SOURCE: LeBar, Barbara. “The Subject is Marriage.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 9, nos. 3-4 (August 1988): 264-69.

[In the following essay, LeBar contrasts Sarton's portrayal of marriage in Crucial Conversations to that in Pearl Buck's The Good Earth.]

Pearl Buck and May Sarton are authors separated by time, culture, and literary technique. Yet each has presented a portrayal of marriage that transcends the aforementioned differences. Each presents a marriage unique to its own time and place and yet, at the same time, a marriage which illustrates the universalities of the intuition.

Despite recent developments in the women's movement and despite long-held Western adherence to the idea that marriage should be based on romantic love, Pearl Buck's The Good Earth gives a readily-accepted portrayal of marriage. Though her story deals with a different time and place and with a culture markedly alien to our own, Americans accepted and cherished the book from the first. It is still widely popular and respected. One of the primary reasons is that readers care about Wang Lung and O-lan, and what is more, they care about their marriage.

No wedding day does more violence to Western sensibilities than does theirs. Buck's opening sentence is simply intriguing: “It was Wang-Lung's marriage day.” And so it was. He went on this day to the Great House of Hwang to pick up his “bride.” the bride he had never even seen. At the House of Wang, she is a slave. As Wang Lung's wife, her status is instantly elevated. Modern women in Western countries view themselves as demeaned when they identify themselves as “just a housewife.” O-lan, on the other hand, welcomed the designation. Up from slavery she came literally and overnight.

In this most “arranged” of marriages, it is not even Wang Lung's father who has chosen the woman who will wed his son. Custom decreed such a procedure, but Wang Lung's family does not get to exercise customary powers. So, it is the Old Mistress of the Great House, wishing to insure herself a place in Heaven, who has agreed to let one of her slaves (albeit only of the homely, kitchen ones) go to the young farmer in marriage.

And O-lan is homely—tall and rawboned like her Northern Chinese countrymen, she has unbound feet, broad, flat features, and blackened teeth. But she is a gem, this woman. And Wang-Lung soon comes to know and to acknowledge the fact. He acknowledges it to himself, but it will be many long years before he acknowledges it to O-lan, and never does he do so in ways that satisfy the romantic longings of her heart.

Poor in a way that demands a new definition of the word, this couple begins married life. They set to work. He tills the land; she sets the long-neglected house to rights. Both have only the crudest tools. A great welt appears on his back caused by the strap hurled over his shoulder as he follows his ox up and down the fields. She cares for, caters to, and pays homage to his old father as custom dictates. The primitive two-room house is scrubbed, the bedding disinfected, and Wang Lung's guests impressed with her acquired-in-the-Great House culinary skills. Soon she even joins him in the work of the fields. At the end of their first year together, there is a profit, and with it, he (always the decision maker) buys land. She supports the decision. At the end of their first year together, there is also a child—fortunately, for everyone it is a boy. In this culture, female children are not greeted with delight—especially is this fact true if it is the first child.

O-lan makes mockery of modern “natural” childbirth. She does not take Lamaze classes; she does not “practice breathing.” She simply has a child. And she bears it alone—without a doctor, without a midwife, without even her husband. She asks only that he bring her a reed from the field “that I may cut the child's life from mine.” He brings the reed, and, for many hours, he waits—going often to their bedroom door, hearing only panting from within (perhaps she had been to those classes after all). At last she allows him to enter; and there he finds, amidst the odor of hot blood, the babe, wrapped in a pair of his old trousers, as was the custom in their country.

Each of the five times O-lan gives birth, the ritual is the same. No help, no complaints. And the fourth time, when they are so beset by poverty that they must flee their barren land and go to the warmer, more prosperous South, it is O-lan who does what has to be done. She takes the life of the barely breathing, unwanted girl child. Two deep bruises on either side of the baby's neck constitute the evidence. Wang Lung suppresses the memory of them ever after. But in his heart he honors the woman who courageously inflicted them. O-lan, he knows, accepted and met the demands of their culture. She terminated an unwanted pregnancy in a way not too different from the way it is done in modern times at local abortion clinics. Buck did not duck this complex issue—one that is fundamental to marriage as an institution. Her treatment of it was most courageous for her time (or, for that matter, for ours), and she gives us a woman whose reasons for so acting are as compelling as any in fact or fiction.

The troubles of this marriage are many. The adversity faced by its principals, deep. The human wounds incurred, universal. Their third child, also a girl, is viewed as a bad omen. She comes in a year of drought and famine. Wang Lung, during their sojourn in the city, considers selling her into slavery, so badly does the family need the few dollars she would bring. Several months later, he discovers that she is retarded. All through his life thereafter, he thanks Providence for staying his impulse to sell. All through their lives, he and O-lan care for this blighted one.

