[In the following essay, Railton contends that The Grapes of Wrath is about change at its most fundamental—biological and organic—level.]

The Grapes of Wrath is a novel about things that grow—corn, peaches, cotton, and grapes of wrath. From the start Steinbeck identifies his vision of human history with organic, biological processes. A recurrent image is established in the first chapter, when the drought and wind in Oklahoma combine to uproot and topple the stalks of corn. In Chapter 29, the last of Steinbeck's wide-angle interchapters, it is the rain and flooding in California that “cut out the roots of cottonwoods and [bring] down the trees” (589). Tragically, even human lives are caught in this pattern of being pulled up from the soil. Farmers are made migrants. Forced to sell and burn all of their pasts that won't fit onto a homemade flatbed truck, they too are uprooted, torn from their identities. Right alongside this pattern, however, Steinbeck establishes a second one: that of seed being carried to new ground, new roots being put down. This image is announced in Chapter 3. The turtle who serves as the agent of movement in that chapter has attracted a lot of commentary from the novel's critics, but Steinbeck's main interest is not in the turtle. Chapter 3 is organized around seeds, all “possessed of the anlage of movement” (20). The turtle simply continues on its way, but by involuntarily carrying one “wild oat head” across the road, and accidentally dragging dirt over the “three spearhead seeds” that drop from it and stick in the ground (22), the mere movement of the turtle becomes part of the process of change and growth.

The Grapes of Wrath is a novel about an old system dying, and a new one beginning to take root. Movement, to Steinbeck, including the movement of history, works like the “West Wind” in Shelley's ode. It is “Destroyer and preserver” both; it scatters “the leaves dead” and carries forward “The winged seeds.” The system that is dying we can call American capitalism, the roots of which had always been the promises of individual opportunity and of private property as the reward for taking risks and working hard. Steinbeck makes it more difficult to name the new system that is emerging from the violent ferment of the old system's decay. It is certainly socialistic, yet a goal of the novel is to suggest that a socialized democracy is as quintessentially American as the individualistic dream it will replace. “Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin” he writes in Chapter 14 (206)—this list would confound a historian, but it is meant to reassure the American reader by linking socialism with our own revolutionary tradition. That was one reason for his enthusiasm about the title his wife found for the novel. He wanted the whole of Julia Ward Howe's fighting song printed as a sort of preface, because, he wrote his editor at Viking.

The fascist crowd will try to sabotage this book because it is revolutionary. They try to give it the communist angle. However, The Battle Hymn is American and intensely so. … So if both words and music are there the book is keyed into the American scene from the beginning.

(L [Steinbeck: A Life in Letters] 174)

At the same time, by tying his novel of history to the rhythms and laws of nature, the growth of seeds, the fermenting of grapes, Steinbeck tries to suggest that this coming American revolution is inevitable, organically decreed. The western states sense “the beginning change” with the nervousness of “horses before a thunder storm” (204); on the road west, separate families “grew to be units of the camps” (265; my italics).

These repeated biological locutions allow the novelist to assume the role of a Darwinian prophet, reading the political future instead of the natural past. Revolution is made to seem as inexorably sure as evolution. The novel is simply recording the process. Yet this quasi-scientific stance, while it helps account for the authority with which Steinbeck's prose tells his story, belies the real engagement of the book. Critics have accused Steinbeck of being wrong, because the drastic social change he apparently predicted never took place. But he knew better than that. If he had himself believed the stance his narrative adopts, he would have written a much less brilliant book, for the novel owes its power to Steinbeck's urgent but painstaking intention to enact the revolution he apparently foresees. Even his assumption of change is part of his strategy for creating it. And Steinbeck knew what he was up against. Despite his desire to make his vision seem “American and intensely so,” he undertakes the task of radically redefining the most fundamental values of American society. The novel uproots as much as the forces of either nature or capitalism do, though far more subtly. And, ultimately, there is hardly anything natural about the kind of change—“as in the whole universe only man can change” (267)—that Steinbeck is anxious to work. Supernatural probably describes it more accurately. Nor is change the right word for it, although it's the one Steinbeck regularly uses. The Grapes of Wrath is a novel about conversion.

