Pearl Buck: The good daughter



(Pearl S. Buck, circa 1932)

If being a good daughter means learning from your parents what to do – and what not to do – then Pearl S. Buck was certainly one of the finest.

Her parents, Absalom Sydenstricker and Caroline (Carie) Stulting, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries from Hillsboro, West Virginia.  Wikipedia reports that there was a split in the Presbyterian Church during the Civil War era between those that “denounced secession as an act of treason” and those that didn’t.  The Southern Presbyterians tended to be more conservative than the Northern Presbyterians.  They clung to a doctrine of “the spirituality of the church” which “declared that social reform and political participation were duties or pursuits to be taken up by individuals, not church courts.” 

Absalom Sydenstricker was certainly cut from that cloth.  As a man of the cloth in China, he disregarded the worldly concerns of his Chinese congregants in favor of what he thought should be their spiritual ones.  Nora Stirling, in her book Pearl Buck: A Woman in Conflict, described Absalom as one who focused intensely upon “the goodness of his God and the worthlessness of theirs.”  Stirling also wrote that Absalom was so dismissive of women, and so intent upon his missionary goals, that he often acted as if he didn’t even remember having a wife or a daughter.  Buck herself compared him to Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick.

Caroline Stulting Sydenstricker, on the other hand, maintained a very close relationship with Pearl.  While in China, Carie often felt exiled from her American homeland.  She therefore maintained an American type household while there, which Buck described in her book, My Mother’s House. Carie nevertheless was able to respect and appreciate the Chinese people - not just as potential converts, but in their own right.  The

Randolph College (Buck’s alma mater) website includes this statement about Carie:  Unlike her husband, she seemed more interested in the people in their day to day hardships, than in the condition of their souls.

Buck herself seemed determined to emulate her mother’s social-justice proclivities (ironically, though, with some of her father’s type of fervor).  However, Wikipedia reports that she also was “determined to never make her mother’s mistake of subordinating herself to either a man or to a zealous creed.”

Resources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_S._Buck

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exile_(1936)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Angel

http://faculty.randolphcollege.edu/fwebb/buck/hdmueller/Absalom1.htm

http://faculty.randolphcollege.edu/fwebb/buck/mewarley/carie.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbyterian_Church_in_the_United_States

Copyright June 26, 2011 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved