The Grapes of Wrath

Ma starts out in the novel as a traditional housewife. She cooks, cleans, and has a secondary role in decision making. This is demonstrated by her physical position when the family gather for a meeting before their trip. As Steinbeck explains, the older men form a semi-circle around the truck. Then “Ma came out of the house, and Granma with her, and Rose of Sharon behind, walking daintily. They took their places behind the squatting men” (104). This hierarchy continues inside the truck; only two men ever drive, Tom and Al. Moreover, it is viewed as Pa and Uncle John’s right to occupy the two positions next to the driver.

However, as the journey progresses this starts to change. When most of the family agrees to Tom’s proposal that some of them go on ahead while others stay and fix the car, Ma aggressively asserts herself. Grabbing an iron bar and daring Pa to take it off her, she convinces the family to abandon the plan. Clearly, life on the road and then in California transforms the traditional family dynamic. This is due to the absence of work for the men and the lack of a secure home. It is Ma, for example, who makes the decision to leave the government camp. And when Pa remarks that men used to decide things, she angrily rebukes him. As she says, “Times when they’s food an’ a place to set, then maybe you can use your stick …But you ain’t a-doin your job, either a-thinkin’ or a-workin’” (368). She has, by the novel’s end, become the de facto family leader. Unfortunately, this coincides with the fact that, with the rain and loss of Tom and her daughter’s baby, there will soon be no family to lead.

On his way back to his parents’ house, Tom meets Jim Casy, the ex-preacher of their community, resting under a tree. Tom offers him a drink, and Casy explains why he abandoned the role of preacher. He came to understand that conventional religion concealed a deeper truth about the holiness of human life and community. At best, God and Jesus were irrelevant. At worst, concern for them distorted awareness of this more fundamental “Sperit” (26). This is why Casy says, “I got to worryin’ about whether in messin’ around maybe I done somebody a hurt” (27).

When Casy meets Tom’s family and hears they are migrating to California he decides to join them. This is in part because he senses that many people out there will need help and consolation. It is also though because, rather than teaching, he wishes to learn. As he explains regarding the migrants, “gonna hear em’ talk, gonna hear ‘em sing…Gonna cuss an’ swear an’ hear the poetry of folks talkin’” (98). This mission reaches its apotheosis when he is imprisoned for assaulting a deputy wrongly trying to arrest someone in a Californian migrant camp. As Tom finds out when meeting Casy again at a strike, prison has deepened his practical understanding of the world. Speaking with people there taught him finally that there is no such thing as “sin.” Rather, “It’s need that makes all the trouble” (400). Human need and deprivation, not latent sinfulness, causes people to commit crimes and behave badly to one another. Shortly afterwards Casy is killed. However, as seen in his final conversation with Ma, Tom takes up the mantle of Casy’s philosophy, and thus his ideas and new mode of “preaching” live on.