You and I, the novel's readers, are the converts whom he is after. Working a profound revolution in our sensibilities is his rhetorical task. His chief narrative task, however, is to recount the story of the Joads' conversions. Thematically, Route 66 and the various state highways in California that the Joads travel along all run parallel to the road to Damascus that Saul takes in Acts, or to the Way taken by Bunyan's Christian in Pilgrim's Progress. The problem with the way most readers want to see that turtle in Chapter 3 as an emblem of the Joads is precisely that it denies their movement any inward significance. Steinbeck finds much to admire in the Joads and the class of “the people” whom they represent, including the fierce will to survive and keep going which they share with that turtle, but he explicitly makes the capacity for spiritual regeneration the essence of humanity. That humans can redefine the meaning of our lives is what makes us “unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe” (204). Con-version—to turn around, to turn together—is a metaphysical movement. This is the route on which Steinbeck sets the Joads. For, as much as he finds to admire in them, he also knows that before American society can be saved from its sins, “the people” will have to change, too.

Thus there is a tension between the novel's rhetorical and its narrative tasks. Steinbeck is writing about the migrant families, not for them; their lives have no margin, either of income or leisure, for reading novels. He is writing for the vast middle class that forms the audience for best-selling fiction, and one of his goals is to educate those readers out of their prejudices against people like the Joads. As soon as they reach California, the Joads are confronted by the epithet “Okie,” and the attitude that lies behind it: “‘Them goddamn Okies got no sense and no feeling. They ain't human. … They ain't a hell of a lot better than gorillas’” (301). As victims of such prejudice, and of the economic exploitation that it serves to rationalize, the migrants are treated with nothing but respect by the novel. Steinbeck takes pains not to prettify their earthiness, but the whole book is a testimony to their immeasurable human worth. By bringing his readers inside the life of an “Okie” family, and keeping them there for so many hundreds of pages, Steinbeck writes as an advocate to the migrants' claims on America's understanding, compassion, and concern. That he does this largely by letting the Joads' lives and characters speak for themselves is one of the novel's great achievements.

As his letters from the winter of 1938 reveal, Steinbeck's decision to write the novel was precipitated by his own firsthand encounter with the thousands of dispossessed families who were starving in the valleys of California. At first he could only see the migrants as victims: “I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this” (L 161), by which he meant “the fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers” (L 158). There is no mistaking the element of moral indignation in the novel he started that spring; although they never appear directly in it, the novel treats the large landowners as unequivocally, allegorically evil. But he had gotten beyond his first reaction to the plight of the migrants by deepening his insight into the causes of their exploitation. Although it can be misread as one, The Grapes of Wrath is not a morality play in which the virtues of the people contend with the viciousness of the “huge growers.” The source of the economic injustices that drought and Depression magnified so drastically is in the values that the Joads themselves initially share with their oppressors in California.

Perhaps the truest thing about the novel is its refusal to sentimentalize the life in the Midwest from which the Joads and the other families they meet have been dispossessed. When their dream of a golden future out West is destroyed by the brutal realities of migrant life in California, the past they left at the other end of Route 66 appeals to them as the paradise they have been driven from. When the novel winds up at the Hooper Ranch, the place seems as infernal as Simon Legree's plantation in Uncle Tom's Cabin. The armed guards, the filthy conditions, the edge of outright starvation on which Hooper Ranches, Inc., is content to keep the pickers—Steinbeck does want to expose this as one of the darkest places of the earth. At no point in the novel do the Joads feel further from “home,” but Steinbeck also wants us to see how much Hooper's farm in California has in common with the Joad farm in Oklahoma that Tom had been trying to get back to at the beginning.

