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.”
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Top reviews from other countries
Veronique Joffreau-Wilcox
and I was so happy ro find it published again in English
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 25, 2018book lover
Simple story yet powerful in emotions
Reviewed in India on April 15, 2017