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John Steinbeck (1902-1968) bio info
1963-Nobel prize
Family of moderate means
Didnt graduate from university
Wikipedia for more bio info
Steinbecks novels=social novels (protest novels)
(They deal with economical problems of rural labor)
Author of literature of protest
He does not follow a sociological movement. He has some elements that
make him a regional writing love for land.
His 2nd book was also for social criticism (1936) California food-picking.
He was engaged already in such research before GoW.
1939 Publication of GoW
His last publication was a travelogue.
[Image=the first cover of GoW]
Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was the leading American Regionalist
artist of the first half of 20th century. His affinity for portraying the common
man made him a good match for Steinbecks story of social injustice and
family strength. Book published with lithographs by Benton in 1940. When
the book was adapted for a movie, Benton also helped. The director tried
to find actors that resembled the faces of the lithographs.
`Just Uncle Toms Cabin had influenced the debate on slavery before the
Civil War; the GoW brought the plight of the migrant worker. [Image]
Summary Key Elements1
1) Description of the coming of the dust in terms befitting a biblical plague
2) Oklahoma City Transport Company truck is both imposing and intrusive,
a symbol of corporate domination as shown by the No Riders sticker.
Tom and the truck driver show toward big business and the rich.
3) Turtle crawling, endangered by modernity and business. Metaphor for
the working class farmers
4) Jim Casy, the moral voice of the novel and its religious center (JC) (Even
the title GoW has a biblical nuance)
5) The coming of bank representatives to evict the farmers. Bank-inhuman
and bank owner with fifty thousand acres- a monster violating earth like
rape.
6) Mulley Graves-ghost. They are trespassing and must hide in a cave to
protect them from patrolling deputies-hunted animals
(Anonymous and general scenes that become personified in the movie)
7) The car dealership owners profit from selling the most ill-used vehicleexploitation.
8) Tom and Casy reach Uncle Johns farm. Pa, Ma, Grandma, Grandpa,
Noah, Joad, Al (16), Ruthie (12), Winfield (10) Rosa sham married to Coonie
Rivers. Casys speech at dinner when people diverge from the common
good they become unholy. Socialist viewpoint championing common good
over individual interests
9) The process of selling belongings. What isnt sold is burnt for lack of
space youre not buying only junk, youre buying junked lives
(Sexual reference of JCs loss of call omitted in movie)
10) Pa + Uncle John return with the truck, prepare to leave. Ma looks
through her belongings. Grandpa refuses to leave. Family dynamic. Tom is
the hero in the GoW but is Ma Joad who is the storys moral center.
11) New means of cotton production. Tractors and drivers have no
connection to the land
12) I66-main migrant road stretching from the Mississippi to Bakersfield
California
3-4 Summary/Key Elements
. .
13) Trouble getting over the mountains in their car. The Joads meet the
Wilsons, a family from Kansas that is going to Cal. Grandpa Dies.
14) Explicit political statement concerning the migration to the West
Coast. Owners nervous by growing labor unity and strikes
15) The typical diner is run by a usually irritated woman who nevertheless
becomes friendly when truck drivers consistent customers who can
always pay. Migrants seem shiftless and threatening.
16) The Joads and the Wilsons continue (together) on their travels. A
rattling in the Wilsons car causes all to stop. Grandma has been going
crazy. (A ragged man at the camp when he hears that the Joads are going
to pick oranges in California laughs. Returning from California, he tells how
the handballs are a fraud. Rose of Sharon hopes to live the traditional
American dream. She is the one beacon of hope within the Joad family.
17) While cars are separate and lonely in the day at night, at the camp
grounds where they stay the families become one. For transgressors there
are two punishments; violence or ostracism. Leaders emerge wise elders).
Communal society of the migrant workers - a somewhat idealized society
that forms spontaneously. S uses the campground life to build a utopian
society in which ostentatious display of wealth is shunned, equality reigns
and no real ruling class emerges. Closest to a ruling class are the elderly,
who rule from wisdom and experience.
(This utopian display is absent from the film)
[Image] Route 66 map
[US map]
A Hooverville was the popular name for shanty towns built by homeless
people during the Great Depression. They were named after the President
at the time, Herbert Hoover (1929-1933), because he allegedly let the
nation slide into depression.