There is, for instance, a wire fence around both farms. The Joads didn't really need a fence, Tom tells Casy, but “‘Pa kinda liked her there. Said it give him a feelin' that forty was forty’” (39). And Pa got the wire by taking advantage of his own brother. That is Steinbeck's point; that is what both fences delimit. We hear just enough about the Joads' earlier life in Oklahoma to recognize that they lived on their forty acres with essentially the same narrowly selfish values as Hooper on his much larger orchard. The Sooners took their land by force from the Indians, just as the large owners in California took theirs from the Mexicans. In both places, what prevailed was the “right” of the strongest—or say, the greediest. The Joads even stole the house they are evicted from. Grampa hangs onto the pillow he stole from Albert Rance with the same fierceness that the owners display in defense of their ill-gotten profits. Steinbeck's antagonist in the novel is not the group of large owners, but rather the idea of ownership itself. It is at the Hooper Ranch that Ma, on the verge of despair, grows most sentimental about the past:

They was the time when we was on the lan'. They was a boundary to us then. Ol' folks died off, an' little fellas come, an' we was always one thing—we was the fambly—kinda whole and clear.

(536)

Given what the Joads have been through since leaving home, it is impossible not to sympathize with her nostalgia. But finally, for Steinbeck, any kind of boundary—whether it's drawn around forty acres or forty thousand, around a family or a class—is wrong. And it is “the quality of owning” that builds boundaries, that “freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we’” (206).

Yet if owning separates, dispossession becomes the basis for a new unity. If one set of values is being uprooted, that prepares the ground for another to develop. On the one hand, the westward journey of the Joads is a moving record of losses: their home and past, Grampa and Granma's deaths, Noah and Connie's desertions. The sufferings inflicted on the family bear witness not only to their strength of character, but also to the evils of the social and economic status quo. Their hapless pursuit of happiness indicts and exposes the America they move across. Steinbeck forces his reader to suffer even more steadily. Ma has a sudden moment of insight on the road west when she “seemed to know” that the family's great expectations were “all a dream” (225), but, for the first half of the novel at least, the Joads are sustained by their dreams. The reader is denied any such imaginative freedom. While most narratives are organized around some kind of suspense about what will happen next, The Grapes of Wrath is structured as a series of inevitabilities. Each of the book's wide-angle chapters precedes the Joads, and in them we see the tenant farmers being tractored off before Tom comes home to an empty house, or the new proletariat being exploited before the Joads even begin to look for work, or the rain flooding the migrant camps before the Joads try to battle the rising water. Again and again what will happen next is made narratively inescapable. “I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags,” Steinbeck wrote about the novel (L 178). It is a good technique for a protest novel. The narrative enacts its own kind of oppression, and, by arousing in its readers a desire to fight this sense of inevitability, it works strategically to arouse us toward action to change the status quo.

On the other hand, however, the journey of the Joads is also an inward one. And there the same pattern of losses is what converts their movement into a pilgrimage toward the prospect of a new consciousness. As in Bunyan's book, homelessness and suffering become the occasion of spiritual growth. In several of the interchapters Steinbeck describes this process: “The families, which had been units of which the boundaries were a house at night, a farm by day, changed their boundaries” (267). They expand their boundaries. Having lost their land, the migrants' minds are no longer “bound with acres” (268); their new lives, their very losses, lead them toward the potentially redemptive discovery of their interrelatedness, their membership in a vastly extended family—the “we.” In the novel's main narrative, Steinbeck dramatizes this process; near the very end, Ma sums up the new way she has learned to define her life: “‘Use' ta be the fambly was fust. It ain't so now. It's anybody’” (606).

As an interpretive gloss on the meaning of her pilgrimage, however, Ma's pronouncement is much too pat. Simply quoting it denies Steinbeck the credit he deserves as both a novelist and a visionary. Again as in Bunyan's book, Steinbeck's faith is neither simple nor naive. Ruthie and Winfield, the youngest Joads, remind us how innately selfish human nature is. In his representation of their naked, nagging need for place and power, Steinbeck looks unflinchingly at the fact that “mine” is always among the first words an infant speaks. Similarly, Grampa and Granma are too old to learn to redefine themselves. The disruptions, the losses by which the others' assumptions are broken up, in the same way that a field has to be broken before new seed can be put into it, kill them both. Even with the other Joads, Steinbeck admits a lot of skepticism about whether they can be converted. Although Pa has become a victim of the capitalist system, it seems unlikely that he could ever abandon the economics of self-interest. As Tom tells Casy on the other side of the fence around the Hooper Ranch, it wouldn't do any good to tell Pa about the strike Casy is trying to organize: “‘He'd say it wasn't none of his business. … Think Pa's gonna give up his meat on account a other fellas?’” (524).

