The Association of the Characters with the Land
A predominant conception is that life is possible only when earth in the form of nature, provides us our necessity. The notion that man born from earth ultimately degenerates into the soil also brought into view. Such a concept evolves from the start when Pearl S. Buck pictures Wang Lung and O-Lan work and yearn for their land. Their life is in every way depended on and connected to land as they are of the farming class. The farmer Wang Lung is never mentally tired of his heavy labour on the earth which he possesses and is always careful of the minute attentions which his crops need. His wife O-Lan who had been a slave in the Great house is not otherwise. She equally shoulders her husband in the…show more content… Bit by bit I will dig up the fields and feed the earth itself to the children and when they die I will bury them in the land, and I and my wife and my old father, even he, we…show more content… He even thinks seriously about selling his daughter if only it would enable him to return to his land. Wang Lung is not the only character in the book who knows the value of the land. Even Cuckoo, the slave who sells him the Hwang land, tells him that the reason for the fall of the Hwang family was the family's negligence of the land.
Even the threat of his uncle, who belongs to a group of fierce bandits, does not generate any fear greater than the love for his land. Land is always a retreat for Wang from his worldly sorrows. When the locusts threaten to destroy his crops, Wang Lung works on his land for seven consecutive days. It is exhausting, but healing at the same time. O-lan also acknowledges and respects the Earth. On her deathbed, O-lan tells Wang Lung that he must not sell the land in his futile attempts to cure her. She says “my life is not worth so much. A good piece of land can be bought for so
