Irish playwright Oscar Wilde once said, “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it….I can resist everything but temptation.” In regards to free will, which is a common dilemma that has puzzled humankind, we wonder if we, as homo sapiens, are ever fully in charge of our actions, or if we are submissive to our mental and physical desires, no matter how unwise the urge seems to the logical mind? In the novels Macbeth and The Good Earth, temptation eats away at one’s virtues until nothing is left but unbridled hunger. This is exhibited in two slightly different ways by the main characters of their respective novels, Macbeth and Wang Lung.
Despite all of his righteous virtues at the beginning of the Shakespearean play, Macbeth quickly becomes consumed by his emotional inclinations the moment he is exposed to the temptation of power when he receives an extra thaneship. Once he feels the pleasure of having authority, his temptation for more grows, and he starts going out of control. After killing Duncan, the good and righteous king, his desires start to snowball, as he begins to act extremely paranoid. His previously courageous, strong, and powerful figure has degraded so much that he has become a cold-blooded, immoral, and uncontrollable monster. The temptations that he has ceded to have made him more of an emotional creature than a logical one. In terms of making decisions, he asserted that “from this moment, the very firstlings of [his] heart shall be the firstling of [his] hand.” (Shakespeare 107) Macbeth promised that whatever his emotions told him, he’d act upon them immediately. This made him into a creature without any restraint, controlled solely by his hunger for the power he has grown so fond of. After making this claim, he was unable to stop himself from ordering unnecessarily brutal murders of his subjects.
Wang Lung’s experience with temptations is slightly different. His desires lay in the area of women, especially after he became rich and materialistic. In the beginning, he was a hands-on worker who felt the earth every single day, even after he returned to his hometown with a lot of stolen gold. However, the moment that he became idle during the flood, the temptation to stop working and take on the rich man’s lifestyle took hold immediately. He came to realize that his peasant wife, Olan, did not have the appearance to match his new status, and started becoming obsessed with a high-class prostitute named Lotus, who soon had Wang Lung attend to her every whim. He was so enslaved by her that “he would have cut off his life if the girl Lotus had commanded it or desired it, because she had every beauty which had ever come into his mind to desire in a woman.” (Buck 196) However, a lesson can be learned, as Wang Lung was able to catch himself from this temptation-driven lust for material objects, and return to his good earth.
Based on the course of civilizations, it is obvious that reality really is no different from the worlds of Macbeth and Wang Lung. Leaders of successful and unsuccessful countries all have a history of succumbing to the lure of power and materialistic goods, and have had fates resembling those of Macbeth and Wang Lung. Our lives are influenced by people having too much or too little power, the former often tending to act on their own personal agendas as a result. Can we, as humans, ever truly be satisfied with what we have in our lives, and be in total control against our temptations?
Works Cited
Buck, Pearl S., and Stephanie Reents. The Good Earth. Ed. Cynthia Johnson. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2009. Print.
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Ed. Rex Gibson. Cambridge: Cambridge U, 2001. Print.
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