Steinbeck’s most famous novel is enshrouded in a number of myths about its origin and nature. Here is a work which appears to be the epitome of the 1930s proletarian novel in that all its good people speak bad English, which sweetens its animal view of human nature with an anomalous mixture of Christian symbolism and scientific philosophy, and which appeals principally on the level of sentimentality and folk humor. The Grapes of Wrath, in short, is naturalism suffering the inevitable consequences of its soft thinking and its blatant catering to popular interests.1

The Grapes of Wrath is indeed closely linked to the 1930s. Unlike either Studs Lonigan or U.S.A., The Grapes of Wrath is set entirely within the 1930s and is concerned with a distinctive condition of the depression. The novel is also a work of the 1930s in the sense that it is a product of Steinbeck’s artistic maturation during that decade. His first three novels, all of the late 1920s, are marked by excessive fantasy and turgid allegory. In 1930 Steinbeck married Carol Henning, met the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, and began to interest himself in economic and social problems.2 His wife’s deep commitment to his career, Ricketts’ philosophical naturalism, and the impingement of contemporary social events on his writing seemed to push Steinbeck not into a denial of his earlier “romantic” strain but toward a hybrid form in which symbol making and ideas have a solid base in contemporary life. In the mid-1930s Steinbeck became absorbed in the plight of the migrant farm workers of the central California valleys. He reported their conditions, talked at great length about their ways in the prairie West and California with the sympathetic manager of a government camp,3 and thus gained an awareness of the substantive detail which crowds The Grapes of Wrath.

The Grapes of Wrath is also a depression novel in its often doctrinaire 1930s economic, social, and political ideas. As late as 1960, in a reminiscence of the 1930s, Steinbeck still held a melodramatic view of the decade, one in which Hoover epitomized the forces of social evil and Roosevelt of good.4 The Grapes of Wrath has something of the same character. Evil is epitomized by the great banks and corporations which oppress the common worker and manipulate, by fear, the lower middle class. The California portion of the novel even enacts an American version of European fascism, in which the deputies and vigilantes are proto-fascists and the migrants are hounded Jews. To this 1930s mix, Steinbeck adds an appropriately Marxist interpretation of history and of economic processes. The migrants can be exploited because labor is abundant, the “lesson of history” is that the increasing chasm between the haves and the have-nots will result in revolution, and organization of the masses—from camp sanitation committees to labor unions—is the solution to all social problems.

There is also an element of truth in the view that The Grapes of Wrath contains an uneasy amalgam of what Edmund Wilson called “biological realism”5 and an overapparent Christian symbolism. Few readers today would accept Wilson’s remark of 1940 that Steinbeck’s characters are “so rudimentary that they are almost on the animal level” or the obsessive concern in the 1950s and early 1960s with Biblical parallels in the novel.6 Nevertheless, the Joads are primitive folk who live close to the natural processes of life, Steinbeck does occasionally indulge in a blatant animism (the turtle crossing the road is a famous example), and the Joads’ exodus and Casy’s life and death are immediately evocative of Christian myth.

Perhaps the most troublesome matter involving the background of The Grapes of Wrath in recent decades has been the relationship between the themes of the novel and the philosophical ideas expressed by Steinbeck in his Sea of Cortez. Ostensibly a record of a voyage in 1940 by Steinbeck and Ricketts to study marine life in Lower California, Sea of Cortez also contains a number of philosophical meditations. The most significant of these is an “Easter Sermon” on the advantages of “non-teleological” or “is” thinking.7 The non-teleological thinker accepts the fatuousness of man’s belief that his will can control events and thus concentrates on understanding experience rather than on judging men. Steinbeck also expresses in Sea of Cortez a belief in group identity,8 an identity which he elsewhere calls the “phalanx.” As individuals, all creatures, including man, are usually weak and unknowing; as members of a group they can “key in” to the strength and knowledge of the group. A group can thus have a distinctive identity. As Steinbeck wrote in a letter of 1933, when he first became interested in this idea, “the fascinating thing to me is the way the group has a soul, a drive, an intent, an end, a method, a reaction and a set of tropisms which in no way resembles the same things possessed by the men who make up the group. These groups have always been considered as individuals multiplied. And they are not so. They are beings in themselves, entities.”9

The two ideas, non-teleological thinking and the phalanx, have long been thought to be the product of Steinbeck’s association with Ed Ricketts, but they have also been viewed as irreconcilable ideas both in Sea of Cortez and in Steinbeck’s fiction. The amoral passivity of “is” thinking and the possibility for beneficial and self-directed group action by the phalanx appear to be incompatible, and “is” thinking in particular seems to be foreign to the moral indignation present in much of Steinbeck’s fiction of the decade. But with the recent publication of Richard Astro’s John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist and Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten’s Steinbeck: A Life in Letters it can be seen that the problem in fact does not exist. Although both Steinbeck’s and Ricketts’ names appear on the title page of Sea of Cortez, it was always believed that Steinbeck himself wrote the narrative portion of the book and that he therefore assumed full responsibility for all of the ideas in that portion. We now know, however, that Steinbeck incorporated verbatim sections from Ricketts’ unpublished philosophical writing, including the passage on non-teleological thinking.10 Although Steinbeck occasionally used or referred to Ricketts’ non-teleological beliefs, he was absorbed most of all during the 1930s, as his letters reveal, by the phalanx idea. He could thus either ignore or contradict “is” thinking when other, more compelling beliefs attracted him. In Sea of Cortez, for example, the narrator of the voyage (here presumably Steinbeck) records his anger at the Japanese factory fishing boats which were depleting the waters off Lower California and thus causing hardship among the Mexicans.11 And so in The Grapes of Wrath itself Casy’s early defense of non-teleological thinking—“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do”12—is clearly in the context of an attack on a puritan sexual morality. The issue of the anomaly of Steinbeck’s non-teleological philosophy is really a non-issue. The concept was largely Ricketts’, and though Steinbeck does occasionally endorse it in special contexts, his own deepest involvement was in the emotionally and morally compelling social activism implied by the phalanx idea.

Thus, there indeed are primitivist, Marxist, Christian, and scientific elements in The Grapes of Wrath. But no one of them is the single most dominant element and none is present in a single and obvious way. Rather, they exist in a fabric of complex interrelationship which constitutes both the power and permanence of The Grapes of Wrath as a naturalistic tragedy.

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The first two portions of The Grapes of Wrath—the Joads in Oklahoma and on the road to California—enforce upon us the realization that the more we come to know and admire the humanity of the Joads the more inhumanely they are treated. Steinbeck’s success in involving us in this irony derives in part from his ability to place the Joads within two interrelated mythic sources of value: they are primitives and they are folk. Their “natural” ways and feelings touch upon a core belief which in various forms runs through American life from the Enlightenment to the primitivistic faith of such moderns as Faulkner and Hemingway.

The Joads are close to the natural processes and rhythms of life. They are farmers who have always farmed and hunted. They have little education and little association with town or city. Their unit of social life is the family with its “natural” crests of birth, puberty, and marriage at one end of life and aging and death at the other. Indeed, the Joads seem to live in a pre-tribal stage of social evolution, since their principal contacts are with other families rather than with school, church, or state. Spoken and written expression to them is always a barrier; they communicate largely by action and by an instinctive sensitivity to unspoken feelings. We first encounter them not in person but rather in the long series of anecdotes about them which Tom and Casy share at the opening of the novel, anecdotes which establish their shrewdness, openness, and understanding in a context of crudity and occasional bestiality. But even this texture of animality in their lives helps establish their naturalness.

As primitives, the Joads have an “honest” relationship to their land. They farm to live, not for profit, and out of the intrinsic relationship between their work and their existence there emerges the life-sustaining values of industry and pride as well as an instinctive generosity and compassion. They seem at first lawless because of their opposition to those who wish to remove them from their land, but their experiences on the road reveal that regulation and order in their lives arise organically out of their needs and conditions. The different families meeting each night in makeshift camps along Route 66 quickly establish unwritten codes of behavior which maintain order and equity in the camps.

The care with which Steinbeck molds our sense of the primitive strength of the Joads early in the novel is especially revealed in two areas of their experience. The Joads are attuned to solving the problems of their lives without outside aid. They raise and prepare their own food, they make their own clothes, and they create and maintain their own special form of transportation. We thus come to accept that the Joads are latter-day pioneers, that the myth of the self-sustaining pioneer family still lives in them. But the Joads not only solve problems by the exercise of individual skills but also by the maintenance of a group strength and efficiency. Here Steinbeck is at pains to dramatize his phalanx notion of the distinctive identity of the group. So, for example, in the family councils just before departure or soon after Grandpa’s death, the family when it meets to solve its problems becomes a powerful and cohesive single body, “an organization of the unconscious. They obeyed impulses which registered only faintly in their thinking minds” (135).

The Joads are folk as well as primitives; that is, we also experience the comic and the ritualized in their naturalness. For example, the three generations of the Joads constitute a gallery of family folk types: earthy and querulous grandparents, eccentric and even occasionally demented uncles and brothers, cocky and sexually vibrant late adolescents, and over-curious and problem-creating children. Above all, the Joads contain the archetypal center of the folk family, the mother as source of love, wisdom, and strength. The Joads as folk salt the novel with the sexuality and excrementality of folk humor and with the ritualized forms of folk life, particularly of courtship and death. Some of the folk attributes and experiences of the Joads have both a Dickensian predictability of repetitive motif and a freakish humor characteristic of Erskine Caldwell’s portrayal of poor whites. (The Joads’ discovery of the flush toilet is pure Caldwell.) But the folk element in the lives of the Joads, when combined with the central strain of their primitivism, contributes to rather than diminishes our sense of their basic humanity. The earthiness and humor of the Joads as folk permit Steinbeck to avoid the heavy-breathing and lush primitivism of his early fiction—notably of To a God Unknown—and encourage us to respond to them not only as symbols but as “real” people.

The Joads as primitive folk appear to be opposed by the life-denying forces of the mechanical, institutional, and intellectual. In Oklahoma these forces are allegorized by the banks and corporations which have the law and wealth on their side but which lack the human attributes of understanding and compassion. The forces are symbolized above all by the impersonal and mechanical tractor which destroys the farmers’ homes and by the anonymous car which attempts to run over the turtle as it goes about its “business” of spreading the seed of life. Yet the mechanical and the commercial are not inherently evil. The Joads’ jerry-built truck soon becomes a symbol of family unity as well as a means of fulfilling their striving for a better life. And the small businessmen along the road and the small California ranchers are themselves threatened with destruction. If the tractor were owned and used by the Joads, Steinbeck tells us, it would be a beneficial mechanical force. The real evils in the Joads’ life are thus not the abstractions of the mechanical or the institutional but the human failings of fear, anger, and selfishness. Those who cheat or beleaguer or harass the Joads in Oklahoma and on the road and in California may symbolize the opposition of the structured in life to the natural but they are above all greedy or frightened men who wish to preserve or add to what they own. Steinbeck’s depiction of this essentially human conflict suggests that his attempt in The Grapes of Wrath was not to dramatize a labored and conventional primitivistic ethic. It was rather to engage us, within the context of primitivistic values, in one of the permanent centers of human experience, that of the difficulty of transcending our own selves and thereby recognizing the nature and needs of others.

Although the Joads as a family are the matrix of this growth, the process of transcendence occurs most pointedly and fully in the lives of Tom, Ma, and Casy. The experiences of these characters illustrate Steinbeck’s faith in the ability of man to move from what he calls an “I” to a “We” consciousness.13 The “conversion” of Tom, Ma, and Casy to a “We” state of mind is both the theme and the form of The Grapes of Wrath; it is also Steinbeck’s contribution both to the naturalistic theme of the humanity of all sorts and conditions of men and to the naturalistic tragic novel of the 1930s.

