The Grapes of Wrath

When Tom and Casy arrive at what used to be Tom’s parents’ house they meet a man named Muley. He stayed behind, living alone outside and eating wild animals while the rest of the community left. His situation and his comments give expression to the tragedy suffered by those evicted from their homes. As he says, “They jus’ cut em in two. Place where folks live is them folks. They ain’t whole, out lonely on the road in a piled-up car” (54). This sentiment is also reflected by an unnamed farmer in Chapter 9. He wonders,

How’ll it be not to know what land’s outside the door? How if you wake up in the night and know—and know the willow tree’s not there? Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you can’t. The willow tree is you (93).

What both express is a sense of the fundamental unity between place and self. A place and a home are not, in this view, an objective set of spaces which individuals happen to inhabit alongside other people and objects. Rather, a home is part of the very fabric of who a person is. Conversely, individuals’ lives and experiences constitute the fabric and meaning of the place. This can be seen when Tom talks about a gate that Ma always used to leave closed but is now open. The closed gate referred to a story when a pig got into the yard and ate the baby of another family. Likewise, the preacher points to the ditch where he baptized Tom. And the unnamed farmer tells his wife, “The pain on that mattress there—that dreadful pain—that’s you” (93). This signifies that a place defines a person and vice versa. This is both temporal and practical. Individuals know who they are because the place refers to and evokes the experiences of their lives. And individuals know how to be because the place and the equipment linked to it is adapted to their weaknesses, strengths, and needs.

As such, the tragedy of the farmers’ eviction is that, with it, they lose a part of themselves. They become disorientated. On the road and in California, they will never recover that sense of familiarity and belonging that they once had on their farms. However, there is also a danger here. Once lost it becomes fatal to dwell upon or refuse to look beyond that previous place. This danger is represented by Muley, who is both literally and metaphorically stuck in the past. His refusal to leave, when all others and all possibility of a meaningful life have vanished, turns him into a kind of animal. He is “hunted” (60) by the authorities, living a life in constant evasion of them. He has no one to talk to or care for him and no roof over his head. His only activity, or “work”, is subsistence hunting of lizards and other wild creatures.

Further, his refusal turns him into “a damn ol’ graveyard ghost” (53). He haunts the places of his past. He lingers around and returns to the bush where he lost his virginity and the barn where his father was gored to death by a bull. But without connection to a present or future these memories are empty. They are relics of a life from which he is severed. Moreover, they simply re-emphasize the very thing he is trying to escape. In a more real and irrevocable sense, his home and past have been lost and are now irretrievable.

The case of Muley indicates that a critical aspect of one’s connection to place is also other people. A place has meaning because it is shared with others. The willow gives shade not just for one person but for a couple. An irrigation ditch is built not just for an individual’s benefit but with the whole community in mind. And the practical meaning of the place, of the tools and fields, the horses, and barns, stands in relation to work. It gains its meaning from the communal labour which feeds a family, provides it shelter and warmth, and ensures its children can grow. Without all this there is no place—nor therefore is there any full self. It is also why the Joads still have hope. Despite everything, they retain the human ties and affection which keep alive the possibility of finding a new land and a new home. They retain the one thing essential to this: the spark of human solidarity which Casy calls “holy” (85).