Page 1 of Readers' Forum on The Grapes of Wrath. To go to page 2 click here.
Uplift your views/comments/questions here.
Exactly what do the letters in Chapter 15 stand >for...IITYWYBAD?
If I Tell You, Will You Buy Another Drink?
> How do you think that Steinbeck used the theme of identity throughout the novel?
> I am in the process of proving that the Joad's lost their true identity after they left the home and began the journey. I feel by the end of the novel they had no identity. Can you help me....... I need some professional advice! Email me back.
True = what they have at any given time surely! There is no other identity than what you have. They are not in disguise. Grampa and Muley identify with their land and can have no other identity being unable to change/adapt. But to survive (like things in Nature, Steinbeck's paradigm remember) we, they and society has to change, adapt and solve its problems. The Past (= the Great Depression) cannot be the pattern of the future for the Joads, for the USA, and for us readers either. Steinbeck's love of Camelot and legends notwithstanding! These are ideals not patterns from the past being so remote.
No, identity is not a major theme. However, the Joads and Wilsons and Graves and Wainwrights do merge into an anonymous mass with social dislocation, loss of property, loss of role in society. They may diminish in numbers but not in identity = relationships; their relationships are tested and proven: Noah was never connected, Connie never one of them, the grans & Casy have to die inevitably and become family icons for them, etc. The bond between Ma and Tom is stronger at end than beginning. Alf and Tom find a way of getting on and Rose faces freedom again. They will survive as a family in connection with other families. Remember his model for society is the overnight spontaneous roadside camps with their own unwritten rules, taboos, and customs that grow from necessity, respect and unexploitative relationships.
Thanks for the request!
Greg
Dear Denise
Thanks so much for your praise re the website. I do hope I can offer useful insights/expertise! I will reply further later but this is how I react now.
In a videoed interview, John's widow Elaine says she found him a mysterious man. Remember he and his sister Mary played Camelot verbatim in Salinas on Castle Rock as kids and he is steeped in legend. He found strength in the past and in his time translating the Mort D'Arthur in Glastonbury UK he was really himself.
Indeed he was very aware of his reading audience, that USA is far more 'religious' than UK. To have punch (at least in his view) his message had to have legendary, symbolic, eternal, supernatural overtones for them. After all, Grapes was a social criticism, a stripping away of the hype of the media of the times. That's why this book was banned for 50 years. See my website link - Kern County bans The Grapes of Wrath
Maybe the Biblical overtones & symbolism were part of the message that society had lost its way, lost its compassion, USA had lost its Plymouth Fathers aspirations. It needed to get back to the basics of virtue, in its original foundation, with freedom & virtue, the 17th century George Washington stuff. Remember the 20s were hedonistic and 30s an ideological battleground for the hearts and minds of the nation. He bought into that struggle. He was not churchy himself; in fact he rejected the bourgeoisie upbringing of his mother and class.
He found a familiarity of spirit in his mentor Ed Ricketts's respect for natural laws. As a newspaper reporter, he saw very many Joads type people. They were the salt of the earth. He was not patronising either. But he was, like Camus, genuine, a real searcher for the essence of good people, seeking an authentic life, free of falsity, hypocrisy and middle class pretensions.
I admire John and The Grapes of Wrath for integrating all these strands: the political, the religious and the humanitarian.
Let me know how you react
Greg
A Response to Symbolism
In a letter to Pascal Covici, Steinbeck himself outlined the "five layers" of his novel:
2. ALLEGORICAL, we are told of our future redemption through Christ;
3. MORAL, we are told of the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace;
4. ANAGOGICAL, we are told of the going forth of the blessed soul from the servitude of corruption to the freedom of eternal glory;
5. OVER-SOUL, may individuality be transcended altogether through the "one big soul" Casyspeaks about?, What does Steinbeck mean by "Manself" that has the one quality distinctive in the universe of suffering and dying for a concept?, Is Steinbeck suggesting a layer of experience at which individual distinctions are obliterated in something like Emerson's "oversoul"?
So if he wrote with the purposes stated above, he must have found many messages in the Bible to be valuable i.e. the promise of redemption, hope, relief from sin, possibility of earthly salvation, etc.
Why does
the novel have so many sexual scenes? (JD.) 11/3/99
Steinbeck does not write salacious material. He was a serious writer.
The sexual scenes are part of the novel's organic metaphor, that hope lies in life, in Nature and in the natural order of things. Nature's instincts are optimistic, to reproduce in all the thrill that that entails. Sexual activities are natural and rejuvenating. What may seem to be farmyard bluntness to us in the 1990s was promise and hope in the 1930s.
Remember that in the 1929 Wall Street crash, the world had suffered a great disaster, and through the thirties hope was hard to find. The excesses of the twenties were quickly forgotten and the serious battle for minds had begun. Western democracies were under threat and the war of ideologies had begun. This was a decisive time: Would the capitalist world crumple under the overwhelming economic collapse? Would the forces of communism fill the vacuum? What future could America hope for in the mire of the fallout from the Depression? The New Deal initiatives served quite a few but others like the Okies were never targeted. They would inevitably miss out and suffer the worst.
