The Grapes of Wrath

After killing the officer who killed Casy, Tom tells Ma and offers to leave. This is to ease the inevitable pressure that harboring a fugitive would bring on the family. Ma implores him to stay. As she says, “We’re crackin’ up, Tom. There ain’t no fambly now. An’ Rosaharn… She gonna have her baby an’ they won’t be no fambly” (411). The Joads are teetering on the brink. Having spent most of the novel trying to keep her family together through terrible circumstances, Ma now suspects that Tom’s departure could spell the end. As she explains, it is not just that they are landless, almost penniless, and without a home or secure work. Nor is it that the grandparents, Noah, and Casy, are now either dead or gone. It is that the other remaining men no longer have the strength to lead the family and keep it whole. Al wants to go off on his own; Uncle John “is jus’ a-draggin’ along” (411); and Pa seems lost.

As such, Ma sees Tom and Rose of Sharon as their last remaining chance to prosper as a family. If Tom, as her remaining eldest son and the real male leader of the family, can survive, and if Rose of Sharon has her baby, perhaps there is hope they will still be a functioning familial group. With Tom’s character and the first of a new generation to rally around, they can pull through. Unfortunately, neither of these things comes to pass. Tom is forced to abandon the family when his position is inadvertently exposed by Ruthie. Meanwhile, Rose of Sharon’s child is stillborn, a result of the stress and malnutrition she endured through their time in California. These two events seem to doom Ma’s hopes for keeping the family intact. Furthermore, they are proceeded by torrential rains and flooding. These destroy the last of the family’s possessions and ruin the truck, a crucial symbol of the family’s shared journey and destiny.

However, this devastation paves the way for something redemptive. Tom, forced initially to hide alone following the police officer’s death, gains Casy’s insight into the fundamental connectedness of things. Relatedly, he realizes that his individual identity and ego do not matter:

I’ll be everywhere—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there… An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there (439).

Tom understands that he must accept a life of struggle and likely die for the collective cause of his people, the migrants. And if he does perish then he will live on in their fights and ultimately in the triumphs of oppressed people everywhere. It takes separation from his family to see this, and it takes his total departure from them for it to be put into practice.

A more enigmatic and radical instantiation of the same idea occurs at the end of the novel. There, having lost everything including Tom and the baby, the beleaguered survivors of this shattered family escape through the rain to a barn where a starving man is dying. With their own family devasted, Ma and Rose of Sharon share a moment of profound and wordless understanding. Told that the man needs milk to live, “the two women looked deep into each other” (475). This moment of connection precipitates the rest of the family being asked to leave. Rose of Sharon then feeds the man the milk from her breast.

With this act, Rose of Sharon consummates the destruction of the family as the primary unit of practical concern and transcends it towards a new locus of social identity and interest. This can be seen in the ostensibly uncanny character of the act. By having a young woman breastfeed an adult man, Steinbeck subverts the essential logic and boundaries of the family. These are, first, that the intimacy of this act can only occur between a mother and her child; and second, that the acts’ purpose is to nurture the next generation of one’s own family only. Instead, by nurturing a stranger and an adult, Rose of Sharon redirects her attention to human beings as a whole. Specifically, she redirects her intimacy and the life-giving quality of her body towards the suffering humanity of the migrants. Thus, this represents the most complete transition from an “I” or an “us,” in the sense of the family group, to a “we”. It can be seen as the culmination of a process occurring throughout the novel. This is one whereby boundaries between family units and the broader community are progressively dissolved—for only in this way, with the dissolution of Joad families everywhere, can the Joads’s suffering be redeemed and the system which created that suffering be overcome.