Grapes of wrath: themes and social commentary

¶ … Grapes of Wrath

Human society, by and large, was historically organized on patriarchal lines till the feminist movement picked up real momentum in the twentieth century. In America, for instance, women were given the right to vote only in the 1920s, post the suffrage movement (Johnston, p. 142). Further, it was not until the post World War II period that women really began to expand on their traditional roles as daughter, wife, mother, and homemaker (Johnston, p. 244). Interestingly, it was the Great Depression that played a key role in the latter day transformation of the American woman from homemaker to an individual who asserted the right to make her own choices and play a larger role in the affairs of society (Johnston, p. 145). In fact, the catalyst role played by the Great Depression in the transformation of the American woman is clearly evident in the manner in which Steinbeck develops the character of Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath from a woman who is content to play a supportive role to one who increasingly adopts a role of authority. It would be a mistake, however, to characterize Steinbeck's Ma Joad as a radical feminist. Instead, as this paper will demonstrate, Steinbeck uses Ma Joad as a vehicle to expose the pitfalls of a patriarchal society and expound on the desirability of a society that practices the feminine principle of caring for others.

Prior to the Great Depression, three-fourths of American women did not work outside the home since the majority of women still perceived marriage as their vocation in life. However, this settling for domesticity did not mean that they remained content to play a submissive role within the house: "If most American women were not feminists or flappers, an explosion of freedoms caused many stirrings.... She was still domestic and supposed to be chaste and pious, but the flappers were no angels and certainly were not submissive.... Just round the corner, however, was the Great Depression. Many dreams would be deferred, and hard times would demand the fortitude and courage of the pioneer women...." (Johnston, p. 142-3)

The perception that marriage and family were, indeed, the right vocation for women is reflected in Steinbeck's principal female characters as well. For instance, Ma Joad's eldest daughter, Rose of Sharon, is depicted as a woman who seems to have no interests apart from her family, as evidenced by her expending all her energies on protecting her unborn child. Similarly, Ma Joad clearly believes that her life's purpose is to keep her family together: "...that's all I can do. I can't do no more. And the rest'd get upset if I done any more'n that. They all depen' on me jus' thinkin' about that." (Steinbeck, p. 159)

Indeed, Steinbeck makes the patriarchal nature of the Joad family apparent in the very first chapter of his book:

Men stood by their fences and looked at the ruined corn.... The men were silent and did not move often. And the women came out of the houses to stand beside their men -- to feel whether this time the men would break. The women studied their men's faces secretly, for the corn could go, as long as something else remained...Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole." (Steinbeck, p. 3-4)

Steinbeck's introduction may establish the patriarchal nature of the Joad family and American society of that era, but on closer examination, his choice of words reveals that he is all too aware of the power of the feminine principle, which he expresses repeatedly, throughout the novel, as the need for a society where the dominant values should reflect the caring of others. Steinbeck chooses to embed these values in the character of Ma Joad, who demonstrates an altruistic nature right through the novel, beginning with the role she plays in including Jim Casy as part of the family circle traveling to California.

In fact, Jim Casy being allowed to travel with the Joads is very telling especially since an already overloaded family truck causes Pa Joad to ask whether they could really afford to take him. The question is settled when Ma Joad simply points out, "It ain't kin we? It's will we?" (Steinbeck, p. 132) Thus, while the travails of the Great Depression may have been the cause of Ma Joad transforming herself into a figure of authority in the family, usurping Pa Joad's role and position, it is clear that she always represented, and practiced the feminine principle of caring for others.

Perhaps the narrator's observation that the "women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole," (Steinbeck, p. 4) was Steinbeck's way of setting the note for the message to follow that every human being is only a piece of one big soul (Steinbeck, p. 572). Indeed, Ma Joad expresses Steinbeck's principle message eloquently when she tells Pa Joad, "man, he lives in jerks -- baby born an' a man dies, an' that's a jerk -- gets a farm an' loses his farm, an' that's a jerk. Woman, it's all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river, it goes right on. Woman looks at it like that." (Steinbeck, p. 577)

Ma Joad's feminine philosophy explains her stoic acceptance of Jim Casy's presence and need to travel along with the Joad family to California. More important, her philosophy leads her to the realization that the need of the hour is to keep the family together. In fact, it is this realization that leads Ma Joad into repeatedly defying Pa Joad and asserting herself, with the first such incident taking place when Pa Joad takes a decision to move on leaving Tom behind with Al to repair the Wilson car: "On'y way you gonna get me to go is whup me.... An' you ain't so sure you can whup me anyways." (Steinbeck, p. 230)

Although Ma Joad's fierce drive to keep her family together may, prima face, seem contradictory to her philosophy of life going on, the contradiction gets explained away when she expounds her vision of the primacy of the family. She tells Tom, "You done this 'thout thinkin' much.... What we got lef' in the worl? Nothin' but us. Nothin' but the folks." (Steinbeck, p. 230) In Ma Joad's eyes, therefore, the need of the hour is to keep her family whole and intact so that no misfortune is too great to bear, and so that like the river of life, they can go on: "We're the people. We go on." (Steinbeck, p. 383)

For Ma Joad, however, family soon becomes a larger vision of all of humanity as she experiences the suffering of her own kin and other migrant families: "Use'ta be the fambly was fust. It ain't so now. It's anybody. Worse off we get, the more we got to do." (Steinbeck, p. 470) And Ma Joad does more in spades.

