Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters

This is the totally absorbing story of the mistress of a privileged Chinese household, Madame Wu. The book takes place in early 20th century China and Madame Wu decides on her 40th birthday to retire from her marriage, allow her husband to take a second wife, and concentrate on herself for a change. She's been a consummate wife, mother, and businesswoman (she's managed the family's estates and business interests for twenty-two years), and she's tired of ministering to others. Partly, the book reads as a sort of spiritual King Lear story, because she is like the king of this family (Mr. Wu has long since handed over all the important decisions to her) and she abdicates, leaving her family at sixes and sevens. She finds herself consumed by fixing small and large disasters that occur as a result of her withdrawal instead of liberated to nourish her spirit. Then an encounter with a foreign priest/scholar transforms her understanding of herself,not by religious conversion, but by demonstrating a different way of being.

It is an old-fashioned kind of novel, full of descriptive detail and at least a dozen memorable characters; socially astute; and fascinating in its depictions of a Chinese culture that no longer exists. Above all, the character of Madame Wu is most compelling, because--as admirable as she appears to be at the novel's start--cool; self-possessed; understanding who she is, what she wants, and how to get it--she changes, in a very convincing way. This book, with its preoccupation with the soul and the transformation of its protagonist, reminded me of Dostoevsky more than anything else.

This book was on sale cheap, or I doubt I would have picked it up--I have bad memories of slogging through The Good Earth in high school. But while I didn't enjoy reading that book, certain images have stayed with me through the decades since, and I imagine this book, which I enjoyed thoroughly, will stick with me also.

Buck is always an entertaining writer with deftly drawn characters. And she's an expert on Chinese culture in pre-Revolutionary China. This book is no exception and we are drawn into the protagonist's (Madame Wu's) very Chinese conundrums and decisions in such a way that we can identify with her even while her issues are utterly foreign. Her grappling with life reflects ours: we are all Madame Wu at times. My problem with the book is how the author uses the setting to slowly aggrandize a watered down secular humanism. She hobbles back and forth between the greatness of seeking what one most wants versus living self-sacrificially for family and society. In the end, Madame Wu discovers that the soul is eternal, but with no faith in any God (Buck doubles down to reassure us of this) or in anything except the eternal nature of the soul. We are supposed to conclude with her, that she has reached ultimate enlightenment. Meanwhile, a Catholic priest is the means of her education, the way she discovers not only love, but this supposed wisdom of the soul. In my opinion, (as a Christian) this is a disappointing philosophy and empty conclusion. Give the book another star if you don't mind getting a treastise on secular humanism in your fiction.

I love Pearl Buck’s books. She is always a deeply satisfying novelist and sometimes, as in the Good Earth, Dragon Seed, The Mother, and Letter from Peking, she soars towards greatness.

I just finished Pavilion of Women and found it curiously unfocused and rambling. It starts off with a gripping premise: Madam Wu, the matriarch of an aristocratic family – the time is always vague in her novels, it this must be about the Sino-Japanese War and the very beginning of Communism, at the age of forty, decides to “retire” from her wifely duty. She purchases a concubine for her husband, and ministers to her very wealthy, privileged extended family from her rooms as a kind of benevolent distant force. Her main goal is to keep the traditional Chinese family fixed in its aim to continue the procreation of children to assure everyone’s role in its journey toward a stable society; thus, its members are assured “immortality” by continued procreation, especially by producing sons. Madam Wu is unusually wise, especially, seeing the value of girls. Her fierce, dogged grip on tradition, however, comes into conflict with her three sons, each having been touched by modernism from abroad.

I won’t go further into the plot, but let me say to anyone who new to Mrs. Buck’s writing, that this, as most of her books, moves glacially. Having said this, I just want to assure the new reader that this is a deliberate device to reflect the almost eternal, pre-Communist, Chinese culture, which was impervious to change, slowly moving toward the future with unusual stability and deliberateness. Once the reader adjusts, and succumbs to her world, there are great rewards.

For me the book takes strange turns and ends unsatisfactorily. Mrs. Buck ignored the Sino-Japanese war and the arrival of Communism, a factor that I can’t believe would not fatally affect the old Chinese order and the Wu family. The remoteness she portrays of the family’s existence – in an unnamed town and unspecified time - doesn’t reflect reality. There are enough hints of war and chaos to make me believe this is during a specific period. In my opinion, the “remoteness” of the family is a contrived device that just does not work.

Madam Wu probably reflects Chinese stability, albeit an imperfect person – she is human, after all – but one jarring note, the one that stood out above everything, was her treatment of her husband; he was a wonderfully, vulnerable man who adored his wife, yet she was curiously calloused to his very poignant reaction of her “divorce.”