Steinbeck here allows Tom, in his blunt vernacular voice, to ask the novel's most urgent question. The American Dream of individual opportunity has clearly betrayed “the people,” but can they plant themselves on a different set of instincts? Can they redefine their boundaries? When he looks at the horrors of the migrants' plight, he knows that the answer is—They must. When he writes in the interchapters as an analyst of American society, the answer is—They will. But the narrative of the Joad family deals with specific people, not analytical abstractions. And their story, while it leads to the birth of the new “Manself” that Steinbeck sees as the only hope for a failed nation, tells a different story. Its emphasis is on how long and hard, and finally private, is the labor by which that New Man will be delivered into the world. Shortly after beginning the novel, Steinbeck wrote his agent that “The new book is going well.” But then he added, “Too fast. I'm having to hold it down. I don't want it to go so fast for fear the tempo will be fast and this is a plodding, crawling book” (L 167). One reason for the book's length is Steinbeck's appreciation of the almost insurmountable obstacles that lie on the path between “I” and “we.” And time alone cannot accomplish the birth of a new sensibility. It will also require a kind of violence. As Casy replies to Tom in their exchange about Pa, “‘I guess that's right. Have to take a beatin' 'fore he'll know’” (524). Even that turtle in Chapter 3 gets hit by a truck before the seeds it carries fall into the ground.

The threat of violence hangs over the land Steinbeck is surveying from the outset, when the evicted sharecroppers wonder whom they can shoot to save their farms. In Howe's hymn, of course, “the grapes of wrath” are immediately followed by that “terrible swift sword,” and in those places where Steinbeck's prose rises to its most oratorical pitch, it seems to predict a second American civil war with all the righteousness of an Old Testament prophet: “three hundred thousand—if they ever move under a leader—the end. Three hundred thousand, hungry and miserable; if they ever know themselves, the land will be theirs and all the gas, all the rifles in the world won't stop them” (325). Yet such passages never ring quite true. They seem to be another of the rhetorical strategies by which Steinbeck is trying to work on the sensibilities of his readers: To their sympathy for the dispossessed he adds this appeal to their fear of what driven people might resort to. Organized, militant action is not at the center of Steinbeck's program for apocalyptic change. His concern is with consciousness. That is where the most meaningful revolution must occur. Even physical violence matters chiefly as a means to spiritual change.

It is because Steinbeck's emphasis is on inward experience that Jim Casy, a supernumerary as far as most of the book's action is concerned, is central to its plot. Casy's presence is what allows Steinbeck to dramatize his concern with consciousness. At the beginning, Steinbeck gives him a head start on the Joads. They are looking to start over in California; although they have lost their home and land, they still hang on to their belief in the American Dream. Casy, however, is looking to start anew. He has already lost the faith in the Christian values that had given meaning to his life, and is self-consciously questing for a new belief, a new cause to serve. He remains a preacher—long after he has rejected the title, the narrative continues to refer to him as “Reverend Jim Casy” and “the preacher”—but cannot find the Word he should announce. In much the same passivity as the novel's reader, he watches and absorbs the meaning of the Joad's attempt to carry their lives and ambitions westward. His first, indeed his only decisive action in the narrative itself is precipitated by an act of violence. In the Bakersfield Hooverville, a migrant named Floyd hits a deputy sheriff to avoid being arrested for the “crime” of telling the truth; when the deputy pulls his gun, Tom trips him; when he starts shooting recklessly into the camp, Casy knocks him out—it is worth noting the details because this same sequence will recur at the Hooper Ranch. In describing this action, Steinbeck's prose departs from its usual syntactic straightforwardness to signal its significance: “and then, suddenly, from the group of men, the Reverend Casy stepped” (361). His kicking the deputy in the neck is presented as an instinctual reflex, and his actions, here, and subsequently when he gives himself up to the deputy to save Floyd and Tom, speak a lot louder than any words he uses, but Reverend Casy has at last found a cause to serve.