Added troubles come in the form of the ne'er-do-well relatives—an uncle and his progeny nearly ruin them when once again they have acquired a small nest egg and some food. This uncle not only has a call on their stores but a call on their devotion as well, hypocritical though the giving of the latter may be. The uncle is, after all, a male relative of the older generation. All homage must, therefore, be paid. Western couples also face the problem. Similar, troublesome relatives threaten the nuclear family in much the same ways. Such relatives tap resources, cause dissension, threaten stability. Yet most Westerners also feel some obligation toward them.

An age-old marital trouble is adultery. As in the Western world, the man's infidelity is more readily accepted. But here, in this time and place, the acceptance goes well beyond Western bounds. Wang Lung brings Lotus into his home as a second wife. O-lan can do nothing except cry out the reproach of her heart, “I have borne you sons; I have borne you sons.” Infidelity on the part of the woman would not, of course, be tolerated.

Troubles fostered by the rivalry and bickering of their first two sons and their wives and by the return of the uncle—now more of a problem than ever since he and his renegade son have turned outlaw—plague Wang Lung and O-lan. At one point, they are forced to take the reprehensible old uncle, his wife, and his son into their home. The alternative is to have the place burned to the ground by the Red Beards, the gang of robbers to which the uncle belongs.

It is O-lan who sees them through this and other crises. She sells their furniture and kitchen utensils when they must move to the South. She supports Wang Lung in his refusal to sell the land. She helps him to acquire more land whenever the opportunity presents itself.

She is equal to any task. She, and not the softhearted Wang Lung, kills the ox when the family is on the point of starvation. She cooks and serves the flesh of the beast. By doing so, she saves human lives, but she too feels like a cannibal.

Her knowledge provides comforts and even luxuries. It is she who knows what kind of inexpensive mats to buy in the city and she who knows how to bend and shape them into a rude, but serviceable shelter, complete with floor and ceiling.

Her memory of her slave days provides her with the information that the rich have their hiding places. When the revolution comes, she finds such a place and the jewels it contains. She turns these jewels over to her husband. They are his passport to the acquisition of large amounts of land. And, thus, the gravest moment of betrayal in this marriage came, not when Wang Lung lusted after and took Lotus, but, rather, when he took the two pearls, all that O-lan had kept from the storehouse of jewelry, and gave them, in the form of earrings, to Lotus.

Ah, but the joys of this marriage are also many. Its accomplishments are almost unbelievable, and its final hours are a triumph. For at O-lan's death, Wang Lung acknowledges that he does not love her and never has. Does not love her wide, flat feet nor her matted, coarse hair. Never melts at the contemplation of all she has done for him and their family in the way that the merest glance from Lotus can cause him to do.

Nevertheless, O-lan is his wife in ways that Lotus can never be. O-lan and he did indeed plight their troths, and they did not part until death parts them.

Not so Poppy and Reed Whitelaw in May Sarton's 1975 novel, Crucial Conversations. Divorce parts them after the Viet Nam War, Watergate, and just plain modern American life have added their whacks to the vicissitudes common to any marriage. Perhaps Sarton's great contribution to the literature of marriage is her showing that nothing about modern marriage is easy.

Sarton believes in marriage. She also believes in feminist values and goals. And she is realistic enough to know that reconciling feminist concerns with the prevailing idea of marriage may be impossible. In Crucial Conversations she shows a marriage that, despite some important accomplishments, has taken too many lumps to survive.

The climax to the novel occurs with the wife's walking out. Poppy doesn't slam the door, but she is firm in closing it. She is convinced that only by leaving her husband can she realize her long-deferred dream of becoming a first-rate sculptor. Reed is, in his own eyes at least, a “liberated,” modern man. He is a rich man and a generous one. From his earnings, he has gone so far as to provide Poppy with her own studio.

However, while he is by no means a brute, he is a chauvinist. Throughout their long marriage, he has merely tolerated her work. Late meals, less-than-perfect housekeeping, some strains in their own relationship and in their dealings with their children, he has accepted as a “necessary curse of modern times.” Accepted in the same way that pioneer families accepted Indian raids. A working wife is something he must put up with. But he does not, and never has, taken her work seriously. Her work and her working are major or minor inconveniences, depending on the cicumstances of life at any given moment. They are never more than that.

To Poppy, of course, her work is a major life commitment. As important to her as Reed himself and, in the end, more important, for she realizes at last that she cannot have both. Unlike most women, she acts upon that realization. She chooses work, and she leaves Reed.

Watergate was her goad. As she tells Reed in her farewell letter, it shocked her into recognition. Honesty has to begin somewhere, she tells him, and she decides that it should begin now with the two of them. Viet Nam he had refused to face, and, thereby, lost his older son's respect forever. To a certain extent, he lost his wife's as well. She faults him primarily, not for his views, but for his treatment of the son who could not share those views.

