Humanism in The Grapes of Wrath

Why did you choose this particular book?

I chose this book because I like the author. The Grapes of Wrath is of course his epic masterpiece of social consciousness in its picture of helpless people crushed by drought and depression. Even here, though, as in all his works to follow, Steinbeck’s focus is upon man, the nature of man and his successes and failures, rather than upon the mere detached picture of an indifferent society, in contrast, for example, to some of Steinbeck’s immediate forerunners in a American fiction, such as Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, who depicted man simply as a wisp in the wind of giant American industrialism and stampeding capitalism.

Humanism in The Grapes of Wrath

Abstract：

    Humanism is one of the most important philosophical strands to be traced through The Grapes of Wrath. All the major characters in the novel seem to move from a religiously based to a humanly based philosophy of life in the novel. Additionally, the humanistic philosophy we find in The grapes of Wrath has been attributed to the influence of transcendental philosophy,

Key word:

humanism, philosophy, spirit, sympathetic, justice

Humanism in The Grapes of Wrath

1. Brief Introduction of John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was the foremost novelist of the American Depression of the 1930s. He was born in Salinas, California, the locale of much of his finest fiction. His sympathy for the migrant workers and the down-trodden, so evident in his writhing, was the result of firsthand knowledge of their struggles. From is boyhood he was self-supporting, he worked as a laborer, a seaman on a cattle-boat, newspaper reporter, bricklayer, chemist's assistant, surveyor, and migratory fruitpicker. His writing reflected his concern with the rituals of manual labor.

His major works are: Tortilla Flat (1935), In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), The Long Valley (1938), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), East of Eden (1952). Among them, The Grapes of Wrath, generally regarded as his masterpiece and his most popular novel, showed the migration of the “Okies” from the “Dust Bowls” to California, a migration that ended in broken dreams and misery but at the same time affirmed the ability of the common people to endure and prevail.

Steinbeck’s treatment of the social problems of his time, particularly the plight of the dispossessed farmer, earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and, in 1962, a Nobel Prize for literature.

2. Plot

The novel begins just after Tom Joad is released on parole from prison. He travels all the way back home only to find his family making ready to move westward. Being unable to repay the money they have borrowed from banks, the Joads, including Grandma and Grandpa, Pa and Ma, John, Noah, Al, Rose of Sharon and Connie, Ruthie and Winfield, are evicted from their land in Oklahoma. Tempted by the fertility of California, they decide to seek their fortune in this “land of promise.” The family, joined by Casy, an ex-preacher, starts on the long and hard journey in an old wagon. During the journey Tom’s grandparents die；Noah, Tom’s dull-witted brother, leaves the family and Connie, Tom’s brother-in-low, deserts them. The rest, however, continue. When they arrive in California, they can hardly earn enough to keep themselves form going hungry. They spend some time in a government-run camp, and later work on a peach farm. When organizing a strike, Casy is killed. Tom revenges his friend and is seriously wounded. In order to protect Tome from the police, Ma, the soul of the family, makes a decision that they should leave the farm. While hiding Tom, they work at picking cotton. But Tom at last leaves the family to carry on Casy’s work in trying to improve the lot of the downtrodden everywhere. Because the rains had made destroyed the Joads’ car, they came to a barn, which they shared with a boy and his starving father. Then the poor kept each other alive in the depression years.

3. Character Analysis

The Joad Family

Grandpa: Grandpa Joad is like a character out of Chaucer’s “ The Miller’s Tale”—he is lecherous, loud, cantankerous, and the Joads seem to secretly relish his consistency in this. Grandpa is an old ripper, and his “joie de vivre” is earthily and convincingly pictured. Early, he repeatedly insists on his intention to gorge himself on grapes when he reaches California. Ironically, though, Grandpa panics at the time of departure, has to be drugged with cough medicine, and dies of a sudden stroke on the first night out, to be buried on his home ground of Oklahoma.

Grandma: She is Grandpa’s spirited equal, whether eating, cussing or praying. She has a right with him for the duration of their long life together. Flighty as Grandma appears, her affection for her husband is obvious before Grandpa’s death. After Grandpa’s death, she retires more and more into a dream world, until she dies in Ma’s arms during the night as they drive across the desert.

Uncle John: Pa Joad’s older brother, Uncle John can be regarded as the black sheep of the family, in that he is an eccentric loner, and a lonely guilt-ridden man. His wife dies for him. The pattern of Uncle John’ life alternates between periods of severe abstinence and brief binges, alcoholic and sexual. Also, he has always tried to assuage his guilt by being good to people—candy and gum for the kids, a sack of flour dropped off on somebody’s porch..

Pa: The elder Tom Joad is a man who, when we meet him, is finding it hard to accept the brute fact of his eviction from the land, where he has labored all his life. His wife and children continue to show respect for him as the head of the family, but in point of act the leadership slowly passes out of his hands into Ma’s and Tom’s. He is presented as a stunned, bewildered figure, sometimes angry, sometimes passive.

