An Illusory Birthright: The Loss of Home and Identity in The Grapes of Wrath - Research Paper Example

An Illusory Birthright: The Loss of Home and Identity in ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ Human beings have a primal relationship to the land. Some cultures hold that people belong to the earth, while others claim that land is an asset to be possessed and exploited. In either scenario, the environment nurtures and protects people according to the dictates of the seasons and the gifts that nature chooses to bestow or withhold. There is a tragic poignancy to the notion of people losing their homes. It is a spiritual amputation in which rootlessness happens overnight and the soul is robbed of something elemental and irreplaceable. Social displacement has for the better part of a century been a matter for history books and literature but in recent years it has intruded on the conscience of a new generation of Americans, for whom foreclosures and natural disasters are near-daily occurrences. Economic hardship, bank foreclosure and the destructive power of the natural world cast into sharp relief the themes of hardship and survival in John Steinbeck’s opus The Grapes of Wrath. But it is the love of the earth and the age-old human predisposition to identify self with place that imbues Steinbeck’s epic with such a powerfully relatable and timeless message. When the bank forces the Joads off their land, it aims a blow at elemental feelings of human security and well-being. For the Joad family and other tenant farmers who live at the mercy of the all-powerful bank, the loss of homestead is tantamount to the death of a family member. The Name 2 human cost has as much to do with the heart and soul as it does with temporal concerns over basic physical resources like food and income. The Dust Bowl farmers find to their dismay that the bank, which holds the deed to their lands, harbors no sentiment for any historical or emotional connection they may have to their homes. Many of those who work for the bank hate what they are compelled to do but are powerless to help. The farmers are profoundly, pathetically helpless to defend themselves despite the moral legitimacy of their claim. “The tenants cried, Grampa killed Indians, Pa killed snakes for the land. Maybe we can kill banks – they’re worse than Indians and snakes. Maybe we got to fight to keep our land like Pa and Grampa did” (Steinbeck, 245). The bank poses a threat like none they have ever faced, or even imagined, a “monster” which “isn’t men,” holding absolute power over them but bearing no responsibility to anyone other than its stockholders (Ibid). The devastation the farmers feel transcends even crops and cabins, hearth and herd. The homes which the bank will take are spiritual refuges, havens that give form to their humanity and dignity to their struggle. The promise that lies at the end of the journey they must endure becomes a psychological refuge, and reshapes their relationship to the countryside and to each other as they seek a new life in California. They draw nearer each other as their lives are turned upside down. “In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the Golden time in the West became one dream” (Steinbeck, 264). The epochal tides of migration that characterize the American experience have always Name 3 been triggered by the loss of something dear, whether it be land or religion or the depredations of an arbitrary authority determined to strip the helpless of the most fundamental human rights and belongings. The great Indian tribes that once lived and moved as they pleased were forced into a series of agonizing migrations. At stake was the sanctity of their ancient ties to the land, the preservation of which left them with no choice but to journey ever further in hopes of reestablishing a sense of home and belonging. Steinbeck’s Joad family does not symbolize the restlessness of the American spirit but the exploitation of vulnerable populations threatened with extinction. They are a communal people, accustomed to helping each other but utterly lost in the harsh new Darwinian reality that the bank, Steinbeck’s “monster,” represents. “People who take a generous and neighborly view of self-preservation; they do not believe that they can survive and flourish by the rule of dog eat dog…They know that things connect – that farming, for example, is connected to nature, and food to farming, and health to food – and they want to preserve the connections…” (Berry, 17-18). For Steinbeck, the American Dream is firmly rooted in the ideal of a free and productive agrarian nation that cannot exist without a secure farming society to give it meaning and moral fiber (Cape, 7). All of those institutions that constitute progress and technological advancement, such as agribusiness, pollution and a disregard for sustainability, stand as direct threats to the ability of simple agrarian families to survive. There is a residual effect at work here as well. The traditional American perception of the farmer has had centuries upon which to build the ideal of the virtuous individualist, the farmer whose forebears banded together to vanquish Name 4 tyranny in the Revolutionary War. The erosion of this stalwart class holds implications for America’s cherished self-image of independence and self-sustainability, qualities that are threatened by the mindless corporate displacement of families like the Joads. This deep connection with the land, which is shared by farmer and non-farmer alike, is what Stephen Railton calls a “realm of spirit, where individuals find their home,” a place in which all can feel secure that the very precepts upon which the idea of America is based will survive (Railton, in Wyatt, 43). It is, after all, a thing won, something earned, “a universal bequest liberated from location and history, a primal warmth innocent of identity and relationship” (Wyatt, 19). In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck unfolds a difficult lesson about the loss of that identity, a terrible shock for Americans who take pride in the traditional notion of home as a birthright. Steinbeck’s great novel is an elegy for this lost ideal. The Joads and others of the dispossessed multitude that makes for California are actors in one of the greatest socio-cultural shift in the nation’s history, in which America was transformed from a static to the highly mobile society