The Grapes of Wrath: Trampling Out the Vintage

The Plot

The Joad family, already downtrodden sharecroppers, find themselves forced off the land their family had farmed for several generations. They begin driving west to California, lured by advertisements of good jobs and their own delusions. They suffer the hardships of the long journey, and once in California, soon come to the realization that jobs are scarce and low-paying as a result of a glut of immigrant labor. Of course, when things just can’t get any worse, they do and the Joads are subjected to various tragedies.

Political Ramifications and Philosophical Ramblings

Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath in 1939 in response to the plight of migrant workers in California, workers fleeing from the loss of their farmland as Oklahoma turned into a “Dust Bowl.” Already in the throes of the Great Depression, many poor people slipped further into abject poverty and even died of starvation in the face of a lack of social programs or an excess of pride.

Steinbeck intended his novel to raise social consciousness about the transients. Steinbeck’s critics accused him of spreading Communist thought; others claimed the novel intended to create sympathy for the agrarian ideal and populist political movements. Steinbeck’s book also ended up as a shining example of New Deal propaganda during the time the Joads stayed in the government camp with modern conveniences, cooperative living and democratic self-rule. I would offer that The Grapes of Wrath is more transcendental in purpose: all souls are linked together as part of a larger soul, the actions of an individual affect others, and when someone dies, that person’s spirit goes back into the greater whole.

Regardless of Steinbeck’s true intent, The Grapes of Wrath did not cease to be an important work when World War II reinvigorated the economy and ended Depression hardships to a great extent. Steinbeck received a Pulitzer Prize for this novel, and it is the cornerstone upon which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature.

Style

Steinbeck alternated chapters of the Joads’ story told through their own eyes with chapters of a third-person narrator cataloging the “overall experience” of the 300,000 transients who migrated to California. I particularly liked the third-person narrator chapters because I distinctly heard Steinbeck’s own voice. Steinbeck’s observations, as related in these chapters, offer a much broader viewpoint of the workings of the labor system when juxtaposed with the Joads’ tunnel vision.

Humanity

“Them goddamn Okies got no sense and no feeling. They ain’t human. A human being wouldn’t live like they do. A human being couldn’t stand it to be so dirty and miserable. They ain’t a hell of a lot better than gorillas.” --Service station attendant

Yet the Joads and the other transient families in The Grapes of Wrath, even when starving themselves, are more likely to offer help to the downtrodden than people with full bellies and warm beds. Ma Joad comes to this realization when the clerk at the company store loans her a dime for sugar she couldn’t pay for: “I’m learnin’ one thing good,” she said. “Learnin’ it all the time and ever’ day. If you’re in trouble or hurt or need--go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help--the only ones.”

One of my friends once made the same observation after she and another friend were stranded on the highway in a broken down vehicle. The people who stopped to help weren’t the ones with cell phones and nice cars; the people who stopped drove a beat up pick up truck at least ten years old, wore old work clothes, had dirty fingernails and unkempt hair, but they also demonstrated compassion.

The Joads are trampled down again and again: thrown off their land, cheated out of the value of their possessions, experience the gradual degradation of their family unit, endure the hardships of life on the road, face the hostility of Californians, thankful for back-breaking work for a pittance in compensation, and experience the loss of all but the clothes on their backs, flood, death, and eventual starvation. The Joads lose everything: except their humanity.

Spoiler Skip to the My Family section unless you intend to never read this novel or already know the ending

The last scene of the novel was quite sensational at the time of publication and remains so today. While the Joads are escaping from a flood, they take refuge in a barn with a little boy and his father. The father is dying of starvation. Rose of Sharon, who recently gave birth to a stillborn child, nurses the old man with her breast milk. I’ve heard others describe this scene as sickening and grotesque. I find this scene heartbreaking in its hope and humanity. This is the essence of The Grapes of Wrath. This is not a novel of despair, but a novel of hope and survival.