Tom is initially the symbol of “natural man.” He is big and raw-boned, is uncomfortable in store-bought clothes, and he can roll a cigarette or skin a rabbit expertly. He has humor, understanding, and a commonsense shrewdness and he is proud and independent. He judges men and events with generosity of spirit, but his faith in his judgment and in a natural order in life has been tempered by his imprisonment for killing a man in self-defense during a drunken brawl. He cannot understand his punishment and emerges from prison with the belief that it is better to live from moment to moment than to seek to understand and thus to plan.

If Tom is natural man, Ma is natural woman in the roles of wife and mother. Steinbeck’s initial description of her renders with a blatantly exultant religiosity her character and function as preserver of the family:

Tom’s power lies in his pride and shrewdness, Ma’s in her capacity to love and in her sense of continuity. To her, life is not a series of beginnings and endings but rather “all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls… . Woman looks at it like that. We ain’t gonna die out. People is goin’ on—changin’ a little, maybe, but goin’ right on” (577). If Tom represents natural strength, Ma represents natural religion. She is appalled by the religion of fear and sin which she encounters in the woman in black at Grandma’s death and in the “Jesus-lover” at Weedpatch. Her religion is of love, and love to her means constant rededication to preserving the family, just as Tom’s strength means solving the problems which this pledge demands.

Whereas Tom and Ma are fully realized both as characters and as symbols, Casy functions principally as a symbol. Dissatisfied with conventional religious truth because it runs counter to his own impulses, he seeks to find God in his own spirit rather than in Bible or church. On the morning of the Joads’ departure, he is asked to say grace before breakfast. He seizes the opportunity to tell them of his attempt to commune with God in the hills. He felt a oneness with all things, he explains,

The Joads, however, scarcely listen; they are absorbed in the expectation of breakfast. And Casy does not really understand the implications of his insight into the nature of “holiness” as a kind of phalanx of group oneness. The journey of the Joads, and particularly of Tom, Ma, and Casy, is thus not so much to California as toward a full understanding and acceptance of this vision of human sanctity and strength.

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The “I” quality of life, man’s selfishness in its various forms, is the dominant force in the Oklahoma portion of The Grapes of Wrath. It exists not only in the corporate “I” of the banks and land companies which are displacing the Joads but in the Joads themselves. Their intense and instinctive commitment to family unity and preservation is a superficially attractive but nevertheless narrow and limited form of self-absorption. It has already been revealed as ineffective in that it has not prevented their eviction. And the local young man who is driving the tractor which is bulldozing their home displays its vital flaw when he says, in defense of his turning against his own people, “’You got no call to worry about anybody’s kids but your own’” (51). Not to worry about someone else’s children, however, as the novel makes clear in incident after incident involving a child, is to aid not only in the destruction of the children of others but of one’s own.

The Oklahoma section of the novel also contains several strains of “We” thinking, strains which emerge more clearly and fully as the novel proceeds. The famous description of the turtle crossing the road is a parable not only of persistence within nature—of the turtle continuing his journey with ingenuity and strength despite hazards and setbacks—but of the relatedness and unity of all life. The turtle unconsciously carries in a crevice of his shell a seed from a plant he has brushed against; he thus has both a specific goal and the general function of contributing to the perpetuation of other forms of life. Tom and Ma at this point are somewhat like the turtle in that while pursuing a specific narrow goal they also reveal in several ways an unconscious acceptance of a “We” ethic. Ma, when she reflects on the number of tenant farmers being evicted, moves instinctively toward a Marxist idea of unity: “’They say there’s a hun’erd thousand of us shoved out. If we was all mad the same way … —they wouldn’t hunt nobody down’” (104). And Tom accepts without question Muley’s observation that “’If a fella’s got somepin to eat an’ another fella’s hungry—why, the first fella ain’t got no choice’” (66). But these “We” qualities, like those of the turtle and other animals, are both instinctive and ungeneralized. They have not taken on the human qualities of consciousness and abstraction, the qualities which Steinbeck later in the novel associates with “Manself” —the distinctive ability of man to give up something material, even life itself, for a concept. The “We” in man, though an attribute of the universal potential for a phalanx identity, is distinguished by conscious awareness and direction.