John Steinbeck in 1939 proclaimed the Route 66 as the Mother Road in
his classic novel GoW. Then the movie was made just a year later, it
immortalized Route 66 in the American consciousness. Shortly thereafter,
more than 200.000 people migrated to California to escape the Dust Bowl
of the Midwest symbolizing the highway as the road to opportunity.
In the novel (17) the brother who leaves explains why.
18) They reach the desert of California (anticlimactic). Noah leaves them.
The Joads move on but the Wilsons stay. Are pulled over for inspection, but
Ma insists they must continue because Granma needs medical attention.
19) Interchapter historical background. California belonged to Mexico. A
horde of tattered Americans poured in, with such great hunger for the land
that they took it. Farming became an industry as the Americans took over.
They imported Chinese, Japanese, Mexican and Filipino workers who
became slaves. The owners of the farms ceased to be farmers and
became businessmen. S predicts that the conclusion of this history will be
the overthrow of the capitalist owner class. He relies on Marxist-Leninist
predictions that capitalist imperialism creates its demise through its own
success. Eventually the accumulation of wealth in too few hands will
deprive of the population to such a degree that they have no choice but to
revolt. (read this chapter)
Hunger and anger
20) Connie Rivers abandons his pregnant wife. Ma remains the center of
authority, generous and just. She gives away some food to starving
children. Sudden outbreak of violence: deputy chases after Floyd, Tom
trips him. Casy kicks the deputy in the back of the neck; he sacrifices
himself to save Tom. His role as a spiritual martyr is fulfilled.
Government camp utopian/social viewpoint. Agitators
21) The number of migrant workers caused the wages to go down. The
owners did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin one.
22) The Joads reach the government camp. Surprised to find there are
toilets and showers and running water. Weedpatch represents a communal
society in which everyone has an equal share and an equal voice.
However, the Farmers' Association that the banks control dictates that
wages be reduced. They even plan underhanded tactics to subvert the
government camps. Anyone who wants 30cents an hour instead of 25 is a
red.
23) Simple details of the life of a migrant worker. Drunkenness was
common.
24) Rumours that the police are going to break up the dance reach the
camp. Despite the intruders (who accepted bribes) they maintain order.
25) Spring is beautiful. Yet the fruits become rotten and soft. The rotten
grapes are used for wine, even if contaminated with mildew and formic
acid because they seem good enough for the poor to get drunk.
26) The comfortable situation that the Joads find in Weedpatch must
inevitably come to an end, as the Joads realize that they cannot find work
in that area. Pa makes a significant comment about gender roles,
lamenting the fact that he no longer runs the family. On the road, they get
a flat tire. They reach the ranch at Pixley where they are to pick oranges
for five cents a box. Tom goes for a walk, but a deputy tells him to walk
back to the cabin. While continuing on his walk, Tom finds Casy, who has
been released from jail. He is with a group of men that are on strike. Casy
claims that people who strive for justice always face opposition, citing
Lincoln and Washington, as well as the martyrs of the French Revolution.
Casy, Tom and the rest of the strikers are confronted by the police. Casy is
killed. Tom kills the man who killed Casy. Tells Ma that he is leaving that
night, she tells him they aren't a family anymore: Al cares about girls,
Uncle John is dragging along, Pa has lost his place as the head of the
family, and the children are becoming unruly. Rose of Sharon thinks that
Toms murder will doom her baby (paranoid religious hysteria). Tom insists
that he must leave, but Ma insists that they leave as a family. They hide
Tom as they leave, taking the back roads to avoid police.
27)
Those who want to pick cotton must first purchase a bag
before they can make money. The men who weigh the cotton fix the
scales to cheat the workers.
28) The Joads settle once again into a temporary home this time a
boxcar. Tom's decision to leave the family is a bittersweet event, but
entirely inevitable. He accepts Casy's belief that there is no individual
soul, but instead a collective soul of which each person only has a part.
This is a turning point for Tom. Previously consigned himself to
individualist action for himself and his family, he now wishes to work
for the common good. Ma realizes that family unity is insignificant
without the greater society unity for which Tom will strive. She cannot
weep over his departure but the rainfall begins, a natural phenomenon
reflecting her emotional state. Women are better equipped to handle
change and pain. When the Wainwrights confront the Joads with the
possibility that Al could get their daughter pregnant, leaving her
without support, the two kids announce their engagement.
29)
The rains mark the end of the harvest season. The migrant
workers face starvation, yet cannot receive government relief. For S,
the workers treatment is inhumane; while no farm owner would
leave his horse to starve they do just that for the migrant labour
force.