Remember the turtle in Chapter 3 where Steinbeck dramatised the will and purpose of the turtle crossing the road? It is an enduring totem and motif in the novel; that the bitterness of the grapes of wrath would swell up into a final outcome for justice. He believed the rights of the common people would win in the end, just as the Bible says that judgement day finally will come to right the world's wrongs. He was not advocating a party or a manifesto to achieve justice, but as a writer and a decent American, he knew the current wrongs could not continue indefinitely. The turtle represents a positive way of life, one that Man should well follow in re-organising a fractured society.
Typically, the sexual scenes are short, anonymous, impersonal and always related as memories. They are expressions of natural instincts. They are recollections whose significance lies in how they mark stages of individuals' growth as people. If only everyone in society could get re-connected with one another as the animals and simple farmers do with the seasons and their bodies' appetites and the soil! Casy's regrets about the girls he laid in the grass are not about the sex but about his abrogation of his responsibility 'for their souls' as their preacher; that getting them frothing with the Holy Sperit (a good deed in itself) led him to do bad towards them. Connie and Rose of Sharon do what's natural on top of the truck even in the midst of death. People must do what they gotta do.
Compared with so much other material, the sexual scenes do not dominate. They support the main theme and carry forward the organic metaphor. They must always be read in the context of the novel's central vision.
Source: http://home.pacific.net.au/~greg.hub.grapesviews.html
Dear Ross, Thanks for finding me and the praise.About "socialism" well you must remember that he was not aligned with the parties. His was an altruism he derived for himself; he saw the suffering and saw the causes. "If all men were one" was his religion and politics too.
Tell me what answers you get from the other
Steinbeck pages to the same question too
please.Greg
JD (again) 24/3/99
1. Change brings the breaking of the human spirit; mechanical farming broke the Okies' spirit.
Rather, Steinbeck believed in the power of the human spirit. He shared in the idea of the 'oversoul' (with Emerson, Whitman and others in a movement called "American Transcendentalism") which bound all men of good will when they cooperate. He believed (or threatened) that their natural cry for justice would be heeded in the end.
He believed that each man's courage contributed to this one great soul, and as groups grew stronger, that soul grew larger and stronger. The Government and the banks back East broke the people's hearts but their spirits, although waxing and waning under duress, would always bear them forward to justice. Like his Okies, Steinbeck was optimistic.
2. The Joads carried Steinbeck's themes to the reader, showing the trouble that people from a different era faced.
No, more powerfully, Steinbeck wrote about contemporary Americans to Americans in his day, in his own era. That's what made the novel so shocking and challenging. If they were from a different era like refugees from the Mexican wars in the 1890s, the critical edge would have been far blunter.
3. The Joads and their companions in the novel were merely a means to an end.
This cannot be Steinbeck speaking. Surely the millions who read about and empathised with the Joads do so only because they are dear to the author himself. After so much description, shared suffering, brief joys and long travails, we readers readily identify with them, as Steinbeck wants us to and as he did himself. That sympathy is the engine of his moral fable.
> what do you think Steinbeck wants his readers to understand about the idea of the oversoul??
Steinbeck was not a political commentator nor lobbyist nor philosopher - just a writer
He sensed something genuine bonding everyone in the Hoovervilles and he found that bond strong and enduring. He believed that it was something primitive and good, something that bestowed dignity on humans and so relationships between everyone would be right if they connected with this 'oversoul'.
But greed, prejudice, etc., blocked their awareness of what's right and just and good in life and so as individuals they lost contact with it. The oversoul was not just a recognition of the other fellow's vulnerability and need but a kind of sensed common humanity. Knowing the oversoul or being connected to it, one would act rightly and compassionately towards others.
Beyond that I am afraid I will fall into implying a holy spirit of some kind.
Greg
Then there is Muley, a symbolic figure of the hopelessly oppressed, a tragic figure lost in his homeland. He recounts the tractors razing the homes; this is oppression. Then breaking in on the narrative, actually happening. the sheriff's car lights up the night and the 3 have to hide in the corn for trespassing on their own land, this is oppression.
I suggest you just go through the chapters, listing incidents of oppression like this to build up your observations how John started developing this theme. The Depression brought oppression, involving denial of workers' rights, denial of employers' and banks' duty to the common weal, dereliction of duty by government (although John was for small government but not Reagononomics), children go hungry; land is taken away; white Americans become refugees in their own country; all this is oppression of the ordinary men and women. They lose human dignity in proportion to how severely the managers and banks bite.
Grapesviews 2: Further
discussion of the novel
Return to Main
Page
Source: http://home.pacific.net.au/~greg.hub.grapesviews.html