The tension between the primitive folk “I-ness” of the Joads’ commitment to family and their tentative reaching out toward a “We-ness” continues on the road. Now, however, new conditions and experiences impress on the Joads a greater sense of the meaning and validity of “We.” “I-ness” is of course still paramount in their minds, particularly after Grandpa’s death raises the specter of eventual dispersal of the family. Their response to the crisis of his death —the decision to bury him by the side of the road—renews a pioneer custom and thus affirms the primacy of the family in the westering experience. But on the road the Joads encounter families like them in intent and need, such as the Wilsons, and so begin to move out of their isolation.14 And in the wayside camps the Joads begin to realize the benefits of group cooperation. Perhaps most of all they begin to sense the potential strength in the fact that so many share the same condition; they are beginning to shape in their minds the vital difference, as Steinbeck expresses it in an interchapter, between “I lost my land” and “We lost our land” (206).

The California experiences of the Joads—and particularly of Ma and Tom—make explicit to them the difference between “I” and “We.” This portion of the novel is divided into four segments. The first two (the Hooverville and Weedpatch) demonstrate concretely to the Joads the opposition between the “I” and “We” ways of life; the second two (the peach ranch and the boxcar) demand of them a conscious allegiance either to “I” or “We.” The Hooverville and the government camp at Weedpatch represent, as many readers have complained, a loaded contrast in human values. The Hooverville is an allegorical representation of anarchistic animality, of the anger, cruelty, and desperation of men seeking to survive in a world in which they are pitted against each other. Put in Marxist terms, the Hooverville is a free market economy when the supply of labor exceeds demand and when labor is unorganized. The government camp, though it is an island in a hostile sea, is maintained on the principle of the surrender of some individual rights for the greater good of the whole. Its method is organization to achieve group aims, and its operative unit is the committee. Put in Marxist terms, it is the proletarian state.

The Joads are almost immediately involved in the destructive violence of the Hooverville; at Weedpatch they flourish and contribute to the suppression of violence. As throughout the novel, the ethical distinction between the “I” of the Hooverville and the “We” of Weedpatch is revealed by the treatment of children at the two camps. When the Joads arrive at the Hooverville Ma prepares supper and soon finds herself surrounded by starving children. She is torn between her commitment to her own family and her responsiveness to the silently begging children, and can only cry out, “’I dunno what to do. I got to feed the fambly. What’m I gonna do with these here?’” (350). In Weedpatch the problem of hungry children is resolved not by depriving one’s own—not by the “I” principle of the conflict between mine and yours—but by maintaining a camp fund which dispenses loans to those in need.

The peach ranch to which the Joads are forced to move in order to get work unites the Hooverville and Weedpatch principles in one volatile setting. Inside the ranch, in a kind of prison, are the families driven to the “I” of scabbing because of their desperate need; outside are striking migrants who have organized to help all migrants. Casy had been separated from the Joads at the Hooverville when he had been arrested for coming to the aid of a man being framed by the deputies. He now reappears as a strike leader and union organizer, and explains his conversion to Tom. “’Here’s me, been a-goin’ into the wilderness like Jesus to try to find out somepin. Almost got her sometimes, too. But it’s in the jailhouse I really got her’” (521). What he had learned in prison, in the incident of the men acting in unison to gain better food, was the principle of group action to achieve just ends. Life had a holy unity both in the wilderness and in jail, but he has discovered in jail that his function was not passively to accept this holiness but to seek actively to render it concrete in social life. Tom, however, doesn’t fully understand Casy’s explanation, and Casy says, “’Maybe I can’t tell you… . Maybe you got to find out’” (522).

