‘Poverty and the struggle to make a living are common themes in American
literature.’ Compare the handling of these themes in TGOW with at least one other
text prescribed for this topic.
Throughout his novel ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, Steinbeck presents poverty and the
struggle to find work as key themes within the oppression of the American poor and the
disillusionment of the “promise land” of California in favour of brutal realism. Through the
exploitation of the helplessness of the American poor against the mechanisation of agriculture to
the extent of maintaining their poverty for profit, Steinbeck furiously accuses the oppressive
corporate greed and commercialisation of a great crime, one worth of the God’s wrath in the
Biblical title ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, and vividly explores the dehumanisation of the poor and their
great suffering in poverty to carry his radical message for change.
To begin with, in ‘Grapes of Wrath’, Steinbeck explores the new hardships of traditional
agricultural work in the 1930s from the rise of new technology such as tractors and the resulting
difficulty to find new work as a main theme within his novel. Due to the failure of crops in the
Dust Bowl and inability to compete with advancing technology, the land of many farmers, such
as the Joads, is requisitioned by the bank to pay their debt and they go west in search of work.
Steinbeck depicts the uncontrollable technology, describing how the “driver could not control”
the tractors and this “monster” that “had somehow got into the driver’s hands...had goggled him
and muzzled him” showing mechanisation to go beyond the common man’s control. This is only
the beginning of the poor’s struggle as technology dominates the agricultural industry, making it
nearly impossible to find decently paid work. The Joads encounter many other families, such as
the Wilsons, on the way to California via the “migrant road” of Highway 66, all being “refugees
from dust and shrinking land.” The Joads are amongst the 440,000 to migrate from Oklahoma
during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The critic Malcolm Cowley in his 1939 review states
that Steinbeck shows how “little by little, that not only a family but a whole culture is being
uprooted” and is giving way to profits of mechanisation. In Willa Cather’s ‘My Antonia’, the
difficulty of the migrant family is presented in their similar difficulty to work it to any true profit.
The Shimerdas “knew nothing about farming” and the father, Mr Shimerda, is not suited to the
unforgiving land or to physical labour. During their first winter in Nebraska, he is found dead
after a long period of homesickness and depression. The narrator Jim admits that “Mr. Shimerda
had only been so unhappy that he could not live any longer”. The poverty and death that would
have befallen the Shimerdas without the Burden family encaptures the American poors’ struggle
with the land that is similar to the Joads and other families in the Dust Bowl, that the Shimerdas
cannot manage without experience and the Joads without the technology. Steinbeck furthers
this struggle against the land beyond ‘My Antonia’ to the poor’s struggle against mechanisation
as well as the weather. Therefore, Steinbeck presents the inability of the American poor to
compete with mechanisation and consequently work becomes increasingly difficult to find,
leaving the Joads and other migrant families completely vulnerable to the exploitation of the
“monster” of the banks that took their land.
Moreover, the “monster” that Steinbeck personifies the bank to be, through its power and
corporate greed, appears to want to keep the American poor in poverty. As the “dispossessed
are drawn west” by the circulating pamphlets that promise work, they slowly begin to realise the
, method of the employers. One man explains to the Joad family that “this fella wants eight
hundred men...so he prints up five thousand” and through the elimination of those demanding
higher wages, he is able to get those who will work for less, since “the more fellas he can get
an’ the hungrier, the less he’s gonna pay”. This demonstrates the exploitation of the American
migrants, forcing them to the point of desperation that they would work for nothing but “biscuits”
and the bare essentials of survival. One employer, Mr Thomas, describes to Tom Joad how they
have the same set wages, stating that the pay on that new day was “twenty five cents”
compared to the previous day’s “thirty cents.” The Farmer’s Association that he describes is one
of many that large landowners were part of during the 1930s that enabled the setting of work
wages and standards. Mr Thomas, though he argues that his workers are “worth thirty”, he is
forced to lower the wages to “the rate” as the argument is that paying thirty will only “cause
unrest.” The critic Alan Yuhas observed that the “heroes of Grapes should be familiar: migrant
workers mistreated and discriminated by the states” and this is vivified in the collective
oppression of the working class to force them to stay in poverty in order to profit as much as
possible. The corporate greed of landowners has gone beyond individual employer’s control.
That metaphorical manmade “monster” that Steinbeck describes “isn’t men but can make men
do what it wants” and these companies and the bank “breath profits” and “eat the interest on
money.” This contrast of the vast profits of the corporations to the working man barely surviving
from the active oppression into poverty stems from a force that even the higher men cannot fight
against, only work with. The common men submit to the great power of the banks as they drive
the tractors, ignoring accusations of betrayal from their own as they say “can’t think of that. Got
to think of my own kids”, and assist in the destruction of camps such as Weedpatch, which is a
sanctuary of their own community and authority, and yet they come to “knife their own” because
they claim “ a fella’s gotta eat.” Similarly, in Theodore Dreiser’s ‘Sister Carrie’, Carrie struggles
to find a job as a lower class migrant that pays enough to go beyond her own living costs. The
newly mechanised working force within the thriving industrial city of Chicago Carrie approaches,
observing that “anything was good enough so long as it paid- say five dollars a week to begin
with”. However, her expectations soon appear unrealistic. Carrie “paid another four dollars and
pocketed her fifty cents in despair” after accepting the only job she could find, demonstrating the
disillusionment she experiences with her original expectations. This is similar to the decreased
expectations of the migrants as they move west expecting work, instead barely surviving and
becoming desperate to the point of taking anything, as Carrie does when she takes the job at a
shoe factory, unable to find anything else. This demonstrates the power of corporations to
control people’s lives through money that society is so dependent upon in industrialisation and
both Steinbeck and Dreiser present the commercial industry and mechanisation to increase the
struggle of finding work. Steinbeck further depicts corporations to actively keep the American
poor in their poverty to maintain the desperation that companies can best profit from and this
vividly presents a key theme of American literature in the migrant, lower class struggle to find
work and individually break free of the poverty trap.
Steinbeck vividly explores the dehumanisation of the American poor in poverty to
demonstrate firstly the hateful nature of higher classes of American people against those that
are being exploited and secondly the removal of their identity as human beings to depict the
inhumane conditions of their extreme poverty. The migrant farmers all have a keen vision of