That cause can be defined as the “group of men” he steps from, but it is also here that Casy disappears from the narrative for 150 pages. In this case Steinbeck refuses to allow his story to get ahead of itself. The exemplary significance of Casy's self-sacrifice is barely registered by the Joads, who still feel they have their own lives to live. And Casy himself cannot conceptualize the meaning of his involuntary action, or the values of the new faith he commits his life to, until later. When he reappears at the Hoover Ranch, he tries to explain it to Tom:

“Here's me, been a-goin' into the wilderness like Jesus to try to find out somepin. Almost got her sometimes, too. But it's in the jail house I really got her.”

(521)

What he got in jail could be called an insight into the moral logic of socialism: that the greatest evil is human need, and that the only salvation lies in collective effort. Although the novel is deliberately vague about how Casy came to be at the Hooper Ranch, and what his role is in the strike there, we could see his new identity in strictly political terms: Like the strike organizers Steinbeck had written about in In Dubious Battle, Casy has committed himself to the cause of Communist revolution. As a fundamentalist preacher in Oklahoma, he had aroused and exhorted crowds to feel the operation of grace, and save their individual souls; as a left-wing strike organizer in California, he is teaching the migrants to organize and act in the interests of their class. But, at this crucial point, the novel complicates its message by keeping its focus on spiritual rather than political concerns. The individual soul retains its privileged position. For Casy's actions at the Hooper Ranch speak much less resonantly than his words, and the revolutionary change they bring about occurs inwardly.

Steinbeck brings Casy back into the narrative at this point to complete Tom Joad's conversion. Tom is the novel's central pilgrim. The book begins with his attempt to return “home.” This works a nice inversion on Pilgrim's Progress, for Bunyan's Christian must choose to leave home before he can begin the path that leads to salvation. Tom has no choice; economic and natural forces have already exiled him from “home” before he can get there. In both works, however, the quest ultimately is for “home.” For Bunyan, of course, the spirit's true home is in eternity, while all the action of Steinbeck's novel is set in this world. It is through this world that Tom moves to find a new home; it is still in this world that he finds it. But it is nonetheless a spiritual dwelling place that he finds. Tom chooses to leave his family at the end of his pilgrimage; almost the last thing he says before disappearing from the story is that Ma need not worry about where to find him:

“Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain't got a soul of his own, but on'y a piece of a big one—an' then—”

“Then what, Tom?”

“Then it don't matter. Then I'll be all aroun' in the dark. I'll be ever'where—wherever you look.”

(572)

Wherever the people are—that is Tom's new home. All the boundaries around his self have dissolved. In this communion with the world soul, Tom finds a freedom that merely being paroled from prison could never provide, and a meaning that living for himself or for his family could never have bestowed upon his acts. By losing himself—to use the phrase that would have been equally familiar to Bunyan's readers and Casy's revivalist congregations—he has found himself.

As Tom's last conversation with Ma repeatedly acknowledges, Casy was the agent of his conversion. It is Casy's words (“like Casy says”) and Casy's mystical presence (“Seems like I can see him sometimes” [572]) that show Tom the way that leads to his being's true home. But this conversion is only accomplished painfully, through another act of violence that indicates how much of Tom's old self must be destroyed before the exemplary New Man that he embodies can be born. Twice in Tom's last conversation with “the preacher,” Casy asks him if he can't “see” the revelation that Casy has seen in the jail house, and that he is trying to realize at the Hooper Ranch. “No,” Tom replies both times (521, 522), not because he is stupid, but because he has always lived within the boundaries of self-interest. As Casy had predicted about Pa, Tom, too, has to take a beating before he can know. Within a few minutes of this discussion, Tom is literally clubbed in the face. The more important “beating,” however, occurs in the realm of Tom's spirit. In a scene that mirrors the moment of Casy's conversion at the Hooverville, Tom witnesses Casy's death at the hands of the “deputies” who have come to break the strike. It is out of the violent trauma of this act of witnessing that Tom's new self begins to emerge.