Watergate compounds matters, at least for Poppy. With children grown and most obligations met, she takes to heart its lessons about the horrors of duplicity, and she leaves.

Caught up in all of this, in various unpleasant ways, are the peripheral people in their lives. In the portrayals of them, the reader sees clearly Sarton's strengths and weakness as a novelist. Chief among the latter is the use of Philip, the couple's best friend, as a clumsy, gimmicky “device” upon which to hang the whole novel. It is with Philip that everyone has “crucial conversations.” These conversations are, in varying degrees, believable, but, in toto, there are so many of them, over such a wide range of issues, that they finally falter and fail—top-heavy with their pseudo-importance. Reader credulity is also strained by the demand that Philip's total intimacy with one and all be accepted at face value. As the confidant of the Whitelaws themselves, their children, and their mothers, Philip leaps generation, class, and social barriers in a single bound, or at least is asked by his creator to do so. Not being Superman, he, of course, fails.

Philip also has his own love interest, an “independent” woman of our times. She is a cop, no less. He keeps Kathy and their oral reading of Dickens a secret from his upper crust of friends. Kathy is not a well-developed character. “Independent” she may be, but a stick figure, she surely is. She is the novel's only representative of working class women and their concerns, and she is an unconvincing one. Added to the problem is the fact that Philip must be “perfect” for her too—meeting all needs, solving all dilemmas.

Again, he cannot do it: neither can he carry the complete structural burden of this novel. Sarton has demanded too much of him. Since he appears in virtually every scene and since he is not a fully realized character, the book itself ultimately fails as a novel of the highest order.

Many aspects of it do succeed, however. Like Buck, Sarton is good at giving glimpses of the extended family. Both writers show the universality of family problems. Evelyn and Cecilia are not robbers or outright criminals, but in their genteel way, they cretae as much havoc in the home of Poppy and Reed as the uncle created in that of O-lan and Wang Lung. They are “mothers-in-law,” much more than they are persons in their own right. So, too, is the uncle much more a representative of the “older generation” and of the cultural reverence due it, than he is an individual.

As O-lan accepts her cultural role, so does the “modern” Poppy—for a very long time. An almost self-defeating, brutal courage is required before she can break the sexist bonds of the role. And the costs of doing so are in every way—financial, emotional, and sociological—high.

Nuclear family concerns surface in both books, and dealing with them both strengthens and harms each marriage. The Whitelaw children are problematical figures. Harry, who resists the Viet Nam War, is the catalyst of his parents' breakup. Susie is a “type”—all “concern and good will.” Emerson, the prep schooler—a Holden Caulfield in reverse—is the defender of his father's chauvinistic values. A tenth grade businessman, one expects him to break out of his preppy clothes straight into a grey flannel suit in much the same way that The Incredible Hulk appeared before our startled eyes. Only Emerson's compulsive consumption of gigantic ice cream sundaes seems like something a real teenager would do.

Money is important in the Whitelaw marriage as it is in most, and it is was with Wang Lung and O-lan. Wang Lung had always to acknowledge O-lan's contribution to their property. Together they rose from poverty. Reed need not, and does not, make any such acknowledgement to Poppy. Though she will no doubt get a settlement. Poppy may have to sue for it. Reed stoops to using money in a final power play in the novel's climactic scene. Poppy may be an artist with a capital “A”; O-lan was a breadwinner. Which, then, had the more “modern” marriage?

May Sarton fails to get her major messages concerning modern “movements” and “influences” effectively conveyed. Hence, she has produced a seriously flawed work.

Ah, but the story of a modern marriage. That is not flawed. The pain and grief—joy and hope—are all there. Ultimately, Poppy and Reed must part, and that fact Reed will not easily accept. In their final encounter, in Poppy's studio, he does, for once, turn brutal. From the brief engagement in physical brutality, he recovers and repents quickly. From the conviction that an active feminist has risen from the ashes of his long-time traditional wife, he may never recover. Poppy finally gets across the message that she is leaving, indeed has left (to take up the artist's life in Paris, no less), but she convinces a bewildered man. One can almost hear him ask, “Where did I go wrong? What do women want?”

And so, the reader comes full circle. For what women want is what all humans want: fulfilling work and abiding love.

Sarton seems to be saying that we may no longer be able to have those things within the institution of marriage. Certainly Poppy and Reed can't. They part, and they do so well before death. Whether other couples can escape their fate, whether modern marriages can be equally fulfilling to both partners, Sarton seems unsure. She seems rather to doubt it, and certainly she is saying that if indeed participants in modern marriage can achieve happiness, it will not be done with ease.