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Imagine nationwide starvation, unemployment, and an unshakable fear; these qualities represent the Great Depression which lasted from 1929 until 1941. In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the entire Joad family or select members are used to represent these various qualities of the nation’s struggles during the Great Depression.
During the time of the Great Depression, unemployment was so widespread that constant travel was necessary in order to find any job that would pay to put food on the table. The Joad family must pick up and move on several times as jobs run out and others become available. Early in the novel, Tom Joad, fresh out of the McAlester prison for killing a man, finds a turtle on his way home to his family. After the turtle
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However, for the pregnant Rose of Sharon, her fear was for her baby. After the Joad family reaches the government camp, Rose of Sharon is confronted by “a stocky woman…carrying an apple box of dirty clothes…” who we later learn is Lisbeth Sandry. She begins to fill Rose of Sharon with the fear of losing her baby by saying things such as, “If you got sin on you--you better watch out for that there baby.” and telling her of two other women in the camp who lost their babies because they were “filled with sin”. Rose of Sharon tells Ma what she said and when Lisbeth returns again, she is met with the fury of Ma and is told to get away from the Joad family and to not come back. In response to this, Lisbeth says, “You’re hell-burnin’ sinners, all of you! ... I can see your black soul a-burnin’. I can see that innocent child in that there girl’s belly a-burnin’.” This further invokes fear into Rose of Sharon who somewhat believes what Lisbeth Sandry has told her, even though Ma tries and tries to comfort her. From that day forward, Rose of Sharon is fearful for her baby’s life and is constantly making sure the rest of the family knows that she must be taken care of. Even when Winfield is very sick and Pa buys him a can of milk, Rose of Sharon says, “I ain’t had no milk… I oughta have some.” Winfield needs the can of milk in order to get better and to stop the skitters …show more content…
Families were using all of their money to travel to find work and when jobs were not found, no money was made so there was nothing to purchase food with. This left numerous families scrounging to find anything they could eat or entering debts with local grocers in order for their families not to starve. This is evident with the Joad family when they are out of work for a brief period and they were not receiving sufficient nutrition. When Rose of Sharon finally has her baby, it is stillborn but not because of sin like Rose of Sharon believes. It is because of a lack of adequate and sufficient nutrition for Rose of Sharon and her baby. Also at the very end of the story, when Ma, Pa, Rose of Sharon, Ruthie, Winfield and Uncle John all try to find a dry place until the water recedes from their boxcar home, they encounter a man and his son, starving in a barn. The son tells the Joads, “Fust he was sick – but now he’s starvin’… Got sick in cotton. He ain’t et for six days.” In an attempt to help the weak and starving men, Rose of Sharon, having just lost her baby, breastfeeds the father to save his life. This is yet another example of how starved people were that they became so weak they could not fend for themselves anymore. The Joads understood the father and son’s struggles so they decided to try and help them with Rose of Sharon’s breastmilk because they had no money to spare to give the son so he could buy food
Al Joad is a fairly skinny guy of medium built who starts out being a
Rose of Sharon’s dreams of a perfect life start to fall apart when Connie deserts her suddenly. She can no longer find comfort in shared thoughts of a white-picket fence, and is forced to face reality. However, instead of concentrating on the Joad family crises, she diverts her worries fully to her baby once again.
or fear." Thus, if Ma acts as if everything is all right, then the family
Character arcs, a primary method of keeping the reader’s emotions tied to the novel and its characters in order to maintain their interest. This method of character development is often implored by writers such as John Steinbeck; this can be observed in his novel The Grapes Of Wrath. An example of such a character arc is Tom Joad’s spiritual and emotional development, as he gradually becomes Jim Casy’s spiritual heir and student. Fully understanding this dramatic development is started by one analyzing three different stages that Tom undergoes throughout his life; starting with his philosophy and actions as a young child, when he finally meets Jim Casy and the acceptance of the new way of thinking, concluded by when he decides to act on the
Wainwright stops to help the Joad family when they are in dire need of it. Mrs. Wainwright is the Joad’s boxcar neighbor at one of the many camps they live in. At this certain time, Rose of Sharon is expecting and is getting weak to the point of where her legs give out from under her. Mrs. Wainwright helps the Joad family in many ways; one being she helped deliver Rose of Sharon’s baby. “I he’ped with lots.” (440) she helped Rose of Sharon and Ma, without her the labor would have been sufficiently more painful. Without the help of others, the Joad’s (FINISH CONCLUDING
“Everybody wants a little piece of lan'. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It's just in their head. They're all the time talkin' about it, but its jus' in their head.” (Steinbeck) The Grapes of Wrath is most often categorized as an American Realist novel. It was written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. As a result of this novel, Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and prominently cited the novel when he won the Nobel Prize a little over twenty years after the text’s publication. This text follows the Joad family through the Great Depression. It begins in Oklahoma, watching as the family is driven from their home by drought and economic changes. Within the introduction of the novel the living conditions is described, “Every moving thing lifted the dust into the air: The walking man lifted a thin layer as high as his waist, and a wagon lifted the dust as high as the fence tops and an automobile boiled a cloud behind it.” (Grapes, 1) This novel is and will remain one of the most significant novels of the Great Depression. Despite its controversial nature it is timeless. In fact, the ending of this text is one of the most controversial pieces of literature written during the time period, and has never accurately made its way into film. The ending to John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath is the most significant portion of the novel due to its historical accuracy as well as its message about the American spirit.
