This Proud Heart Analysis

This Proud Heart speaks of the fate of most women who are talented. Susan is a genius who can do anything better than anything and at the same time his desirous love and family life. In fact as peter Conn feels that “she is less a fictional character than an allegorical emblem, a sign of the opportunities and limits women faced in the America of the 1930’s” ( A cultural Biography 205 ). At a certain stage she even contemplates giving up her art to save her marriage but ultimately decides against it as she is too independent to extinguish herself in mere domestic responsibilities. At the end she realizes that she can fulfill herself only through her art and separates from her husband so that she can pursue her work with undivided attention.

Buck had been an object attack throughout her adult life: by the Presbyterians during the missionary debate; by literary critics, especially after she won the Nobel prize by MaCarthyites, who smeared her as a subversive; by the Chinese communist who labeled her a reactionary by social work establishment for her radical views on interracial adoption. Even since her emotionally stunted childhood she had been as essentially isolated woman. Her loneliness deepens in old age. She told James T. Farrell, “I know what it is to wake in the night and feel utterly alone even in one’s own house and to wake to grey dawn and hesitate to begin the day”. Pearl S. Buck shaped her last year into a kind of final exile, completing the pattern of homelessness that she had known since childhood. Now her end was near. She suffered from lung cancer. After she came back from hospital she never recovered. She slept for long period each day. Her books her correspondence and her plans came to stop. Lying in bed she asked Beverly to spread old copies of Dickens novels around her. Early in the morning of March 6, 1973, after a quite night she breathed her last. News paper around the World covered her death as a front page story. Pearl S. Buck’s funeral took place, as she had instructed at Green Hills farm. It was a private ceremony. Only her adopted children attended; Carol was not brought from Vineland, and stayed away. After a brief non-religious service pearl s buck was buried beneath a large ash a few hundred yards away from her