The Grapes of Wrath

With the family having driven out of Oklahoma and past the Texan town of Amarillo, Rose of Sharon starts talking to Ma about her aspirations. She says that on reaching California, “Me an’ Connie don’t want to live in the country no more” (171). She wants to stay in a town with her own car and an electric iron and to go to the cinema. At first Ma is concerned that this will break up the family. But after Rose of Sharon adds further details, “Ma suddenly seemed to know it was all a dream” (172). These ideas rest on the fanciful promise of a job making radios that Rose of Sharon’s husband found out about in a magazine. They are the superficial ideas of a young woman with her first child: moving to a new state and fantasizing about something different.

The dreams of her older brothers are humbler. Tom says to Al, referring to money Al had set aside for a drink, “When we get out to the coast you an’ me’ll take her an’ we’ll raise hell” (183). The simple pleasure of getting drunk is what he looks forward to at the journeys end. Meanwhile, Al dreams about getting married and working in a garage. This is a somewhat more grounded goal than Connie’s since Al shows demonstrable skill and knowledge in fixing cars. Either way, these dreams serve a useful purpose: Having hopes for the future can be an important way of enduring and overcoming the difficulties of the present.

However, dreams also have a negative side. Dreams can be manufactured and manipulated. This is most emphatically seen with the promises which cause the dispossessed farmers to head for California in the first place. As Pa explains, “I got a han’bill says they got good wages” and “says they need men” (197). Like many others, he is drawn in by the prospect of high paying and plentiful work. Moreover, it is not just economic enticement. As an unnamed migrant says in Chapter 17, “the pitchers sure do look nice” (208). The orange-colored pamphlets are just one part of a broader campaign in which the dream of California is sold to migrants. The pictures and the advertisements conjure up a seductive vision of fruit trees, sunshine, and little white houses. In one sense, especially for those who suffered through the slow death and repossession of their farms, it is the perennial human dream of the promised land.

This will be severely disrupted though. When a “ragged man” overhears Pa talking about his expectations for wages in California he appears to expose the truth about the pamphlet and the dream. The man says, “This fella wants eight hundred men. So he prints up five thousand of them things an’ maybe twenty thousand people sees ‘em. An’ maybe two-three thousan’ folks get movin’” (198). The landowners and companies deliberately try to entice as many workers as possible to migrate there. The competition for work, and thus its relative scarcity, means each worker and each family rarely has enough to eat. In turn, this situation means that the migrants are easily manipulated into accepting wages that they would otherwise reject. The subsistence wages themselves play a part in this. They serve the added benefit of keeping the workforce perpetually on the brink of starvation and therefore always willing to work for almost nothing.

That said, it is not clear that Pa and the others are able to digest the implications of what they have been told—that is, the pamphlet which brought them there is part of a cruel and cynical lie. Dreams and hopes die hard. Moreover, there is a question about the efficacy and morality of telling the incoming migrants. The ragged man wrestles with this, saying, “I says I wasn’t gonna fret ya, an’ here I’m a-doin it” (198). Since they are set on their course, revealing all this might simply cause the migrants useless worry. At the same time, most of their dreams will come crashing down anyway on encountering reality in California. Pa will never get his new little “piece a growin’ land with water” (196), nor will Tom have his moment of carefree intoxication. Rose of Sharon will not get her house.

Yet out of these shattered dreams Steinbeck tentatively sees the possibility of a new and more fundamental dream. This is the vision, forged from the migrants’ struggles, of a just and genuinely self-governing way of life. This is witnessed in embryonic form in the miniature communities of migrants that spring up by the side of Highway 66. They are able to police themselves, care for the sick, ensure no one is hungry, and provide real connection with others. Although they are dismantled and vanish in the day, the communities provide the light and fruit which the death of those other dreams—and the suffering that goes along with it—have made possible. They also reveal the truth about the Californian migrant dream as starkly as possible.