The Great Depression and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath Though most Americans are aware of the Great Depression of 1929, which may well be "the most serious problem facing our free enterprise economic system", few know of the many Americans who lost their homes, life savings and jobs. This paper briefly states the causes of the depression and summarizes the vast problems Americans faced during the eleven years of its span. This paper primarily focuses on what life was like for farmers during the time of the Depression, as portrayed in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and tells what the government did to end the Depression. In the 1920's, after World War 1, danger signals were apparent that a great Depression was coming.
In the novel, The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck brings to the reader a variety of diverse and greatly significant characters. However, the majority of each characters' individuality happens to lie within what they symbolize in the microcosm of the Joad family and their acquaintances, which itself stands for the entire migrant population of the Great Depression era. One such character is that of Jim Casey, a former preacher and long-time friend of the Joads. In this story, Casey represents a latter-day Christ figure who longs to bring religious stability to the burgeon of migrant families facing West.
These were the actions taken before Rose of Sharon helps the starving stranger in the barn by feeding him her breast milk. Even though the Joads have never met this man, they know what it is like to be hungry and to suffer. Therefore, Rose of Sharon makes a huge sacrifice to help someone in need.
“: You hungry, Gabe? I was just fixing to cook Troy his breakfast,” (Wilson, 14). Rose understands her role in society as a woman. Rose also have another special talent as a woman, that many don’t have which is being powerful. Rose understands that some things she can’t change so she just maneuver herself to where she is comfortable so she won’t have to change her lifestyle. Many women today do not know how to be strong sp they just move on or stay in a place where they are stuck and unable to live their own life. “: I done tried to be everything a wife should be. Everything a wife could be. Been married eighteen years and I got to live to see the day you tell me you been seeing another woman and done fathered a child by her,”(Wilson, 33). The author wants us to understand the many things women at the time had to deal with whether it was racial or it was personal issues. Rose portrays the powerful women who won’t just stand for the
Marie had just traveled from her hometown of Ville Rose, where discarding your child made you wicked, to the city of Port-Au-Prince, where children are commonly left on the street. Marie finds a child that she thinks could not be more beautiful, “I thought she was a gift from Heaven when I saw her on the dusty curb, wrapped in a small pink blanket, a few inches away from a sewer as open as a hungry child’s yawn” (79). Marie has suffered many miscarriages, so she takes this child as if it were her own, “I swayed her in my arms like she was and had always been mine” (82). Marie’s hope for a child has paid off, or so it seems. Later, it is revealed that the child is, in fact, dead, and Marie fabricated a story to sanction her hopes and distract her from the harsh reality of her life, “I knew I had to act with her because she was attracting flies and I was keeping her spirit from moving on… She smelled so bad that I couldn’t even bring myself to kiss her without choking on my breath” (85). Her life is thrown back into despair as her cheating husband accuses her of killing children for evil purposes and sends her to
Rose’s loyalty to her family showed a load amount of strength in character. Even though she was not the mother of the child, who would eventually be named Raynell, she still stepped up to the task, even if it was against what she wanted in life. In the play Fences it states, “Okay Troy.. you’re right. I’ll take care of your baby for
Rose Mary is a selfish woman and decides not to go to school some mornings because she does not feel up to it. Jeannette takes the initiative in making sure that her mother is prepared for school each morning because she knows how much her family needs money. Even though Rose Mary starts to go to school every day, she does not do her job properly and thus the family suffers financially again. When Maureen’s birthday approaches, Jeannette takes it upon herself to find a gift for her because she does not think their parents will be able to provide her with one. Jeannette says, “at times I felt like I was failing Maureen, like I wasn’t keeping my promise that I’d protect her - the promise I’d made to her when I held her on the way home from the hospital after she’d been born. I couldn’t get her what she needed most- hot
Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is a realistic novel that mimics life and offers social commentary too. It offers many windows on real life in midwest America in the 1930s. But it also offers a powerful social commentary, directly in the intercalary chapters and indirectly in the places and people it portrays. Typical of very many, the Joads are driven off the land by far away banks and set out on a journey to California to find a better life. However the journey breaks up the family, their dreams are not realized and their fortunes disappear. What promised to be the land of milk and honey turns to sour grapes. The hopes and dreams of a generation turned to wrath. Steinbeck opens up this catastrophe for public scrutiny.
The Grapes of Wrath is a novel by John Steinbeck that exposes the desperate conditions under which the migratory farm families of America during the 1930's live under. The novel tells of one families migration west to California through the great economic depression of the 1930's. The Joad family had to abandon their home and their livelihoods. They had to uproot and set adrift because tractors were rapidly industrializing their farms. The bank took possession of their land because the owners could not pay off their loan. The novel shows how the Joad family deals with moving to California. How they survive the cruelty of the land owners that take advantage of them, their poverty and willingness to work.