Weedpatch Camp or Arvin Federal Government Camp [images]
Steinbeck - The American Dream for success but NOT for the
individual!! Steinbeck express the socialist views, not as a
revolutionist of his times, but because such views were quite
common during the Great Depression.
The community transcends the family (final monologues)
30)
After three days of rain they face the possibility of flooding
from the nearby creek, but cannot leave because Rose of Sharon
goes into labor. The one solution depends on community action: the
rest of the families must pitch in to build up the embankment, which
will stop the flooding. Without help the family is forced to take
shelter on top of their car. Rose of Sharon delivered a stillborn baby.
The family finds a barn for refuge until the rain stops. In the corner
of the barn there are a starving man and a boy. Ma and Rose of
Sharon realize what she must do. Ma makes everybody leave the
barn, while Rose of Sharon gives the dying man her breast milk.
Rose of Sharon breastfeeds the starving man in the barn to sustain
him. She gives what was meant for her baby to a complete
stranger, an example of selfless sacrifice for the sake of community
instead of individual well-being. Yet it took a deep personal loss, to
enable Rose of Sharon to aid the man.
Dorothea Lang and the Farm Security
Administration
Migrant was the polite word; most JUST CALLED THEM Okies even though
these Okies came from all over the Midwest, Arkansas, Kansas, Texas and
Oklahoma. Some, like Cleo and Florence have come early, before the Dust
Bowl but more were coming now, by the thousands, by the tens of
thousands. In beat-up old cars, trucks, anything that would move, they
came. They loved in tent cities called Hoovervilles. If they were lucky, they
had that days food; if they were rich, they had maybe five days food. In
years to come, it would be said of the migrants that they had so little, but
they always had enough to share with those that had less
To the respectable people they meet along the way, the Okies are simply
outsiders, dirty and uncivilized. (Them god dam Okies got no sense and
no feeling says one bystander. They aint no human. A human being
wouldnt live like they do)
But Steinbeck would convince them that these are good country people
like you, white Americans. And they are families; not lone derelicts or alien
outsiders.
The last chapter of GoW is totally missing from the film.
The birth of Rose of Sharon's child carries significant symbolic
meanings.
For Rose of Sharon, the child has represented the possibilities for
the future, yet the baby is stillborn.
The event has clear parallels to the Joad's journey to California: they
faced incredible hardship and pain striving for a better future, yet
their sacrifices lead to nothing.
The fate of the baby is even a perverse reversal of religious
imagery. Uncle John places the dead child in a box and sends it
down the river, an obvious allusion to Moses. Symbolic-pessimistic
ending
Steinbeck's overt purpose, like that of Dos Passos in U.S.A., is to
convince usand his charactersthat the individual, even the
individual family, scarcely matters any longer. The new
concentrations of economic power have made the old yeoman
independence a thing of the past. Those who would not be able to
adapt, who are too old and too set in their ways, like Grampa and
Granma, die on the road, unable to enter the new land. Even Ma
and Tom, who are the strongest and most determined, who never
lose heart as others do, are at best able to hold some of the family
together. They learn that unless they throw in their lot with others
the Wilsons early on, the Wainwrights later, the strikers whose jobs
they unknowingly takethey are helpless against the large growers,
the police and the vigilantes who enforce their power.
Despite the accusations of those who derided him as a dangerous
radical, Steinbeck was never a Communisthis politics were those
of a New Deal Democrat.
He appeals to his readers' moral sympathy and human kinship but
also to their Americanism, a powerful motif in a period when all
social protest was labeled Communist.
He saw the grapes as an image of the Edenic plenty of America, a
land controlled by a small plutocracy while the people starved.
The Grapes of Wrath is akin to the post-1935 Popular Front, with its
romance of the People, a novel in which the Communists are barely
mentioned except as all-purpose bogeymen of the owners. In a
famous passage, Tom learns that "a red is any son-of-a-bitch that
wants thirty cents an hour when we're payin' twenty-five!"which
means, "Were all reds." Earlier, we had seen Tom refer to himself
jokingly as "bolshevisky," as he proceeded with Casy to reinvent
radicalism in all-American terms.
