No offense to Thomas Hart Benton...

While I was thinking of different aspects of The Grapes of Wrath, I looked through different photos from the Great Depression, especially those of Dorethea Lange.  These photos not only provide us with historical information, but also give a face to citizens in the 1930s.    Looking at these images gave me a better mental image of Joads and the people that they meet along their way.  Of course, the film gives a general image of these people, but I liked being able to let the characters develop in my mind.

 

            I vaguely remember watching the film of The Grapes of Wrath in my high school American History class after discussing the novel.  I feel like the portrayals of the characters were accurate to Steinbeck’s writing, especially the portrayal of grandpa and Tom.  While I think that the film is somewhat accurate, I feel like the images of this time convey the message of the text better.  For instance, take the photo “Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange: 

 

http://americahurrah.com/PhotoShow/migrantmother.jpg

 

            In my opinion, this brings more emotion than can be conveyed in a two hour film.  The emotion on the mother’s face truly shows how difficult this time period was for everyone.  She looks horrified of the unknown.  The children cling to her in desperation.  The absence of the children’s faces makes this even more moving. 

 

            Nothing against Thomas Hart Benton’s illustrated version of The Grapes of Wrath, but I think that a version with photos from different photographers of the Great Depression would have been compelling.  It may not display characters as well, but I feel like it would give a piece of history, both written and captured in photos, so that the Great Depression is kept alive in future education.  I’m sure with careful searching of archives, it wouldn’t be difficult to personify the characters throughout these different photos.  

-Allison McDermid

Control

Control is a theme seen through out the entire novel. It affects the development of every character in different ways. Through out the novel the Joads lose every constant that they have held onto during their lives. The characters deal with this issue very differently, especially the two main female roles. There is a stark contrast between the way the two characters approach this life change.

Rose of Sharon handles the changes in her life the worst, in my opinion. She refuses to acknowledge major events during the move. When the family sees the dog dead on the road, all she can think about is her self and her baby. This is the first example of random tragedies in the novel, and Rose of Sharon chooses to focus on a part of her life she still has control over, rather than accept this random sad occurance. Also when Connie leaves her, she still holds onto the belief that she will be taken care of and provided for. The whole time they are at camp, she does not take the time to insure her family’s safety. She goes off and meets other men rather than look for work, again exerting the only kind of control she has. She does not seem in denial, just completely way too immature to handle the seriousness of her current situation.

Ma Joad made an astonishing transition into her new life. When we first meet Ma in the beginning of the novel, she is a very stereotypical mother. She is cooking and overjoyed that her son is home. However during the trip, we see her fighting to keep her family together on several occasions. She has always been in charge of the family and keeping it fed and nourished with love. While it appears that Ma is stepping into a male role in the family, I believe she is just holding onto the one aspect of her life she can control; her family. We see this when she doesn’t let the family split up in the cars, the scene with the jack handle, and when Grandma dies. She holds the family together and keeps a level head. She knows that family is the only thing they have left, and she so fights hard to keep it together. Ma just strengthened her role in the family and holds control over the only thing the characters have left.

Religion in Grapes of Wrath

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

~ Mahatma Ghandi

In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck presents and criticizes various forms of religion and ritual, and in an ironic twist, turns the most outwardly secular character, Jim Casy into a Christ-figure.

Along their journey, and even within the confines of their own family, the Joads encounter various manifestations and degrees of religious worship. Grandma Joad represents a sort of compulsory ritual-worship without introspection. Early on in the novel Tom Joad explains to Casy an incident in which Grandma sent him a Christmas card when he was still in prison. The card is meant for a child and contains a religious poem and pretty decorations. “I guess Granma never read it. Prob’ly got it from a drummer an’ picked out the one with the mos’ shiny stuff on it. The guys in my cell block goddamn near died laughin’…Granma never meant it funny; she jus’ figgered it was so purty she wouldn’ bother to read it.” (35) This incident parallels Grandma Joad’s further displays of religion. She focuses on the ritual of religion, insisting on grace at the dinner table and saying ‘Amen’ after anything the ex-preacher Casy says, regardless of its lack of resemblance to any normal grace. “So many years she had times her responses to the pauses. And it was so many years since she had listened to or wondered at the words used.” (110)

