Steinbeck\'s Okies: Three Critical Perspectives

Steinbeck's "Okies": Three Critical Perspectives

To gain an understanding of this great American novel, the reader must at some point grapple with the meaning or importance of Steinbeck's indigent farm workers: the so-called Okies. They are at the center of the work, and it is their journey and struggles that make up the living soul of the novel. When one reads carefully through the three critical appraisals this essay will examine, the reader notices a changing magnification.

Each of our three critics has the "Okies" under the microscopic, so to speak, but they employ three quite different lenses to examine their subjects. As we shall see as we move from Reed to Owens to Gladstein, the calibration of the microscope moves steadily away. The movement starts with a narrow aperture, and "zooms out" to encompass a universal perspective: the "Okies" however, remain solidly in the center of our lens' field of vision.

John R. Reed, in his article "The Grapes of Wrath and the Esthetics of Indigence," offers the reader a very close scrutiny of the language employed within the novel; his interests concern the nuances of the migrant workers' speech patterns and actions. He focuses his examination on the specifics of the indigents' life in the west, and celebrates what he sees as their dignity and honor in the face of their daily trials. As Reed argues, the "Okies" must "maintain their dignity and pride [...] and transform the meanness of their lives - the indignities and humiliations of poverty, and abuse - into something larger and more significant" (612). The critic further points out that in his article he is interested in how Steinbeck is "able to transform the image of the poor by associating their earthly life of the soil with emerging ideals and [...] hopes" (604). Reed looks at the specific "earthy" language used by the migrants, and compares that usage with the other classes of people around them. As Reed notes, "earthy speech, under these circumstances, becomes an insignia of honor" (607). The reader soon sees that Reed's perspective is centered solely on the migrant workers, and he maintains that this is just where Steinbeck wants our gaze to be focused too. Reed claims there is no need for a larger vision in order to understand the novel's intent: "I do not feel that The Grapes of Wrath requires the network of Hebraic, Christian, archetypal and mythic allusions and symbols that can be found in it to convey its meaning" (614). Reed's reading then is centered on the minutia of the "Okies" everyday life.

In contrast, Louis Owens, in his article "The American Joads," widens the lens of his perspective to see the indigent workers as symbolic of the entire American ethos: the westward search for the Biblical "Eden." This writer backs away from the critical observation of minutia; he widens the aperture to embrace the whole of the nation:

The Joads are the representative migrants, and the migrants are the representative Americans. The migrants' westward journey is America's, a movement that encapsulates the directionality of the American experience" (651). The "Okies" must be seen, he contends, within a larger framework: the vast American epic. Biblical yes, but through the American context of the Biblical vision, in which as he says, there is a "crucial association between California and the biblical Canaan" (645). For Owens then the religious reading is the right one because as he notes, Steinbeck keeps "the bible firmly in both the background and the foreground [...] for he is writing about a nation founded solidly upon a biblical consciousness, as the novel's title indicates" (643).

Mimi Reisel Gladstein, in her article, "The Grapes of Wrath: Steinbeck and the Eternal Immigrant," goes one further and backs the lens off even more to make the "Okies" become a universal metaphor for immigrant workers throughout the world. Gladstein, of immigrant stock herself, coming from a varied background encompassing both Europe and South America, naturally sees this story from a universal perspective. She asserts that this is not primarily an American story of migrant trials and sorrows, but something larger: it is a work which encompasses symbolically the hardships of immigrant life wherever it exists throughout the world: "The Joads gain much of their literary cachet from the similarities of the problems suffered by immigrants everywhere. Their experience is universal" (684).

In common with our first critic, John Reed, Gladstein also analyzes the use of language in the novel. She however sees within the conversations and name-calling evidence of the universal methods of exclusion. She examines the ways in which the communities relate to each other: the "in-groups" and the "out-groups." She employs the sociological term "ethnophaulism" (687) to identify the derogatory or de-humanizing use of language and name-calling between the various groups within the novel. As Gladstein notes, "he [Steinbeck] shows his Californians behaving toward the new arrivals in ways that are typical of the in-group's behavior toward the out-group" (688) anywhere in the world.

Reed's examination of language usage in his article is quite different. He is more interested in the use of crude language, and the various meanings this usage implies. He focuses on the language operating within the various communities. This becomes apparent for the reader, in passages like the following: "Just as derogatory language becomes more vile in the mouths of middle class than among the migrants, so unpleasant details are more savage in the established community" (608).

It is interesting to view the "Okies" through these three different lenses. Whether the Joads are just dirty cussing farmers on the move, or representatives of the biblical movement westward towards "Eden," or even as the universal emblem of the eternal immigrant: these characters that Steinbeck has drawn in the novel live as bold, memorable "living" individuals.