Grape Depression
John Steinbeck's Naturalism and Direct Historical Representation: The Great Depression and the Grapes of Wrath
Literature cannot help but be reflective of the period in which it is written. Even novels that are set somewhere outside the time and place that author occupies will necessarily include some degree of commentary on the issues, beliefs, and values of the author's own world. This is, in part, what makes an understanding of history so essential to a true understanding of individual works of literature as well as larger literary movements, periods, and genres; though historical criticism is certainly not the only valid approach to reading and interpreting literature, a lack of basic historical knowledge concerning the background of a specific text will almost certainly lead to a misinterpretation of that text and a lack of awareness of certain subtleties and implications in a given work.
At other times, of course, authors make their works far more explicitly about the times in which they are living, or perhaps through which they recently lived. Fiction that is directly and explicitly historical can be very powerful as a means of social and political commentary, and when the literature is of a high enough caliber the messages and characters of a particular piece of historical fiction continue to resonate with subsequent generations while still retaining the flavor and values of the time in which it was created. The stylistic choices and implicit values of a given piece of historical fiction, that is, are embedded both in the external story of the text as well as in its symbolic and structural details.
John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is one such piece of historical fiction. Published in 1939, at the end of a decade typified by the major economic downturn known as the Great Depression, the novel depicts the plight of the Joad family and the country at large as poverty, hunger, and a conspiracy of weather patterns changes the face of the Midwest -- the "Breadbasket" of America -- and forces homesteading farmers West in search of itinerant labor and land where foraging might actually yield some nutrition. Both the events and the values of the time period are clearly captured and starkly presented in Steinbeck's novel, and the style of the text is as important to an understanding of the work and the time period as is the story itself. This paper will examine the historical background created by the Great Depression, the basic overall elements of Naturalism in literature, and finally discuss The Grapes of Wrath as a naturalistic representation of this particular period in American history.
The Great Depression
Like most major economic events in modern history, the Great Depression is a highly simplistic way of referring to a time period created by fairly complex and ongoing economic forces. Throughout the 1920s, the newly created Federal Reserve system gave investors a great deal of confidence that the economy would be stabilized, and when the Fed tried raising interest rates in 1928 and 1929 to discourage stock market speculation, business reacted by shrinking back hugely in a succession of mutually harmful protectionist practices (DeLong 1997). This led to the crash of the stock market in 1929 and the beginnings of the recession.
Though The Grapes of Wrath is not directly concerned with the machinations of the economic system that had been created in contemporary American society (the subject is addressed in a symbolic and decidedly non-economic manner, as will be detailed below), it is important to understand the failures of the financial institutions in the country during the 1930s in order to understand the totality of the Joad family's plight. The recession did not occur only in the United States, but took place on a global level; investors were left without money to invest from companies failing, companies failed due to a lack of investment, and the entire global system of finance and trade essentially ground down to an excruciating snail's (or turtle's) pace (Smiley 2008). Very rich individuals actually got richer early on (and some throughout), but in general there was a scramble by banks and those in the middle-class urban and suburban areas to obtain real assets and begin building some semblance of financial security again (Smiley 2008). In the Midwest this meant one thing: land.
By 1933, an estimated fifteen million adults of working age could not find employment -- meaning approximates for the proportion of unemployed range from a quarter to a third of the country's non-farm workforce (The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers 2003;...
But the value and meaning of life and love described by Casy is manifested by the outsiders, the Okies, the rejects, the wanderers, the strangers, and the oppressed. They are the socially marginal characters of a self-satisfying culture. They are the ones Steinbeck admires in his novel for they are the ones who "wander through the wilderness of hardships, seeking their own Promised Land" (Shockley 87). They await the
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