While there are wonderful observations that made me continue reading – ultimately, Mrs. Buck is a wonderful write and observer - I must say I became impatient about three-quarters into the story. This is certainly an interesting book, I suggest any newcomer to Mrs. Buck’s fabulous books, however, start with the Good Earth or Dragon Seed.

I've read many novels by Pearl S. Buck, and Pavilion of Women is my favorite. I read this once when I was a teenager in the sixties, and I re-read it now, in my sixties. What a beautiful book! Madame Wu, the protagonist, is the forty-year old matriarch of a wealthy family in China. She decides on her 40th birthday that she wants to recede from her responsibilities as a wife, and sets about finding a concubine for her husband.

She undergoes a number of changes throughout the book, learning from people and events. She is powerful because she is respected by everyone around her. When she makes mistakes, she learns from them. She judges those around her-- household members, friends, her sons' wives, and more. Her judgements are fair, and she sees it her business to help those she can help in her household. She chose a wife for her first son, and that has worked out well for them. Her second son found a wife on his own, she arranged a wife for her third son, and the fourth son, who lives with nearby farmers, is not ready for marriage.

There are two western characters in the novel, a nun-like woman and a priest. The woman is to be pitied, because she is alone in the world, spews out Biblical readings, and tries hard to proselytize. But the priest is a magnanimous character who, though poor, takes care of orphaned children. He is beloved because of his selflessness, and he is hired by Madame Wu to teach one of her sons English.

Much happens throughout the novel, and Madame Wu, though sheltered from the outside world in the family compound, becomes more open and philosophical.

This is primarily a character study, and rare view into the Chinese gentry. This is not an "exciting" read, but is well-written and great for deep-thinking female reading. It did take me a while to get through it because of this. I wasn't "grabbed" by it, but I didn't regret the time spent reading it.

What if a woman who has been burdened with family responsibilities for many years just stops doing it all in a quest to find her own freedom? The answer to this timeless question is the crux of one of Pearl Buck's most cherished novels.

Madame Wu, the revered mistress of a large, walled estate in a small city in China that is home to some 60 people old and young, including dozens of servants, has turned 40. Although the year is not specified, the story seems to take place sometime in the 1930s-1940s at a time when China was wrestling with a harsh transition from the old, treasured ways to more modern social conventions. But Madame Wu is oblivious to all that, reigning within her four walls with quiet and serene dignity and a very firm hand. But at age 40, she decides to "retire" from her marriage, finding a concubine for her stunned husband in an attempt to create a new life for herself—a life of freedom still within the walls of the compound but one where she can do as she pleases and be responsible for no one. A life where she can read books and discover who she really is. A life where she can spend her days thinking. Things don't quite work out as she envisioned. And that is the genius of this book as events swirl out of Madame Wu's control, creating strife, envy, animosity, and disorder that is by turns tragic and comic. And then something completely unexpected, if not outright astounding, happens that turns things right side out again.

The book is exquisitely written with so much vibrant detail and colorful descriptions of the rooms, the food, the clothing, and the customs that I felt as if I could be living in this compound. It is a rare writer who can so successfully pull the reader into the very pages of the story in the way that Pearl Buck has done.

While the novel was written in 1946 about a time and culture that no longer exist, its profound and oh-so wise message is still relevant and germane for today's readers.

I am more than a little embarrassed to say I had never known of Buck before happening across this work a few days ago, though I now have absolutely no doubt that all her praise, including the Nobel Prize, is completely deserved .
The author possesses an almost supernatural ability to bring distant people , ideas, and culture to the forefront of the reader's mind, drawing upon color and feeling that could easily compel the reader to believe the work is something of their own memory.
As with any protagonist, Madam Wu is is impossible to fully love or fully hate, but remains impossible to ignore. Her expressions of grief , love, and self-examination offer insight to all who are enchanted by her words.

In Pavilion of Women, Pearl Buck follows the consequences that flow from a woman’s decision to stop sleeping with her husband after celebrating her fortieth birthday – and to select a concubine to fill that role in his life. Madame Wu’s logic is flawless – she does not want to bear any additional children in the second half of her life and she wants to live her own life, free of her duty to raise children, serve her husband, and live for the others in her vast household.

"I will spend the rest of my life assembling my own mind and my own soul. I will take care of my body carefully, not that it may any more please a man, but because it houses me and therefore I am dependent upon it."

Her husband, her sons, her close friend, and even her servants do not understand Madame Wu’s decision, however, and much of the novel relates how she acts to carry out her plan – selecting a young woman to be her husband’s concubine; selecting a tutor for her third son, so that he can attract a wife who has been educated in Shanghai; sending her youngest son to live in the countryside with rural cousins; and, then, trying to solve the problems that arise. Madame Wu is steadfast in her decision to live in her late father-in-law’s quarters in the household and living her own life.