Sairy Wilson uses religion for the feeling of closeness and humanity that it provides for her. One her deathbed she implores Casy to say a prayer for her, despite his claims that “I got no God.” (298) Sairy tells him “I wanted to feel that clostness, oncet more. It’s the same thing, singin’ an’ prayin’, jus’ the same thing.” (298)

Possibly the most striking criticism of religion comes in the form of Lisbeth Sandry in the Weedpatch government camp. She is a ferociously God-fearing woman who attempts to spread her fear among the rest of the members of the camp. It is not good enough for her if the Joads are religious, they must have the same zest and fear that she does. She fights with the manager, who has a Casy-like view of things: “He don’ believe in sin. Tol’ me hisself. Says the sin is bein’ hungry. Says the sin is bein’ cold.” (423) The manager has an accepting view of Lisbeth, saying “She’s a good woman, but she makes people unhappy.” Through the manager, Steinbeck is commenting on the paradox of religious worship like that of Lisbeth Sandry’s. She has good intentions, and seems to genuinely believe that she is helping people, but ultimately she only causes them hurt and suffering, like when she causes Rosasharn unnecessary stress with her lectures. Through her attempts at helping, she is only causing harm. It is also very telling that, while she considers the government camp the paragon of sin, she is clearly comfortable and doesn’t leave.

The most ironic and striking religious commentary comes in the form of the ex-preacher, Jim Casy. Casy outwardly claims to have no God. He resents his preaching career and refuses to pray unless outright begged to do so. He doesn’t believe in sin, but when he was a preacher and did believe in it, he engaged in sin quite often. Despite his outwardly agnostic tendencies, Jim Casy shares far more with the biblical figure of Jesus Christ than just his initials. Casy travels with people to learn from them and talk to them. He even experiences his own sacrifice and resurrection. Casy represents the clear distinction between claiming Christian-ness and actually being Christ-like.

Futility in "Grapes"

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.

Rosasharn and Selfishness

Let’s face it: Rosasharn, as interesting as her name may be, is one of the least consequential yet most annoying characters in The Grapes of Wrath. In a way she’s a foil for Ma, that strong, almost paternal presence whose morality sometimes surpasses even Tom’s. Rosasharn is subdued, uncertain, and entirely dependent, providing fodder for the novel’s occasional but potent sexism. In short, she’s every stereotype I hate to see projected onto my gender.

Her greatest crime, however, is that she is unabashedly selfish. Everything she does (which isn’t much) is either in her best interest or in the best interest of her child – but only because having “a freak” (393) would reflect poorly on her, arguably.

She constantly whines about needing milk, and even though Winfield also needs milk, she eyes it jealously until Ma sneaks a small cup of it to her. Worse still, she blames Tom (and, earlier, the deaths of both Grandpa and the dog) for ruining her child, seeing as she herself never sinned, and “didn’ dance no hug-dance” (394). (Remarkably, she never seems willing to hate on Connie, the only character who ever did anything directly to her or her child: abandonment and neglect.) But she admits this not only in a holier-than-thou sense, bragging about her morality, but rather with regret. As her child is already screwed up, she might as well have had some fun at the government camp.

I might be acting a little unfairly toward Rosarsharn, of course. In a sense, she was proven right in the end – her child was stillborn. Whether this was a result of all the sin and depravity she witnessed (as she would like to believe), or merely the malnutrition and poor living conditions they experienced, or the stress and emotional damage from losing Connie and other family members, or just fate itself, Steinbeck never reveals. He leaves things complicated.

But regardless of what caused her child’s death, the fact remains that it changed her in a way that none of their previous troubles could. Everyone else grows over the course of the novel, but it’s not until the very end that Rosasharn finally gets over herself and sheds her selfishness entirely, giving her milk to a total stranger. It’s all she has left to give. As the book implies throughout and states directly multiple times, the poor are the most charitable. And while Rosasharn was always poor, it's not until she has experienced one of life's greatest losses that she takes on this maxim. Her charity in the final pages matches the tragedy of her loss.