that we know today. Yet, this change did not come about willingly, or voluntarily. It was coerced, an enforced displacement that would alter the way the nation viewed itself. In a sense, the road becomes home for Steinbeck’s wayfarers, or rather the means of passage to a more transitory meaning of “home.” Steinbeck offers a paean to the survivability and resilience of human beings forced to adapt to an alien mode of existence. Peter Lisca contends that in his treatment of human displacement and its effects, Steinbeck sets the need for movement in a moral context. For Lisca, the tribal waves of “Okies” who flock westward Name 5 epitomize “the indomitable life force” (733) that urges them on despite grinding hardship and the resistance of other Americans who regard them as a disruptive and intolerable underclass. Home, it turns out, is much more than a geographical destination or physical asset after all, it is the realization of community and the communal acceptance of an entire people by others. The Joads are Americans but when they reach California, they find themselves relegated to a nether status in which they exist as pseudo-citizens of a republic built on the concept of egalitarianism and the enfranchisement of the individual. The Joads’ agony is just beginning when they are kicked off their land. Indeed, the entire concept of home works against them as they journey west. The people they encounter are too concerned with protecting their own homes and communities to consider welcoming the migrant Okies. They are the faceless poor, people who, through no fault of their own, have been dehumanized by America’s brutal capitalistic system. Having no homes of their own, they are somehow intrinsically and chronically undeserving of owning homes. They are seen as untrustworthy, immoral, violent and covetous. Steinbeck anticipates that peculiarly American phenomenon popularly known as “not in my backyard,” a reference to the fact that though Americans may recognize the existence of a problem and agree that something must be done about it, they are inclined to turn a blind eye when the solution involves them directly. As such, the Joads are forced to just keep moving. The Grapes of Wrath is more than an expose of economic oppression. Steinbeck’s condemnation extends to the duplicitous and contradictory nature of the American character. “At every turn the dispossessed sharecroppers are defrauded and persecuted in the Name 6 land of freedom and democracy” (Bodnar, 43). The search for home becomes a dog-eat-dog struggle that pits even migrant workers against each other, reminiscent of starving animals tearing at each other over a few scraps of food. The notion of equal justice before the law is perverted by police, who serve the interests of the businessmen and landlords who wield real power. Thus democracy is betrayed. Ma Joad reacts to their predicament with an eloquent act of protest, burning a postcard of the statue of liberty, an icon of America’s promise. Ma Joad’s symbolic act of defiance is more than a comment on her family’s experience. It is an allegorical rejection of the conviction that the “American Dream” applies to everyone. For the Joads there is no more “truth” in this than in the preamble to the Constitution, with its affirmation of the universal truth that all men are created equal, a noble concept arising from the Enlightenment but interpreted in the late 18th century by wealthy, white planters to mean those of their own social class and economic standing. For the disenfranchised in The Grapes of Wrath, the American dream is a tragic misrepresentation, overblown propaganda proclaimed with pseudo-religious fervor, justifying the self-satisfaction of men like those who forced the Joads to abandon their homes. Steinbeck’s consideration of the American dream’s warped credo took in “the ecological and cultural diminishment all around him,” comprehending and mourning “the importance of individual action to preserve the American Dream,” and the failure of America as a “land of unending promise and possibilities” (Cape, 4). In Mother Earth and Earth Mother: The Recasting of Myth in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Joan Hedrick takes up this theme, writing that the underlying philosophy of the American dream “has been closely tied to the image of an Name 7 abundant, tillable soil” (134). The loss of land and home is more than a personal tragedy for the migrant farmer, it signifies nothing less than the destruction of a cherished national ideology, an undermining of democratic ideals comparable to the epoch that witnessed the end of the Roman republic and the onset of rule by the powerful few. The selective reality of the American dream and its economic fallout is quantifiable, with an easily recognizable material cost. From a cultural standpoint, there is an even more degrading price to be paid in terms of the human soul. The people Steinbeck characterized in The Grapes of Wrath were shunned by people who ought to have offered help, fellow Americans from whom they differed only minimally. To those who rejected the Joads and forced them to keep moving, these were mere “Okies,” simple people regarded as either degenerates or simpletons, whose simple speech invited derision and contempt. The tendency to classify others based on appearance and social origin is a familiar American shortcoming, one that has long hampered efforts to integrate American society. This is usually identified with issues of race. But in The Grapes of Wrath it transcends race. Steinbeck portrays a socio-cultural segregation that is as present as racism, albeit more insidious. Ma Joad rails against the unfairness of this particular brand of prejudice, insisting that her family can claim a legacy that is as “American” as anyone’s. “We’re Joads. We don’t look up to nobody. Grampa’s grampa, he fit in the Revolution. We was farm people till the debt” (Steinbeck, 537). As “farm people,” the Joads are rightful inheritors of the most cherished dimension of the American dream, the right and privilege land ownership, of identifying with a piece of earth that has sustained generations. Survival is a complicated theme in The Grapes of Name 8 Wrath: the struggle for physical survival amid deprivation and material loss is accompanied by the fight to sustain one’s sense of individual worth. The Joads’ survival depends on more than finding a new home and the