The vigilantes attack the strikers, and as Casy is about to be clubbed down, he says, “’You fellas don’ know what you’re doin’. You’re helpin’ to starve kids’” (527). The first sentence of this speech (and its repetition by Casy just before his death) is often cited as a specific parallel between Casy and Christ. In fact, Casy is a Christ-figure only in the social-activist sense of the Christian life in The Grapes of Wrath. The vigilantes are not killing the son of God but children who have been denied their humanity, and Casy is not sacrificed to vouchsafe a heaven for man but to aid man to achieve a better life on earth. Holiness is not a condition between God (or his son) and man but between man and man, between all the members of the “whole shebang,” as Casy put it earlier. Helping to starve children is thus unholy or parallel to killing Christ; helping to create a society in which children will be fed is man’s true Christlike role on earth.

Even though Tom fails to grasp Casy’s meaning at this point, he has been growing in understanding. True, his two acts of involvement so far—his coming to the aid of the Hooverville migrant earlier and of Casy now—were instinctive responses to blatant acts of bullying. But he has also been absorbing a sense of the social injustice and of the fundamental inhumanity in the condition of the migrants which is now reaching the level of consciousness. He realizes that the landowners wish not only to employ the migrants but to turn them into a kind of obedient domestic animal. “’They’re a-workin’ away at our spirits,’” he tells the family. “’They’re a-tryin’ to make us cringe an’ crawl like a whipped bitch. They tryin’ to break us’” (381).

In defending Casy, Tom has killed a man and therefore has to live in the fields when the family moves on to pick cotton and live in an abandoned boxcar. Musing over Casy’s ideas and experiences, he now accepts what he had earlier neither understood nor had even consciously heard. Casy, he recalls,

Tom here expresses both Casy’s wilderness vision and his later social expansion and application of that vision. The wilderness (contemplation and passivity) is not a true joining of one’s soul to that of all men; only in social unity and action can this be achieved. So Tom decides to pursue a true “We-ness”; like Casy, he will now attempt to organize the migrants.

The Joads, and particularly Ma, move in an analogous direction. In the crisis of Rose’s delivery during the flood, the Wainwrights, who are as beleaguered as the Joads, come to their aid. When Ma tries to thank Mrs. Wainwright, she replies,

So Ma, the staunchest defender of the “I” of the family, has come to accept consciously the principle of “We” embodied in the “anybody” of those in need.

The conclusion of the novel, when Rose of Sharon gives her breast to the starving man in the barn, unites in one symbolic act various themes which have been fully dramatized in the conversions of Tom and Ma. Throughout the novel Rose’s pregnancy has represented one of the major strands in the primitive character of the Joads as a family. Her child-bearing is honored because it is a contribution to family continuity, and it constitutes, because of her intense self-preoccupation, the inward-turning nature of the family. But with the birth of her still-born child—a child who is the last “starving kid” of the novel—she is freed from these “I” roles. Encouraged by Ma, she can now—in a climactic gesture of conversion—move outward to the “We” of the starving man. She is saying, in effect, that all those who hunger are her children, just as Tom has given himself to the anonymous migrants who require leadership and Ma to the “anybody” who needs.

By the close of the novel the Joads have been stripped clean in several senses. They have lost most of their possessions, including the truck which had served since their departure from Oklahoma as a symbol of family unity. In the family itself, the weak (Grandpa and Grandma) and the irredeemably self-preoccupied (Noah, Connie, and finally Al) have fallen away. Left is a core of Ma and Pa, Uncle John and Rose, and the two children, Ruth and Winfield. With the exception of the children but including Tom, this is a group in which each figure has conformed to the Biblical promise that to lose all is often to gain one’s salvation; that is, each has struggled through to a form of “We” consciousness. Tom in his decision to trade a day-to-day existence for militant organizing, Ma in her acceptance at last of commitments beyond that of saving the family, Rose in the translation of her biological self-absorption into an almost blissful giving, Pa in his neglect of his anger at his loss of status in the family as he marshals the boxcar migrants into a group effort to save their dwellings, and even John, in that for once his lifelong preoccupation with his guilt is replaced by an outward-directed anger (it is he who sets Rose’s dead baby afloat in a box to remind the nearby townspeople that they are starving children)—each has made the journey from “I” to “We.”