Steinbeck, using a club of his own, makes it impossible for the reader (who is also witnessing this violence) to overlook the scriptural power of Casy's life and death. His likenesses to Christ are established at the start, when a man with the initials “J. C.” departs for California with twelve Joads. Not only does Casy die as a martyr: twice he tells the men who are about to kill him that they know not what they do (cf. 527). As if these cues were not enough, immediately after he dies one of the vigilantes says, “‘Jesus, George. I think you killed him’” (527). And, as if even this were not enough, Ma has Tom repeat Casy's last words, then repeats them herself:

“That's what he said—‘You don' know what you're doin'’?”

“Yeah!”

Ma said, “I wisht Granma could a heard.”

(535)

The most devoutly Christian of the Joads, Granma presumably would have taken the most pleasure from the preacher's appropriation of the Word. But, for all this, Steinbeck insists that we understand Casy's death and its implications in ways that Granma never could, unless she were willing to throw off her old self as well. For if it is easy to note how Christlike Casy is, especially in death, it is crucial to note how un-Christian, anti-Christian are the values to which his death converts Tom.

As others have noted, The Grapes of Wrath contains many echoes of and allusions to the Bible. Yet the novel never wavers on the point that Casy's rejection of Christianity makes at the very start. Throughout the book Steinbeck returns to Christianity only to attack it. He exposes and condemns the several “Jesus-lovers” whom the Joads meet, the Salvation Army as a Christian relief agency, the preachers who teach Christlike submission to Caesar. One of the ways that Ma is made to change in the course of her pilgrimage is by replacing her acquired faith in God and the next world with the belief in the people and in this life that she gradually learns from Casy. Who shall inherit the earth is among the book's most urgent questions, but Steinbeck has no patience with the idea that it shall be the meek. In his last talk with Ma, Tom's vernacular sums up the novel's displacement of Christianity, citing scripture to the end that Steinbeck has consistently had in mind:

“most of the preachin' is about the poor we shall have always with us, an' if you got nothing', why, jus' fol' your hands an' to hell with it, you gonna git ice cream on gol' plates when you're dead. An' then this here Preacher says two get a better reward for their work.”

(571)

This “Preacher” is Solomon, whose words in Ecclesiastes Steinbeck converts into a socialist manifesto. Much like Melville in “The Try-Works” chapter of Moby-Dick, Steinbeck is using “unchristian Solomon's wisdom” to carry his readers beyond the New Testament to a new revelation. Christianity itself is another evil that must be uprooted. And Casy's death not only completes his apotheosis by being paired with Christ's; it also violently repudiates the legacy of the Crucifixion. The strike breakers may not know what they're doing, but Casy doesn't ask anyone to forgive them for that reason. His death may be a martyrdom, but Tom's immediate, instinctive reaction to it is neither to love his enemies nor to turn the other cheek, but to murder the man who killed Casy.

It is surprising how little notice Tom's act of violence has gotten from the novel's commentators. In a sense, Tom's crime here is a more enlightened act than the murder he had gone to prison for before the novel begins. There he had killed to defend himself. Here he kills to avenge and defend an idea—the idea that Casy and the strike at Hooper's represent. His readiness to fight and kill for this larger concept is a measure of the spiritual distance he has traveled in the course of his pilgrimage. Like Casy's stepping forth at Bakersfield to knock out the deputy. Tom's involuntary action indicates his preparedness to take the final leap into the kingdom of spirit he attains at the end. But still, Tom's act is a brutal murder. He hits “George” four times in the head with a pick handle. Steinbeck hardly expected it to pass unnoticed. “Think I'll print a forward,” he wrote about the novel, “warning sensitive people to let it alone” (L 168). He may even have been comparing himself as a writer to Tom's savage reaction when he added: “It pulls no punches at all and may get us all into trouble.”