The film
Steinbeck pleased with the final film version
John Ford was attracted to the storys dualistic themes of
dispossession and quest for survival
History of the release of the film STEINBECK WROTE: ' As for
Grapes, it opens sometime in January. There is so much hell being
raised in this state that Zanuck will not release simultaneously. He'll
open in N.Y. and move gradually west, letting the publicity precede
it. He even, to find out, issued a statement that it would never be
shown in California and got a ton of mail, literally, in protest the
next day. He has hired attorneys to fight any local censorship and is
trying to get Thomas Benton for the posters. All this is beyond our
hopes.'
Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is a camera-conscious novel: the
narrative eye zooms in and out of the devastated landscape in the
opening lines of the novel. The fact that Steinbeck was
documenting a current phenomenon made the task of producer
Daryl F. Zanuck and director John Ford easier: all they had to do to
envision their characters was to look at the Dust Bowl and
depression photographs by people like Dorothea Lange and Horace
Bristol. According to photographer Horace Bristol it is no
coincidence that several of the principal characters in the film
resemble Bristol's photographs, since the 20th Century Fox directors
asked him for a set to help them cast for the movie.
Horace Bristol
Differences between the novel and the film
opening credits
In the central part of the United States of America lies a limited
area called 'the Dust Bowl', because of its lack of rains. Here
drought and poverty combined to deprive many farmers from their
land.
This is the story of one farmer's family, driven from their fields by
natural disasters and economic changes beyond anyone's control
and their great journey in search of peace, security, and another
home.
One can already notice in this opening lines of the film the director's
attempt to carefully avoid attaching specific blame in this
potentially controversial film. The possibility of social change
wrought by violent by violent conflict suggested in the novel will not
even be hinted at.
The movie only focuses on the Joads, a migrant family from the Dust
Bowl region, while the novel's focus shifts from the Joads to the
situation of all the migrants who went to California in the 1930s.
In the interchapters the fate of many migratory workers is
described. Moreover, Steinbeck provides the reader with a detailed
picture of the historical background of the 1930s: he describes the
dust storms, the expulsion of the farmers from their homes, the
tractors who destroy their farms, Route 66, the major migrant road
to California, the reception of the so called 'Okies' in California. In
these interchapters Steinbeck also criticizes the way tenant farmers
are treated and the way powerful, rich people exploit the poor
migrants.
Interchapters: Ss criticism - Migrants exploitation.
Who is to blame for the ruined earth? Okies are partly responsible but also
the American system of land (they have 'cottoned out' the earth) and the
banks. This is one of the reasons why they have to move west. In the
novel S made a clear statement that the sharecroppers, the American
system of land exploitation and the banks are to blame for the ruined
economy. The film carefully avoids blaming anyone in particular. The
reminder of collective guilt is omitted.
The film version excluded many small episodes from the novel,
among them episodes showing unfair business practices.
The complaint about the unfair practices of used-car salesmen;
the argument with the camp owner about overcharging;
the depiction of the company-store credit racket;
the dishonest scales on the fruit ranch; and even the practice of
taking the jackpots from his slot machines - none of these was ever
proposed for the shooting script.
Although elements of the interchapters were eventually
incorporated into the film, particularly in the few panoramic shots,
the ultimate effect of such condensing was to focus exclusively on
the Joads rather than Steinbeck's 'Manself.'
Some interchapters from the novel are taken into the film version
and the characters are changed: the anonymous characters of the
novel's interchapters become the Joads in the movie. One of these
scenes is the one in the grocery store: in the novel an anonymous
migrant asks for a loaf of bread while in the movie Pa Joad asks for
it.
The film's political implications were muted because the film-makers
feared criticism. In the scene where Farmer Thomas warns Tom and
the Wallaces about the impending raid on the Government Camp,
the recurring question of 'red' agitation comes up again. Tom, who
has heard the argument before, bursts out,
' What is these reds anyway?'
Originally, according to the script, Wilkie Wallace was to have
answered, rubbing his own line from the novel, that according to a
fruit grower he knew once, a red is anyone who ' wants thirty cents
an hour when I'm payin' twenty-five.' In the final print, however,
Farmer Thomas answers Tom's question simply but evasively , ' I
ain't talkin' about that one way 'r another', and goes on to warn the
men about the raid.
Since scriptwriter Nunnally Johnson was a conservative Southerner,
it was only natural that he de-emphasized S's specific left-wing
arguments. Johnson has justified his method, saying, I thought the
politics were secondary to the story of the Joads.'