My Family

The Grapes of Wrath’s portrayal of one family’s odyssey as migrant workers resonates deeply with me. My family had a similar experience. My grandfather, father, and eight of his nine siblings spent the majority of the 1930s wandering the Southwest in a jalopy, picking fruit and cotton. They were sharecroppers forced off the land my family had farmed since the end of the Civil War.

My father learned how to pick cotton before he learned how to read. He went to school in between harvest seasons and bouts of typhoid. By the end of the Depression, he barely had an 8th grade education. He told me a story once of how a landowner gave my family a portion of wheat. If they separated the wheat from the chaff, they could keep half of the resulting wheat. The wheat turned out to be infested with weevils or some sort of larvae. They gave the landowner his half to feed to his pigs and took their half to the dump. The family joke was if they’d kept the bad wheat, they would have had enough meat to last all winter.

None of my family died, in fact my father and aunts and uncles are alive today, aged 72 to 89, except one aunt who died of cancer in the 1960s. My grandfather passed away in 1984 at the age of 93. I wonder if they would be quite so hearty a breed if they had not gone through the hardships of the Great Depression. They didn’t make it to California back then, and that was never a goal, and now they’re scattered from Texas to Oregon. Their story is rather mild compared to the Joads’, however, I, for one, know that families like the Joads and my own did exist and did live a transient lifestyle and did the best they could in the circumstances into which they were thrust. They not only survived, they overcame.

Nit Picks

Steinbeck does not apply the “Okie” dialect consistently through out the novel. Towards the beginning, the Joads pronounce family as “family,” then change to “fam’ly” and finally evolve to “fambly” by the end of the book.

My feminist sensibilities were frequently annoyed by the Joads’ incessant use of female pronouns (she, her) for inanimate objects. In this case, Steinbeck probably portrayed the “Okie” dialect accurately and is therefore excusable, though it grated on my nerves.

Steinbeck’s first chapter describes the loss of a crop to “dust bowl” conditions in the third person narrative style, and casts the men as the heads of the households: “And the women came out of the houses to stand beside their men--to feel whether this time the men would break….After awhile the faces of the watching men lost their bemused perplexity and because hard and angry and resistant. Then the women knew that they were safe and that there was no break….Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole.” However, Steinbeck then places Ma Joad in the unacknowledged position as the head of the household: “She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken….She seemed to know that if she swayed, the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.” The men of the family don’t view Ma as the head of the family until she threatens to whup Pa with a tire iron and goes on to be the decision-maker for most of the Joads actions.

Conclusion

The Grapes of Wrath is a timeless classic that has withstood the end of the plight of migrant workers during the 1930s and the movement for political reform that it sparked. Steinbeck’s protest served its purpose sixty years ago and continues to serve another purpose now: that all people are a part of a greater organism and no matter how many attempts are made to stamp out the poor or erase ethnic groups, others always rise up to take their places and preserve the chain of survival. Ma Joad put it like this, “Why, Tom--us people will go on livin’ when all them is gone. Why, Tom, we’re the people that live. They ain’t gonna wipe us out. Why, we’re the people--we go on.”

My thanks to Stephen_Murray and frazzledspice for hosting this write-off in honor of the anniversary of John Steinbeck’s 99th birthday. Participants in the Steinneck 99th Birthday Writeoff, in chronological order of publication, are:
In Dubious Battle (1936) - Caravan70 and Macresarf1
Of Mice and Men (1937) Stephen_Murray
(movie) Skygirl
The Red Pony (1937) - Stephen_Murray
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) - Murasaki and NFP
(movie) Ladydagney1 and Howard Creech
The Moon is Down (1942) - Gabriella
Cannery Row (1945) - GraceF and Kchowell (veneto)
The Pearl (1947) - Isinga
East of Eden (1952) - Ed_Grover
Sweet Thursday (1965) - Stephen_Murray?
The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1954) - Gabriella?
Once There Was a War (1958) Jiahong
Travels with Charley (1962) - Eplovejoy and Hadassahchana

Plus
An overview of Steinbeck on film - Stephen_Murray
and
TBA: Frazzeledspice and Nathanael73