In one of the major ironic motifs of The Grapes of Wrath, this reduction of the Joads to an almost animal struggle for survival also bares fully their essential humanity, their Manself. Throughout the novel the migrants’ poverty has been viewed by others as an index of their inhumanity. The gas station attendant at Needles cries, “’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’” (301). But it is the very absence of that which defines humanity to the limited understanding which at last helps shape the penetrating clarity of spiritual insight of the Joads and thus enables them to discover a transcending sense of oneness with all men.

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Our understanding of and response to the Joads’ journey to awareness are aided by a number of fictional devices. Of these, the natural and Biblical symbolism requires little detailed discussion. The one serves to establish certain similarities between the Joads and natural life, the other between them and man’s spiritual character. Together they contribute to Steinbeck’s theme of the enriching unity of all life, in which the natural is also the spiritual and the spiritual is also the natural. Less obvious in their function are the interchapters and the cyclic structure of the novel. Both serve as forms of editorial commentary through which the Joads’ experience is translated into a statement on the human condition. The interchapters have a number of forms, from generalized narrative and prose poem to dramatic exchange and authorial philosophizing. They also vary in content from social realism to expressionistic exaggeration and in tone from humor and satire to bombast and supplication. But they are bound together, whatever their form, content, or tone, by the underlying authorial emotion of anger. Steinbeck uses the narrative of the Joads to involve us in the tragic pathos of the life of a migrant family, and the interchapters to involve us in the anger we must feel when we understand the inhumanity to man which their lives illustrate. The interchapters not only allegorize the Joads into universal figures of the poor and downtrodden but also engage us, through Steinbeck’s devices in these sections, in an intensity of emotion usually foreign to allegory and other forms of abstraction. The interchapters are not extraneous to the novel but rather are central to its ability to move us.

Anger, yet an anger which contains an element of hope, is also an important characteristic of the cyclic form of The Grapes of Wrath. The novel begins with the Joads poor and landless in a drought-stricken Oklahoma; it ends with them even poorer and still landless in a flooded California. In Oklahoma, the men are at first silent and puzzled but then become “hard and angry and resistant” as they sit “thinking—figuring” (6-7). In California, the men, in a parallel moment, are at first fearful and then angry (592). Anger is thus a source of both strength and continuity. In California, moreover, anger has found a focus and therefore a potential resolution. Nature, whether drought or flood, is not to blame for the condition of the migrants, nor is the Oklahoma tractor driver or the California deputy or ranch foreman. To blame is the greed exemplified by the economic system, and against this force, the Joads, who have thought and figured, have begun to find an answer in their willingness (as symbolized by Tom) to mold themselves into a group force equal in strength. So the last two chapters of the novel end with images of renewal in the midst of the carnage. After the starvation of the winter, “Tiny points of grass came through the earth, and in a few days the hills were pale green with the beginning year” (592); and after the Joads are driven from the boxcar by the flood, Rose nurses the starving man in the barn.

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Much that is central in The Grapes of Wrath as a naturalistic novel of the 1930s can be understood by noting the remarkable number of similarities, as well as some significant differences, between it and an earlier naturalistic novel of social conflict in California, Frank Norris’ The Octopus. In both works a struggle for land occurs within a cycle of natural growth, and in both the weaker figures in the conflict—the wheat ranchers and the migrants—suffer a tragic defeat. But in both instances, the most insightful and feeling of those crushed—Annixter, Vanamee, and Presley, and Tom, Ma, and Casy—struggle through to an understanding both of the underlying nature of the conflict and the essential nature of life. The three young men in The Octopus learn that the machinations of men cannot affect the omnipotence and benevolence of the natural process of growth, and the Joads learn to accept the oneness of all existence. Both works are fundamentally naturalistic despite these religious overtones. As is also true of The Octopus, the naturalism of The Grapes of Wrath resides in the theme that man can find in verifiable natural and social life the basic truths he should live by. In The Octopus the continuity of life is discovered not in the Pauline symbol of the seed—that man shall be reborn in heaven—but in the real seed, that man and nature reproduce themselves. And in The Grapes of Wrath, Casy’s discovery that all things are united in holiness is only a vaguely felt concept until its meaning is completed by his finding that oneness is union organization and that holiness is the power to correct injustice. Men may come to know these truths initially by an instinctive or intuitive reaching out, but the truth itself must be not only felt but also observed and validated in experience. Both novels are thus conversion allegories, but the “religion” to which the characters are converted is that of the sanctity of life itself rather than of some aspect of man, God, or nature which is different from or superior to the life we lead and know.