Conservatist script writer
A few sentences from the novel
In the novel Jim Casy, a former preacher, asks the Joads if he can
join them on their way to California. The Joad family talks about
whether they should take him or not. As it turns out, there are
arguments for and against taking Casy with them. Pa Joad is worried
that there won't be enough room for somebody else because they
are already 12 people.
' But I'M wonderin' if we can all ride, an' the preacher too.
An' kin we feed a extra mouth?'
Ma is one of the family members who Casy to join them. While Tom
hesitates after Casy asked if he may join them, Ma says, '' Why we'd
be proud to have you.' But she also tells him that it is not for her to
decide - there has to be a family council. During the family council,
it turns out that Grampa also wants Casy to travel with them to
California. He says, ' I kinda like this fella.' Again it is Ma Joad who
defends Casy's wish for joining them, saying,
' there ain't room now. There ain't room for more'n six, an'
twelve is goin' sure. One more ain't gonna hurt.'
In the film, Casy does not need to ask if he may join them: the Joad's invite
him to travel with them. It is actually Pa Joad, the one family member who
had the most doubts about taking Casy along in the novel, who asks Casy
to join his family in the film version
A few sentences in the novel that describe Ma burning her
keepsakes become a wordless scene of inestimable power, evoking
Ma first as a younger woman, now as a woman staunchly but
poignantly taking leave of the past.
The Saturday night dance at the sanitary camp becomes the occasion for
another privileged moment, as Tom dances with Ma to the tune of the "The
Red River Valley"a scene of intense communal and personal warmth that
is not at all typical of Steinbeck, but was profuced brilliantly by Fonda and
Ford. The novel is about a social migration; the film is about a mother and
son.
Desertions of family members
Reversal of Government (= Weedpatch) Camp and Peach Ranch
episode
The celebrated reversal in the film of the novel's Government Camp
and Peach Ranch order is the screenwriter's effort to make the Joad's
collectivism more motivated and more progressive. By placing the
Government Camp scene after their experiences in the Hooverville camp
and the Peach Ranch the Joads' willingness to engage in collective action
becomes understandable, and the audience can see the positive effects of
such action.
The different endings
While the novel ends with Rose of Sharon giving her breast to a
starving stranger in a barn, a scene that has very often been
criticized, the movie ends with the Joads leaving the security of the
government camp, but in the tone of an upbeat all the way. The
movie finally ends with Ma's famous 'We're the people' speech.
Thus the movie ends without the destructive flood, without the
symbolic stillbirth, and without the final gesture of universal love.
The audience leaves this movie moved and comforted.
The sense of impending change, enormous change, which swells
toward the end of Steinbeck's novel, simply cannot be found in the
film.
Comparison of Ma Joad's ' We're the people' speech in the novel
and in the film
The novel does not end with this speech. After Ma's speech Rose of
Sharon's baby is stillborn and the Joads have to take shelter from
the flood in a barn.
Ma's speech in the film: pulled from the middle of the novel and
shaped into the conclusion of the movie. (Were the people...)
The movie ends with this speech as 'Red River Valley' strikes up in
the background.
Zanuck himself decided to flesh out and highlight the now-famous
'We're the people' speech by Ma Joad by placing its optimistic
survival message at the end of the film.
The implications of this final speech are that there will always be
rich and poor, aristocrats and peasants, but that the aristocrats will
rise, dissipate themselves and disappear, while the peasants will
keep trudging down a long, hard road.
Nunnally Johnson and John Ford produced an adaptation that was
not only exceptionally faithful for its time but also unusually bold for
Hollywood in its treatment of a controversial issue. Their loyalty to
this project, however, did not prevent them from toning down the
explicit sexual, religious, and political dimensions of the novel.
Though Steinbeck himself was wracked with guilt over an affair that
threatened his first marriage, in his novels he presents men as
horny, randy creatureslusty animals bursting with natural vitality.
Steinbeck worked hard to forestall censorship of these aspects of
the novel, especially the frank language, which ultimately led to its
being condemned for obscenity by those who objected, more
accurately, to its social views.
Virtually none of the novel's darker side survives in the movie.
Steinbeck's naturalism also fuels the book's religious satire,
beginning with Preacher Casy, who is estranged from his calling in
part because he cannot condemn or restrain his spontaneous sexual
appetite. His conflict eventually leads him to a religion of humanity,
a revolutionary radicalism that combines Emerson's Oversoul with
Marx's theory of Surplus Value. Very little of this antireligious feeling
gets into the movie either.
