Pearl Buck’s Pavilion of Women:The Gospel of Universal Love

One of the most popular American authors of her day, humanitarian, crusader for women’s rights, editor of Asia magazine, philanthropist, Pearl Buck, is noted for her novels of life in China. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. In most of her novels Buck projects a basic pattern of conflict between orthodox institutional religion and the spirit of humanism. For her, humanism is the only moral alternative to the evils and odds of the modern civilization. Her Satan Never Sleeps, Peony, The Hidden Flower, and Come My Beloved deal with orthodox institutional religions while Mandala is a kind of departure from such orthodox institutional religions to mysticism. About Pavilion of Women (1946) Deshpande has rightly observed; “Buck’s Pavilion of Women seems to be a unique novel. Its uniqueness is of threefold nature. First, the religious encounter in the novel does not have the usual background of orthodox and institutional religion; second, it is totally devoted to mysticism and spiritualism and third, it defines Pearl Buck’s humanism and her vision as a novelist very clearly.” (1999:96).