means to feed and clothe themselves; it is equally a matter of believing they have a right to live and prosper in their own country. Ma Joad, the family’s link to a past of which they have a right to be proud, reminds them of this legacy and impels them to persevere. Perseverance has been a central tenet of America’s farming industry ever since the troubled era that Steinbeck chronicles. Farmers, particularly the smaller, family farms have long been pressured by factors that undermined and displaced the migrant farmers in the 1930s. Economic globalization, the growth in corporate agriculture and technological advances that produce cheaper, synthetic substitutes for crop yields have driven many farmers out of business and off lands that have been in the same family for generations. The drive for profits motivates economic decisions that impact farmers, but as writer and agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry contends, economies of scale have their own destructive reality. “American agriculture has demonstrated by its own ruination that you cannot solve economic problems just by increasing scale and, moreover…(it) is almost certain to cause other problems-ecological, social, and cultural” (Berry, 15). Berry proposes that America has developed technologies capable of significantly expanding agricultural production, scientific advances that have outstripped our ability to manage their economic consequences. The business interests, and political supporters, that have pushed for globalization have argued that a supranational economy will improve the lives Name 9 and economic conditions for everyone, but in so doing they marginalize the entrepreneurs, small farmers and others who are independently employed (Berry, 14). And so it seems the vulnerability of the Joads is not only still with us, it has been magnified by the modernization of farming practices that are aimed at maximizing profits. Steinbeck reminds us that manipulation of the land and its resources has been with us, in some form, for a long time. Upon reaching California, the shining destination of their exodus, the migrant farmers become caught up in this vicious cycle, finding that they were vulnerable to the same hostile forces that drove them from their homes in Oklahoma. The cruel irony of the situation is that the very people who resist them in California were once as powerless and desperate as the Joads. “Once California belonged to Mexico and its land to Mexicans; and a horde of tattered feverish Americans poured in. And such was their hunger for land that they took the land…and these things were possession, and possession was ownership” (Steinbeck, 231). The owners to whom Steinbeck refers have become cynical and secure in their ownership. In their complacency, they are comfortable regarding the Joads and their kind as inseparable from the foreign masses that come to America from China, Europe and Mexico seeking new homes and an opportunity to better their situations. Set adrift from their roots, bereft of belongings and any sense of empowerment, the Joads, though they are “seven generations back Americans,” find that they are as alienated from mainstream American society as the immigrants who risk everything to undertake an even longer journey than the trek that brought the Joads to California (Steinbeck, 238). It is a bitter fact of American history that the sole comfort in Steinbeck’s message is that when people have nothing Name 10 left to lose, they can find strength and a way to survive by coming together. But their solidarity does not guarantee a happy ending; indeed, it is only as a united group that they may hope to extract, often by force, that which they have lost: homes, futures and hope. Steinbeck observes ominously that “when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that rings through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed” (Ibid). The Grapes of Wrath ends with an expression of defiance by the repressed in the person of Tom Joad who, determined and inspired to act against the systematic oppression that has preyed on his people, sets out to do what he can to alleviate their suffering. His speech remains one of the most memorable “people power” manifestos in the annals of American literature. “I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be everywhere – wherever you can look. Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there (Steinbeck, 387). Tom’s speech is a declaration of survival, an assurance that by banding together the Joads and those alongside whom they have fought and suffered have won through. But Tom holds out no particular hope or promised reward; his is simply a gritty declaration that he will carry on, determined to make a home for his kind somewhere, somehow. In the 70 years since its initial publication, the popularity of The Grapes of Wrath has risen and fallen according to the vagaries of literary taste and in accordance with American social change. Steinbeck’s impassioned plea for social and economic justice rings as true today as it did in the 1930s. With American families still feeling the consequences of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, Steinbeck’s message has acquired new meaning Name 11 and relevance for a new generation. To put it simply, as long as there are Americans whose homes are threatened and civil liberties are curtailed, all Americans may count themselves among the dispossessed. Name 12 References Berry, Wendell. Another Turn of the Crank. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 1996. Bodnar, John. Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy and Working People in American Film. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2003. Cape, Robin. “’The Grapes of Wrath’ and the Modern Sustainability Conversation.” Thesis. University of North Carolina/Asheville, Spring 2009. Hedrick, Joan. “Mother Earth and Earth Mother: The Recasting of Myth in Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’” The Grapes of Wrath: A Collection of Critical Essays. Robert Davis, ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: G.K. Hall, 1982. Lisca, Peter. John Steinbeck: Nature and Myth. Crowell Publishing, 1978. Railton, Stephen. “Pilgrim’s Politics: Steinbeck’s Art of Conversion.” New Essays on the ‘Grapes of Wrath.’ CUP Archive, 1990. Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York, NY: Viking Press, 1939. Read More