When our class discussed the concluding chapters from Grapes of Wrath, we hit on Ma Joad and her need to stay with her recently deceased mother’s body. I made a few notes that I would like to reassess in this third entry. One possible theme of this text is futility and Ma Joad’s staying with her mother exemplifies this. The method behind her madness was to sustain the morale of the family long enough to get to one of the checkpoints. She convinced her family that Gramma Joad had merely fallen asleep and that she was doing “okay.” This was not the case obviously, but Ma’s ploy to keep her family’s spirits up was a temporary success.
There is also very evident irony here as during Ma’s temporary covert behavior, she and the rest of the family see various families heading back. These other “Okies” had been forced to head back to their already abandoned homes to eke out a living that was apparently better than California. Imagine the sense of futility in having to return home and being, sometimes, forcefully evicted and then having to resort to returning from a place promised to have better circumstances. Despite this harsh reality, Ma Joad endures for the sake of her family.
The novel wraps up with a man needing aid from the Joads who have survived their endeavors. Meeting the small boy and the scene in which his father is suckled by Rose of Sharon is the epitome of futility in a sense. In the same sense, it is reassuring because despite the fact that the Dust Bowl has nearly ruined their lives, the family is reminded that they still have their bodies to sustain them. The man gave up his own nourishment so that his son could live and Ma, in a somewhat similar manner, put Rose of Sharon in an odd predicament by giving up her daughter so that she could save the man in the barn.
Another possible theme that this last scene provides is that of no man or woman being beyond the aid of another human being. Throughout Steinbeck’s piece, gender roles are reversed and male dignity is put aside. A man being nursed back to health is quite epitomal, not the proper adjective form of the word I realize, of gender reversal of that time and no one being beyond aid even further. The people did what they had to survive and animalistic and maternal/ paternal traits, from Ma and Rose of Sharon, surface in such dire times.
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Good, Brock. Perhaps the boy and his father can be seen in relation to other father-son relationships in the book--remember the father who spent his last nickel on candy for his boys? Another interesting way to look at this chapter would be in terms of families--one half of a family joins another half family, to ensure each other's survival. Rose of Sharon had to give up being a mother in order to become a mother. Steinbeck thus returns to an argument made earlier in the interchapters: the experience of migration creates new structures, new forms of solidarity.
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