"In this city the Wu family was only one house. It was pleasant to think that there were all these others where men and women lived together and brought forth their children and children’s children. And in this nation there were many more such cities, and around the world many other nations where in different ways men and women lived the same life. She liked to dwell upon such thoughts. Her own life took its proportion. What was one grief among so many like it, or what was one joy in a world of such joys?"

The chance hiring of the tutor, a foreign priest from Venice, for her son’s education, changes the placid life that Madame Wu imagined for herself. Brother Andre, as he calls himself, is a very tall, very large man with very unusual ideas that attract both her son’s desire for personal freedom and her own. Both her son and Madame Wu come to love this man, his high degree of learning, his lack of fear, and his venturing mind. No romantic attachment colors Madame Wu’s attraction to Brother Andre but, before he dies, he becomes the only man she has ever fully loved. It is the flowering of the relationship and the effect it has on Madame Wu’s actions that makes Pavilion of Women and engaging and powerful book – as powerful as the author’s best known work The Good Earth.

A few quotes may illustrate the effect of Brother Andre upon Madame Wu:

Brother Andre’s advice about her third son, “You can be as free within these walls as you could be in the whole world. And how could you be free if, however far you wander, you still carry inside yourself the constant thought of him? See where you belong in the stream of life. Let it flow through you, cool and strong. Do not dam it with your two hands, lest he break the dam and so escape you. Let him go free, and you will be free.”

Madame’s view of her readiness for Brother Andre’s words, “It was so pellucid a soul, so wise and yet so young. She had lived in this house and had learned so much through her own living that she was ripe with understanding. Her mind was a crystal cup, the workmanship complete, the cup only waiting to be filled.”

Madame’s thoughts about Brother Andre at the time of his death, “He was neither foreign nor a priest to her now. He was the only being she had ever met whom she worshiped. Old Gentleman had taught her much. But Old Gentleman had feared many things. Brother André feared no one. He feared neither life nor death. She had never thought of him as a man when he was alive, but now that he was dead she saw him as a man lying dead … She was skeptic to the soul. Not in years had she entered a temple or burned incense before a god. Her father had cleansed her of the superstition common to women, and Old Gentleman had finished the work. She did not now believe in an unseen God, but she knew certainly that this man continued.”

Brother Andre’s influence on her son, “Madame Wu now saw. Indeed, she perceived what she had never seen before, that Fengmo was not at all like his father, but he was very like his grandfather. The same sternness sat on his features, the same gravity shone in his eyes. He was handsome, but grave … When she had asked André to be his teacher she had asked blindly, seeing only a shallow step ahead. She had touched a lock, half turned the key, but a wide gate had opened under her hand, and her son had gone through to that new world.”

Madame’s faith in her own immortality, “Yes, she now believed that when her body died, her soul would go on. Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever. Love alone had awakened her sleeping soul and had made it deathless. She knew she was immortal.”

This is not Buck's best work, although very well constructed and displaying her deep, personal knowledge of Asia, in this case, pre-communist China. Buck attempts to profile the transition of traditional upper-class Chinese society to incipient westernization by focusing on the vital but largely unknown role of aristocratic Chinese women, especially her heroine, a middle-age and impossibly wise family matriarch. Buck's characterizations, typical of 1940's writers, are generally too idealized for modern readers, who expect more insight about women's lives than what they wear and what's for supper (exceptions are the finely done scene of a difficult birth, and a too-quixotic and platonic east-west romance). Descriptions, Buck's forte in all her works, are extensive and vivid, allowing you to feel a robe's silkiness and savor a soup's rich broth. But unlike the great transitional novels by 19th century western women --Austin, the Brontes, Burney, Chopin, Eliot,Edgeworth, etc. -- "Pavilion" is too delicate and satiny, lacking the bite of satire and irony, and blunting insight into this major shift in China's culture. One cannot escape the perception that Buck is handcuffed here by her Edwardian, missionary upbringing. On the plus side, "Pavilion" is worth reading for that very silkiness, which transports readers into a fantasy of elegant dignity and heroism--this is escapist literature, and can be enjoyed as such.

In the midst of reading the story of Madame Wu I saw a film was available for viewing. Of course, the film is an adaptation of the novel, but it is not the same story at all. Madame Wu would never have done what she is depicted doing on screen. The film is a significant disappointment if you hope to understand anything about Chinese culture of the time, the function and purpose of marriage and family life, and the relationship between women and men based upon rational thinking rather than love. Madame Wu is a deeply intriguing, engaging character. We are allowed entry into the depths of her mind. We know how she thinks and why. Her navigation of her world in the women's quarters is enlightening.