Ma: Ma is a powerful though unassuming figure in the Joad clan. She is probably the ideal mother figure. She is patient in her unending labors, and in her determination to keep down fear and encourage joy in her family. She has a sense of humor and on occasion a kind of girlishness. Yet she can act and act vigorously, in opposition to the menfolk when it is for the sake of preserving the family unit. Throughout the novel she emerges as a symbol of love, as a person who instinctively practices brotherly love. She is a person of insight and intuition, and is able to communicate with the philosopher of the novel, Jim Casy, and his unconscious” disciple,” her son Tom.

Noah: Nobody ever knows what Noah thinks or feels or even whether he is slightly feeble-minded, as Pa fears, because of an accident at his birth. He does his work reliably and never raises his voice in anger. On the day before the family sets out across the desert, as they encamp by a river, Noah announces to Tom his decision to remain by the river and fish. And indeed, the parting vision of such a placid existence of r Noah is a natural one.

Tom: Tom is a central character, and perhaps the one who develops most－and survives－in the novel. He is individualistic and quick to anger if he feels he is being pushed around; however, in the same time, he is also kind, sometimes witty, and potentially strong in the moral and intuition that his mother is. In fact, Jim Casy becomes his teacher, converting him by words and by his won example to the idea that a man cannot just look after himself but should be in the spirit of compassion and be obligated to help others. Although still an outlaw of society at the end of the book, Tom’s status is actually changed: he is fighting for social amelioration, a better way of life for his people and for all struggling people. Tom, in other words, experiences re-education and re-birth in the novel.

Rosesharn (Rose of Sharon): Rose is beauty, kind-hearted, but also vulnerable, sometimes she is self-deceiving. When her husband leaves her when she is pregnant, she still believes that he will come back. Most of Rosasharn’s existence in the story is centered upon her unborn child, who at length, because of inadequate diet, unsanitary and harassing living conditions, and perhaps because of Connie’s eventual desertion, is born dead. However, good and honest, she saves the life of a famished stranger with the milk from her breasts.

Al: Sixteen-year-old Al is expert at two things: tomcatting and mechanics. He worries about his responsibility for the old Hudson, but his judgments prove sound and dependable for the family. Typically, Al is an admirer of his older brother Tom and wishes to imitate him. At last he has become engaged to Aggie Wainwright, whose family has shared a boxcar with the Joads.

Ruthie: She is 12, and seen in the novel at that point of suspension between girlhood and womanhood, ranging from lady like composure which excludes her young brother Winfield to giggling, frantic games and exploits with him.

Winfield: He is 10, and realistically depicted in the gaucheries, the awkwardness, and the mischievousness of a 10 year old.

Other Characters

Jim Casy: The ex-preacher is revealed form the first as an introspective man who retains the respect of the community in spite of－later, because of－the fact that he now refuses to preach. He has examined himself, he says, and has found that although he still strongly feels a call to lead and help the people, he can no longer in good conscience preach the religious gospel they are accustomed to. It emerges that he doesn’t believe the old-time “hell fire” and “promise of heaven” religion is realistic for their present needs. Jim Casy, who is the Christ-figure prophet until his martyr’s death, speaks thoughts which reflect various philosophies: Transcendentalism, humanism, pragmatism, socialism. He does in fact lead and comfort the people; and he lays down his life for Tom Joad, who has in effect become his disciple and eventually takes over his work for social betterment.

Muley Graves: He is a neighbor of the Joads in Oklahoma, and he represents one of the pathetic directions in which the ruined lives of the Okies ran. Although his family has migrated to California, “something” kept him form accompanying them. The way he now roams the countryside, living almost like an animal off the land “like a graveyard ghost”, as he confesses—he seems a little touched. He is a sad figure to all, as we get our final glimpse of him standing forlornly in the dooryard of the Joad homestead.

Floyd Knowles: He is a brave, stronghearted young man who can be singled out from among the various men encountered by the Joads as commentator on the conditions of the migrants. He bitterly describes the exploitation of the workers by the owners, and the injustice and brutality of officials. Floyd speaks up and demands his legal rights, and he is immediately arrested on the false charges of “red agitator”.

Mr. Thomas: Thomas is an interesting representative—a good man—of the small farmer or small businessman contingent in the hierarchy of laborers, owners, bankers, officials, etc. He is sympathetic to the situation of the migrants—for example, he himself is ashamed and angered that he must reduce their pay from thirty cents to twenty-five cents, and he does them the important favor of revealing the plan to cause a riot at the Saturday dance. He is one of the little men who will probably be squeezed out eventually by larger business interests; as it is, he is obliged to lower the wages because he is under the power of the Farmers’ Association, which in turn is controlled d by The Bank of the West. The power interests will not hesitate to wipe him out if he resists.

