For my first blog entry, I would like to analyze and connect both novels we have covered in class: The Grapes of Wrath and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Particularly, I will discuss the notion of futility between both novels’ protagonists, Janie and Tom.
Janie seeks love and her own niche in a society mostly dominated by men and where her newly-blossoming sexual inquiries do not have a place. When she ultimately finds love in Tea Cake, love in a manner that she acknowledges for herself, he is brutally removed from the plot by her own hands. Aspects of Shakespearean tragedy could also be connected, but such will be saved for another blog perhaps.
Tom Joad on the other hand, yet on a similar parallel with Janie, meets his own series of setbacks as he and his family try to find their niche too but this time in the West. Both his grandparents die, he is subject to the brutal death of the dog, whether it affected him greatly or not, and also just the general way that he and his family see their fellow “Okies” heading back to their land are all futile aspects of the horrid conditions of the Great Dust Bowl.
Both protagonists also have the ever-surmounting responsibilities to both themselves and their families. Janie has to run the store after her husband dies, even though she in set free in a way. Tom eventually ends up being the head of his family, despite his young age and goes on to lead a revolution with his fellow poverty-stricken Dust Bowlers.
Certain perspectives of New Criticism convey the need to read one text solely by itself, with no other texts to relate to nor the taking of societal and culturally relevant issues into consideration. This would be my advice to readers of both Grapes and Their Eyes for two reasons: both texts were revolutionary in their own sense and also simply because both pieces are quite depressing when read so closely together.
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Since we're reading these texts in the same class, any "new critical" approach that would isolate them from each other probably wouldn't work. But Brock points out an important commonality--a sense of the tragic, summarized by the gas station owner in ch. 13 of Grapes: "What the country's comin to?" Whether or not these novels are depressing I think would need some further debate. Another commonality that deserves to be explored is the relationship between the characters and the environment--the muck in Their Eyes and the dust in Grapes.
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