Tom Joad and Anger

I would like to add to Andy's argument about the catalyst of anger in The Grapes of Wrath. While it is true that most men are motivated by anger, they lack the ability to find a way to focus their anger into action. At first this seems based largely upon intellectual capacity and the ability to understand what's at stake. Tom and Jim Casey are the smartest characters of the novel, and both men understand the larger picture. There is something more complex though that seems to drive men to action.

Several men are angry throughout the novel, and several even seem to understand what is driving down wages. Several different characters explain to the Joads why life is so difficult in California. These men are angry, on the verge of giving up, or on their way home. They see that if men were able to organize, wages might stop going down. These men, however, seem to lack the morality that drives Tom and Jim Casey. Largely they seem to see the problem in simple terms.

Ma tells Tom "Everthing you do is more'n you" and while it is okay for her to make Pa angry she has to "lean" on Tom (353). She recognizes that anger can be valuable both because it reaffirms gender roles and because it incites men to continue moving forward. Pa, and the men like Pa, must become angry because anger gives them a sense of purpose and meaning. They have been taken out of their normal environment, and they can no longer fulfill their usual duties (work, support the family, etc.). In many cases this seems to have an emasculating effect, and anger helps to counteract this. Tom needs to be "leaned" on because he understands himself as a part of a larger context and tends to think things through with this in mind.

The common thread between Jim Casey and Tom, which other men seem to lack is the time each had for reflection. Although Tom is naturally given to think about things in a larger context, he struggles with what he should actually do about the injustices he sees. After he kills the man who killed Jim Casey, he puts his family in danger an must go into hiding. This period of hiding allows him to focus inward in a way which Jim Casey had done in the wilderness before him. It is only after this period of reflection, that he is driven to work toward social change.

The Importance of Anger

In Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath a common theme of motivating force seems to reoccur: anger. Throughout the novel men are motivated by their anger, they are motivated to preserve their dignity and to institute change in the world around them, and at several points in the novel the reader is shown the “fruits” from this inspiring wrath. By emphasizing the motivational force of anger in his novel, Steinbeck seems to be guiding the reader to the belief that anger is, not only a productive and appropriate response, but also one that is capable of bringing about significant change.

As the novel progresses the reader is reminded time and again that an angry man is not a broken man. Ma Joad voices this realization to Tom in one passage saying “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.” (p352). This realization relies on the fact that an angry man is motivated by the attacks on his dignity; he is motivated to institute change.

This motivation, when considered an isolated incident such as one man being motivated to try his luck again at finding a job despite the bleakness of the odds, is not such a powerful thing, in terms of instituting change. But when this anger becomes widespread enough, and centered around a similar cause, that is when the products of this wrath can become larger and more powerful than just single man. Take for instance Casey’s anecdote of the prison riot that gave him the idea for the strike he was organizing. Casey attempts to explain it to Tom, but the lesson is lost on him. Here Steinbeck seems to be arguing that if enough people had brought their anger together and centered it around the common cause for access to property or wealth that perhaps a change could have brought about.

It is important to note, however, that Steinbeck complicates this simple black and white picture of anger producing the solution for injustice. The moral centers of the novel, Tom, Ma, and Casey, never seem to act on anger- they feel it, such as Tom’s reaction to the vigilantes who burn down the Hooverville, but they never act on it. This complication shows that although Steinbeck acknowledges the power of anger in brining about change, that this anger must be tempered and guided. Steinbeck wants the reader to realize that real change, social change, does not come from a simple catalyst to a reaction, such as anger, but that it requires an agent that can see the larger picture. This kind of change comes from someone like Tom, as Ma tells Tom and the reader that he is different from most people because he sees the big picture. At first Tom disregards the comment, but later in the novel, he proves his mother right when he talks about going out to bring the angry people together and to “Throw out the cops that ain’t our people” (p419) in order to allow themselves a chance to succeed.

For some readers, this message has seemed to smack of Communism, but disregarding the labels and mixed messages of materialism that are complicated and sprinkled throughout the novel- this revelation that Tom has seems to be more about simply reacquiring the dignity that these migrants have lost and been denied. It is this sort of “fruit” or result that Steinbeck seems to urging his readers to grasp from the vine of wrath; not simple a reaction to an unfavorable circumstance, but a motivation and reaction centered around an ideal that is larger than simply one man to bring about a real and lasting change.