The Grapes of Wrath also has its own distinctive character as a naturalistic novel of the 1930s. The Octopus proclaims that “all things, surely, inevitably, resistlessly work together for good,”15 since the natural process of growth is both omnipotent and beneficent. Although the railroad monopoly is a bad thing which affects individuals adversely, it does not adversely affect mankind in general, since society and its conflicts are subsumed under the cosmic beneficence of the natural order. Men have died in the struggle for a crop of wheat, but the wheat itself will feed the starving millions of India. Steinbeck’s perspective is quite different. Much of the fruit grown by the San Joaquin ranchers doesn’t reach anyone because it is destroyed to maintain high prices, an act which aids the wealthy but harms the poor, including the migrant children who hunger for the oranges they see all around them. Steinbeck views the American economic system not as part of a natural process but as a baneful social illustration of the “I” principle. Men can and must struggle through to a “We” activism of camp committees and unions rather than accept that good will eventually accrue to the greatest number through cosmic beneficence. Although Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath occasionally appears to be endorsing a Marxist theory of historical necessity by his references to the inevitability of class conflict if class divisions continue to grow, he is really endorsing a naturalistic version of a traditional social gospel activism in which one’s beliefs must be realized in social life as well as be expressed in the temple.

Some of the obvious and often noted defects of The Grapes of Wrath stem from its character as a 1930s naturalistic novel, though a good many of these are less disturbing if the allegorical mode of the novel is at once accepted. Parables such as the turtle crossing the road, characters who exist principally as symbols, the hell-paradise contrast of the Hooverville and Weedpatch—these are major weaknesses only if one adopts the notion that naturalism is limited to the probabilities of social realism. Much more significant as a flaw in The Grapes of Wrath is the conflict between its tragic and social impulses. Steinbeck asks us to respond to the fate of the Joads with the compassion we bring to other accounts of men who must be stripped naked and suffer before they can understand the needs of the poor naked wretches around them. But he also generates intense anger toward those causing the misery of the Joads and points out ways in which their condition can be improved. The two intents seem to be related. It is the economic system as a whole which is the equivalent of the Joads’ initial “I” values. Thus, compassion for their suffering as they move toward a “We” consciousness, and anger at the economic system for failing to undergo this change appear to be coordinate sentiments. But in fact the presence of these two emotions both diffuses and confuses the tragic theme and form of the novel. Steinbeck has succeeded so well in engaging us in the nature and quality of the Joads as primitive folk that the family assumes a validity at odds with his ultimate goal for them. We wish the Joads to find a better life in California, but we are not really persuaded that the committees and unions and other activities which represent the “We” principle in their lives are really better than the folk inwardness and the clearly definable entity that is their family. Here we are perhaps victims of a change in perspective since the 1930s in that we are no longer convinced that committees are inherently superior to other forms of awareness and action. We are also reacting in a way unforeseen by Steinbeck to his conviction that the humblest man can rise to the wisest thoughts. Steinbeck believed that it would be primarily the “thoughts”—the acceptance by the Joads of “We-ness”—which would hold us. But instead it is the Joads themselves who are the source of the enduring power of the novel.

Source

From Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation (1982): 65-81. Copyright © 1982 by Southern Illinois University Press. Reprinted with permission of Southern Illinois University Press.

Notes