4. Comment:

The entire major characters in the novel, with Jim Casy and later, Tom Joad leading, seem to move form a religiously based to a humanly based philosophy of life in the novel. It is clear, of course, as soon as Jim Casy begins to explain to everyone why the cannot be a “preacher” any longer that he more and more finds the religious precepts of his and his people’s immediate past untenable in their present realities: some of Jim’s most memorable speeches early in the book are his declarations that he wants to help and comfort the people still, he feels things are changing and they are going someplace, but he can no longer look upon sin in the conventional Bible-belt evangelical way nor can he offer facile prayers or parade future heavenly glory to people whose lives are materially an psychically wretched in the present. In another important speech he claims the “spirit”—a feeling of which has always figured so largely in local religion—a feeling of which has always figured so largely in local religion—seems now to him to be more of a human spirit that the spirit of a remote God; at any rate it is this human spirit which he now feels sure of , just as he feels certain that the souls of all the people go to make up one great soul: the Oversoul spoken of before.

Tom Joad moves toward a philosophy of humanism in the novel, too. At the beginning, although he is a sensitive, kind and communicative person, he is still, rather naturally, “out for himself”—individualistic, we might say, focusing on his won personal and material well-being and of course, the welfare of the Joad family. His actions, that is, stem more form particular causes and crises rather than from any sense of general principle. As he says, “I put one foot down in front of the other,” and” I climb fences when I got to climb fences.” He is, however, an admirer and disciple of Jim Casy’s almost form the beginning, too, since Jim is the first person form his past whom Tom encounters on this way home form prison. Tom always listens with curiosity and interest to Jim Casy, and later he realizes, as he tells his mother, that he has absorbed more of Casy’s philosophizing that he knew. He takes over Jim Casy’s philosophy and his tasks, too, at that point after Casy’s martyrdom when he quotes the preacher and takes up his credo that “Two are better than one.” He speaks in terms of “our people,” of doing something so that they may live decently and happily again. Tom Joad has thus enlarged his compassion to all human beings, beyond the family unit.

The women like Ma and Sairy Wilson can of course be included among the “humanists” in the novel too, for (first of all as mothers) all their actions are outgoing and predominantly selfless. Ma Joad cars about human beings and understand s them strikingly will. There are countless examples of her insight and understanding: after Grandpa’s death, later in the evening, she instructs Rosasharn to go and lie by Grandma because “she’ll be feeling lonesome now”; she is constantly attuned to the complex emotions which come with Rosasharn’s pregnancy, compounded by the desertion of her husband Connie—Ma prevents Tom from needling her, yet encourages her to see Tom’s jokes about her swelling body as affectionate, which they are; she comprehends that the girl  in her loneliness wants to enjoy the Saturday dance at Weedpatch  but desperately fears the temptation of her flesh, so that she  and Ma go and sit together, Rosasharn secure in Ma’s promise to keep her out of trouble; and at the very lowest ebb of her daughter’s morale, shortly before her baby is due, Ma makes exactly the right move by giving Rosasharn the gift of gold earrings, one of the few family possessions salvaged, and further distracts her form her troubles by piercing her ears on the spot. Ma silently and without judgment whatsoever acknowledges Uncle John’s absolute need to get drunk on the night Jim Casy has stepped forward to go to prison in place of Tome; on another occasion, she breaks down with reasonable and sympathetic words the pathetic defenses of the mother whose hungry children have licked the Joad stew pot and gone home to brag and ask questions about it. One of the prime instances of Ma’s insight into and compassion for humanity is her exchange with the scared little storekeeper at her Hooper ranch, where her hard-earned dollar is so swiftly absorbed by the exorbitant pries set by the Hooper controls. She has complained with perfect justice about the unfair price on each item of their purchases. When finished shopping and on their way out, she realizes that she still has no sugar, which she has promised the family. She asks the man to trust her for the dime’s worth of sugar, which her family is earning at the moment out in the orchards. He cannot: company rule. Not even for a dime, Ma asks? “He looked pleadingly at her. And then his face lost its fear. He took ten cents form his pocket and rang it up in the cash register. There, he said with relied. While he cannot go against the owners, out of fear, he can loan money form his won pocket…. As Ma gratefully acknowledges his huge gesture, in relative terms, she makes her point about “humanism” among the poor people in general: “I’m learning one thing good. Leaning it all a time, everyday. If you’re in trouble or hurt or need—go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help—the only ones.”

It might be added that the humanistic philosophy we find in The grapes of Wrath has been attributed to the influence of transcendental philosophy, which stresses man’s wroth and dignity and potential depth of character, and to Walt Whitman’s exuberant belief in the masses and love of one’s fellow man.

5. Conclusion:

The Grapes of Wrath is highly valued for its social and political message. Steinbeck in his panoramic descriptions exposes the incredible ruthlessness of bankers and fruit growers and the great sufferings of the agricultural migrants in the 1930s in America. Under the circumstances, humanism is a big question merit pondering. Or more exactly, be humane is the essential thing.