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This is a selection from an enormous novel that became one
of the sagas of the Great Depression. The Grapes of Wrath was a bestseller in the thirties, and later generations have
continued to turn to it to gain imaginative access to the
Dust Bowl disaster, the migration to California, and the
impact of hard times on thousands of rural American families.
For the past fifty years the novel has remained popular without
much intervention by English departments. Though it might
be too long to fit neatly into the confines of an academic
semester, the book’s strongly drawn characters and
austere prose pull many readers through it quickly. In terms
of aesthetics and literary movements, the book might seem
hard to classify amid the heyday of high modernism. Some
readers see The Grapes of Wrath as a throwback to the literary
naturalism of the end of the nineteenth century. This is
one of the ways in which the book still challenges us as
readers: can social and moral emergencies compel an artist,
and a community of readers, to abandon the fashionable aesthetics
of the moment, and communicate in a different style?
Explorations
1. Choose a substantial passage in The Grapes of Wrath,
a passage that seems to you rhetorically and stylistically
interesting, and look at Stein - for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter
Dreams” or Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale
Horse, Pale Rider.” What are the effects of Steinbeck’s
choices? How would you describe the voice that they help
create? Why might such a voice be appropriate to a novel
like this about a large-scale social crisis?
2. Steinbeck’s novel offers a
great deal of dialogue between people from working-class
backgrounds, people with
little formal education. Think about other novels, stories,
plays, or films in which a writer - almost invariably
a person with a lot of literary experience - tries to
recreate the voices and motives of working-class people.
Can you think of situations in which this attempt succeeds
memorably, or fails? What strategies make for success in
one case, and disaster in another?
3. Is Steinbeck’s kind of storytelling dated? Compare
Steinbeck’s narration to the ways in which the Dust
Bowl is described in other media - history books, documentary
films, Web sites. Do you think that large numbers of modern
readers would accept such a story told in this way now? When
The Grapes of Wrath was filmed in the late thirties, it was
shot in 35-millimeter black and white - the standard
Hollywood process of the time. The visual effect at times
was eerily like the award-winning photography of Dorothea
Lange and Walker Evans, two award-winning chroniclers of
the Depression in the rural South. What might The Grapes
of Wrath gain or lose in a wide-screen “remake” with
color and stereo? Do you believe that a writer of novels
could succeed now in creating a sweeping account of “the
masses” or “the millions,” of ordinary
people in an upheaval of this scale? If a novelist set out
to write a modern-day Grapes of Wrath, what might have to
be done - and what style or strategies might need to
be avoided - to make such a novel successful as art
with a social impact?
Other Sites to Consult
http://www.steinbeck.org/MainFrame.html: The Web site of
the National Steinbeck Center; includes biographical information,
an annotated bibliography, information on exhibits and programs,
teacher resources, and an extensive collection of links.
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/afctshtml/tshome.html: Voices
from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin
Migrant Worker Collection (hosted by the Library of Congress)
presents a collection of audio recordings, photographs, and
print material documenting life at Farm Security Administration
(FSA) migrant work camps in central California in 1940 and
1941.
http://www.museumca.org/global/art/collections_dorothea_lange.html:
The Oakland Museum of California’s collection of Dorothea
Lange’s work.
http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/print/128_migm.html: Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant
Mother” photographs at the Library of Congress.
http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/bio/a1634-1.html: Collection
of Walker Evans’s work from the J. Paul Getty Museum.
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