viewed as the feeble gender while men are seen to hold leadership skills. Despite being the youngest and the only daughter in the family, Liang showed leadership rather than her father or her older brothers. In Iron Road, James tells her, he respects her for her courage because she was able to go into the tunnel alone and blow it up despite putting herself in danger. Using the knowledge Tiger gained from working in a fireworks factory, she was able to save her fellow workers in Canada from days of labour by blowing up the tunnel (Iron Road). Going into the tunnel to blow up firework was very dangerous as she almost got stuck in the tunnel. The reason it was an action worth
He uses the money to buy some seeds, a new ox and he is able to return back home. The greed starts to set in when Wang learns that his wife stole some jewels from when there the looting was happening. They talked it over and agreed to buy some more land leaving O-lan with two pearls. The good thing that has come out of Wang looting another person’s home helped him understand why others did so to him and led him to forgive them. He becomes so wealthy that he is able to buy Ching’s land and build enough rooms for him to live in and to also buy laborers. Wang buying laborers shows what wealth does to a once poor peasant man. He is not the one that cares for his land nor is he compassion about his land anymore. Wang hits the biggest turning point when he disrespects his wife and tells her that she is not fit to be a wife of a wealthy man. “Now anyone looking at you would say you were a wife of a common fellow and never of one who has land which he hires men to plow!” (Buck, 168). Wang then starts to “buy” more wives because that is what wealthy men do. In the end Wang ends up like the rest of the wealthy men the he never thought he would become. He got his own uncle’s family addicted to opium, wouldn’t give other refugees seeds without either having high interest or giving up some of their land. This was one of Buck’s main goal, to show the readers what happened to people when they were consumed by wealth and started to become
Throughout The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, O-lan showed herself as a very humble woman. O-lan was a slave in the House of Hwang before her marriage was arranged by the Old Mistress of the House of Hwang. O-lan was faithful throughout the book to Wang Lung through harvest, famine, and even when Wang Lung brought home another woman. O-lan was a hard worker and worked even when no one told her to. She had wisdom that only a slave and a hardworking woman could acquire. Pearl S. Buck reveals many things that all show O-lan to be the humble woman she was.
nature. After the uncle moves his lazy family into Wang Lung’s house, Wang Lung gets to
This novel tells the story of Wang Lung. He is a man who rises from being a poor farmer to a very wealthy man because of his faith in the good earth. In the beginning of the story Wang Lung tries to see as little water as possible because he feels safest with his land under his feet. His family is very poor so he must feed his father corn gruel and tea.
From the beginning of Wang Lung’s marriage to O-lan, she saved him time, money, and effort without complaint. She offered wisdom when asked and was smart in the ways of the world. During the famine, when the family went south in search of food, O-lan taught her children how to beg for food, “dug the small green weeds, dandelions, and shepherds purse that thrust up feeble new leaves”(p. 128). She raised her children prudently. She knew how to bind her daughter’s feet, and she gave them a better childhood than she had had. O-lan knew that the land was the only consistent thing in her life, so she willingly helped Wang Lung as he bought more and more land. O-lan knew her place in the family was as a wife and mother. As a wife, she fe...
The Good Earth focuses around the life of a Chinese peasant, Wang Lung, who struggles to overcome a poverty-stricken life. The accounts of Wang Lung's life portray traditional China. One prominent aspect of this story is how women were depicted in society. The role of women in China is woven throughout the novel. Depending on their social status, each female character within the novel gives readers a different perspective of a woman's role during this period. In addition to their roles, the author includes the trials and tribulations these women must face as well. As a whole, the importance of these female characters are based upon their contribution to the ego's of the male protagonists and as being providers of support to both family and order in society. In Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, women are depicted to be consistent with the authentic Chinese culture of that period.
“‘If you sell the land, it is the end.’” (360). There is absolute truth in these words, if one was in rural, turn-of-the-century China. These wise words, quoted by the main character Wang Lung, come from Pearl S. Buck’s enlightening historical fiction, The Good Earth. In the story, Wang Lung, a poor young farmer, marries a slave of the powerful Hwang family, O-lan. Together, they face hardships and triumphs, prosperity and famine, along with the birth of their three sons and two girls (the fifth child died of strangulation). Throughout Wang Lung’s life, he evolves dramatically in response to the many challenges he faces. In particular, his wealth, idea of women, and the earth itself change Wang Lung’s attitude and point of view as he rises in the social classes of China.
The Death of Woman Wang, by Jonathan Spence is an educational historical novel of northeastern China during the seventeenth century. The author's focus was to enlighten a reader on the Chinese people, culture, and traditions. Spence's use of the provoking stories of the Chinese county T'an-ch'eng, in the province of Shantung, brings the reader directly into the course of Chinese history. The use of the sources available to Spence, such as the Local History of T'an-ch'eng, the scholar-official Huang Liu-hung's handbook and stories of the writer P'u Sung-Ling convey the reader directly into the lives of poor farmers, their workers and wives. The intriguing structure of The Death of Woman Wang consists on observing these people working on the land, their family structure, and their local conflicts.
Together, Wang Lung and O-lan grow a profitable harvest from their land. O-lan becomes pregnant, and there first child is a son. Meanwhile, the powerful Hwang family is falling apart. Wang Lung is able to purchase a piece of the Hwang family's rice land. He enjoys another profitable harvest. O-lan gives birth to there second son. Wang Lung's new wealth catches the attention of his uncle. Custom says that Wang Lung must show the utmost respect to the elderly especially relatives. So obligated he loans his uncle money despite knowing that the money will be wasted on drinking and gambling. The Hwang family's finances continue to fall apart, and the Hwangs sell another piece of land to Wang Lung.