I was wrong about The Grapes of Wrath

A while back I wrote a post in which I compared The Grapes of Wrath to Atlas Shrugged, noting that the two stories had many (unintended?) similarities that seemed to suggest a few (unintended?) truths.

Then I noticed that while Rand's text was thoroughly oriented towards a specific philosophy, Steinbeck's text appeared to contradict itself.

This, by the way, is not where I went wrong. The contradictory elements of The Grapes of Wrath have been well documented, as it turns out, and I am not the first person to puzzle over the simultaneous advocacy for an individualism and a collectivism that may not be able to co-exist.

I did, however, misread the ending. Here's what I originally wrote:

It is unclear, at the end of the book, what kind of world Steinbeck might propose. Perhaps he is unclear of it himself. He writes "Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten," and he ends his book glorifying futile self-sacrifice (we don't actually believe the man Rose of Sharon feeds from her own body survives, after all).

After watching the Steppenwolf production of The Grapes of Wrath (slime tutorial available on YouTube, naturally), I realized that I had filtered Rose of Sharon's actions through the lens of someone who had read The Grapes of Wrath and Atlas Shrugged back-to-back, and whose thoughts had been occupied by themes of self and self-sacrifice.

Here's what I believe Steinbeck was actually trying to tell us:

At the beginning of the novel, Tom Joad meets up with Rev. Casy, who explains that he is no longer a practicing preacher:

"I figgered, 'Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,' I figgered, 'maybe it's all men an' all women we love; maybe that's the Holy Sperit – the human sperit – the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of.' Now I sat there thinkin' it, an' all of a suddent – I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it.”

At the end of the novel, Tom tells his mother that he's accepted Casy's philosophy as his own:

“Then it don' matter [if I die]. Then I'll be all aroun' in the dark. I'll be ever'where – wherever you look. Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad an' – I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready. An' when our folks eat the stuff they raise an' live in the houses they build, why, I'll be there.”

This understanding is what allows Ma Joad to let her son go – but what's important, and what may be overlooked, is that Ma Joad has been both preaching and practicing this philosophy from the beginning. She didn't need to discover it or come to terms with it, the way Tom and Casy did, because it is presented as something women already know:

“Man, he lives in jerks – baby born an’ a man dies, an’ that’s a jerk – gets a farm and looses his farm, an’ that’s a jerk. Woman, its all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river, it goes right on. Woman looks at it like that. We ain’t gonna die out. People is goin’ on – changin’ a little, maybe, but goin’ right on.”

When Steinbeck explains that man can create new fruits but man cannot create a system through which their fruits can be eaten, he may be asking us to compare man to woman, who sees first the "fambly" and then the world as a single problem:

We need food. We have food.

Ma Joad says as much on the way to California. She's not thinking about what kind of life they'll have when they get there. She's thinking that in a few hours they'll need food, and they have food – and whenever anyone comes within sight of their campfire they are included in the we, and they are fed.

And so we get the last pages of the book, in which Ma understands that her daughter has already learned this core value. We are the group of people taking shelter in this barn. We need food. We have food. The fact that it is one woman offering her body to one man is irrelevant. The fact that this man may still die from starvation is irrelevant. The fact that it is Rose of Sharon is relevant only in the sense that Ma now knows that this value will continue. The next generation of humanity will go on, regardless of whether it includes individual Joads.

This appears to have been one of Steinbeck's core beliefs, as it turns out – the idea of the ecological web, the phalanx theory, etc. – but you can look the rest of it up on your own.