In fact, it can be said that Ma Joad was a practitioner of the feminine principle even before she was able to clearly articulate it. For, throughout the novel, Ma reaches out to others in generosity: first to Casy, then the Wilsons, then the Hooverville children, the Weedpatch camp residents, and finally to the Wainwrights:

She stands in sharp contrast to American images of macho strength and also to Lao Tze's view of the feminine qualities embodied in yin as being weaker than the masculine yang. Yet Lao Tze urges; 'Know masculinity, / Maintain femininity.' [Tao Teh Ching, 72 (28)]. Although maintaining such a balance between polar opposites is difficult, believers must strive mightily to attain the brotherhood and unity such a balance will foster. In Ma, then, is the paradigm of Lao Tze's balanced man -- the one who sees and copes with the paradoxical nature of yin and yang, of strength residing in apparent weakness." (Meyer, p. 338)

Ma Joad certainly knows, understands and manipulates the masculine nature of her men folk. She decrees that the family must move on from the Weedpatch camp in spite of its comforts: "I feel like people again." (Steinbeck, p. 420) Ma Joad takes this decision because she recognizes that a man's dignity lies in his being able to provide for his family: "Take a man, he can get worried an' worried, an' it eats out his liver, an' purty soon he'll jus' lay down and die with his heart et out. But if you can take an' make 'im mad, why, he'll be awright." (Steinbeck, p. 481)

Although Ma Joad does succeed in making Pa good and mad at times, he gradually allows her to take over the reins of the family and even stops resenting it: "Funny! Woman taking over the fambly. Woman sayin' we'll do this here, an' we'll go there. An' I don' even care." (Steinbeck, p. 577) It is of interest to note here that Ma Joad automatically assumes the role of the woman soothing a male ego when she hears Pa's reflections: "Woman can change better'n a man,' Ma said soothingly. 'Woman got all her life in her arms. Man got it all in his head. Don' you mind. Maybe -- well, maybe nex' year we can get a place." (Steinbeck, p. 577)

Steinbeck's use of the backdrop of the Great Depression and the migration of the Oklahoma farmers to California to bring out the strength in Ma Joad and the value of the feminine principle was not just a flight of his imagination. For, Ma Joad's story is echoed in a wide body of documented literature that covered the same period. For instance, take this quote from a Mr. Adams in Mirra Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family: "There certainly was a change in our family.... I relinquished power in the family. Now I don't even try to boss. She controls all the money and I never have a penny in my pocket but that I have to ask her for it." (Johnston, p. 144)

Mr. Adam's narration may only be anecdotal evidence, but other documented evidence that the role of the woman was forcibly changed during the economic depression of the 1930s substantiates his testimony. For instance, in his study of fifty American families of the University of Michigan students, Robert Cooley Angell found a shift in dominance of husband and wife. However, Angell also found that though women had assumed true leadership of the family, most tried to minimize the effects on their husbands (Johnston, p. 153). Thus, like Ma Joad, it appears that the wisdom of women lay in knowing the masculine but maintaining the feminine.

Several critics, in their analysis of The Grapes of Wrath, have opined that Steinbeck's intention behind penning the Joad's story was to critique the American capitalist way of life. Undoubtedly, there is a great deal of merit in this view, judging by several passages in the book, which are clearly meant to serve as an indictment of capitalism. In Hooverville, for instance, Tom is lectured to by a worldly old hand about how the gathering of surplus workers enabled employers to pay miserable wages: "They send out han'bills all over hell. They need three thousan', an' they get six thousan'.... An' then them owners don' want you there no more...So they kick you out...." (Steinbeck, p. 334-5)

However, it can be inferred from the climax to The Grapes of Wrath that Steinbeck's larger message to society was one of caring for others:

Bereft of husband and child, Rose of Sharon is now called on to extend her love and nurturing to others in need. She shows her acceptance of this call...by giving the milk in her breasts to a starving stranger. Her name itself suggests that she (and other young women) are to reach beyond the conjugal family, regarding all people in need as their children.... The changing concept of family is closely allied to Steinbeck's allusions to socialism and unionism, allusions which run throughout the novel. The author seems to say that disenfranchised people such as the new migrants can survive only by pulling together...." (Hinton, p. 102-3)

Another indication that Steinbeck aimed at exposing the pitfalls of patriarchy while espousing the adoption of the feminine principle is manifested in the fact that Ma Joad is, by far, the strongest character in the novel. "In Ma Joad we encounter one of the great authentic people of fiction. The rest are puppets with differentiating traits." (Whicher, p. 69).

Ma Joad emerges as the strongest protagonist in The Grapes of Wrath because not only is she seen as the soul of the Joad family and the novel, it is she who recognizes that the human family is far more important than the individual entity (Meyer, p. 334). As Casy remarks, "There's a woman so great with love -- she scares me." (Steinbeck, p. 229) Thus, by virtue of embodying Ma Joad with all the qualities of the feminine principle, Steinbeck also effectively manages to expose the pitfalls of a patriarchal society. He achieves this through highlighting that it is not male dominance and macho aggression but the care and nurturing of the female that binds both the conjugal and the human family together.

In fact, Steinbeck is not alone in advocating the feminine principle as the answer to society's many ills. He is preceded by a bevy of women writers from the Romantic period, who inspired by Wollstonecraft's Vindication, held up the benefits of a revolution in female manners. Indeed, Mellor locates Mary Shelley, along with such writers as Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Smith, Susan Ferrier, Helen Maria Williams, and Felicia Hemans, in the context of a set of values that emphasizes the rationality of women, celebrates community, conceives of nature as an ally, and espouses an ethic of care rather than an ethic of individual justice (Fisch et.al. p. 8).