Forum on Public Policy 1 “Noblesse Oblige”: Pearl Buck’s Platonic Conception of Self Jennie Wang, Professor, Dept. of English Language, Literature, and Linguistics, Providence University, Taiwan ―The novelist has a noble function.‖ ----Sinclair Lewis ―Elizabeth Taylor is not my Imperial Woman.‖ ----Pearl Buck Abstract If the Nobel Prize was her crown, after her rise to fame, Pearl Buck did not fail her ―noblesse oblige‖—her social responsibility and public duty, as a writer and public figure on the world stage, guest of the White House, speaker on public mass media, editor and publisher in literary circles, and philanthropist in social welfare. She was recognized as a political activist, a strong supporter of the Civil Rights movement and the feminist movement. She toured 238 cities in 1960s, appeared on radio and television programs as a public speaker, and lobbied successfully to change American attitudes and policies in the areas of immigration, adoption, minority rights and mental health. In 1950s, she was particularly concerned with ―the inferior position of women in U.S. society,‖ which did not ―justify the American claim to world leadership‖ (Buck). In writing Imperial Woman, a fictional biography of the Chinese Empress Dowager (Cixi 1835-1908), she undertook ―a study of the character of a woman,‖ a woman in power, from a historical point of view. What does it take to be a woman in power? How does she rule in a court of mandarins? How does she position herself as a wife, mother, sister, beloved, and a supreme ruler? Drawn from her personal experience, transnational imagination, and remarkably, a postcolonial historical vision, Buck created a fictional, Romantic, idealized model of a woman in power. It is her Platonic conception of Self, I presume, as her biographers all agree, that transforms a powerful, classical model of Chinese women into American feminist consciousness and American literature, while she subverts the Orientalist stereotypes of Chinese women from a feminist point of view. I Introduction On Pearl S. Buck, a considerable amount of literary criticism exists exclusively on The Good Earth and Dragon Seed, which constitutes a popular and academic myth that the merit of this Nobel Prize winner might only lie in the presentation of Chinese peasants in pre-modern China. What happened to her career and accomplishments after her repatriation to the United