Once we have noticed all this, however, it is by no means easy to know what to make of it. While he was writing The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck apparently needed to disguise even from himself how skillfully the novel works to convert rather than confront the sensibilities of his audience. “I am sure it will not be a popular book” he wrote (L 172), not long before it zoomed to the top of the best-seller lists. He was writing a “revolutionary” novel fueled by his own wrath at the moral and economic horrors of contemporary America; such a work had to be “an outrageous book” (L 172). Yet his deeper need was to reach “the large numbers of readers” (L 172) he expected to outrage. His very ambitions as a prophet of social change depended on being read by the widest possible audience. His handling of Tom's murderous action epitomizes his own divided intentions. Tom's action aggressively defies the laws of both society and the New Testament. At the same time, Steinbeck makes it incredibly easy for his reader to accept Tom's act. Immediately afterward, he retreats to the shack on the ranch, and as soon as possible he confesses his crime to the whole family. When he and his mother are left alone, he goes over the event again, and Ma—who for 500 pages has stood for love and compassion—Ma unhesitatingly absolves him of any wrongdoing: “‘I can't read no fault on you’” (535). By returning the “murderer” to the bosom of his family, and having him shriven by his own mother, Steinbeck domesticates his deed. In one respect, he disarms it of its radical power. In another, though, he uses it to further his task of radicalizing his audience's sensibilities: The reader who remains sympathetic to Tom has already been made, subliminally, an outlaw from the values of American society and the New Testament. Our willingness to harbor Tom, to continue to identify him as the book's moral hero, is a measure of our preparedness for conversion to a new vision of the truth.

We could explain Steinbeck's use of biblical typology along the same lines, as a purely rhetorical strategy. “Large numbers of readers” could not be expected to endorse militant socialism. Instead, Steinbeck shrewdly insinuates his revolutionary vision by presenting it in the familiar guise of Christianity. Just as Casy's quest carries him from the fundamentalist's Bible to a Marxist reading of Ecclesiastes, so Steinbeck's choice of Casy as the narrative agent of revelation allows the novel to find a middle ground between the conventional American's old allegiances and Steinbeck's newer testament. There would be nothing inherently wrong with such a device. Every novel of purpose must make some compromises with its audience if it wants to reach and move them. Yet explaining Steinbeck's affinity for the Bible this way would never get to the heart of his novel. His use of Christianity is more than strategic. For the private, inward operation of grace is as fundamental to his vision as it is to St. Paul's or Bunyan's.

To the doctrinaire socialist, meaning is found in collective action. Steinbeck offers his version of that ideal in his descriptions of the government camp at Weedpatch where the Joads stay for a month after being driven out of the Hooverville. The camp has a wire fence around it, too, but it only matters when the forces of capitalism try to destroy the communal harmony of the camp. The novel presents life in the camp as a Utopian but practicable antithesis to the selfishness that rules on both the Joad farm and the Hooper Ranch. In the camp happiness is pursued by owning things jointly, sharing responsibilities, making decisions by democratically elected committees. The camp's weekly square dances provide the book's most attractive image of a communal society: The music belongs to no one individual; the dancers obey the calls in unison and joy. It is not an accident that the Growers' Association and its hired reactionaries try to discredit the camp by disrupting a dance. That episode allows Steinbeck starkly to polarize the two worlds, within the camp and without: There's harmony and expression inside, violence and exploitation outside. He may in fact have meant for this portrayal of men and women acting collectively to occupy the center of the book's moral ground. But, if so, he complicates his own values by reintroducing Casy into the narrative, and shifting the drama back inside Tom's consciousness. He also betrays his misgivings about collective action as redemptive in the book's only other extended account of it. This occurs in the final chapter, when Pa convinces another group of migrants to work together to build a dam to save their campsites from the rising floodwater. Not only do their efforts fail; although they work frantically through the night with as much unison as those square dancers, their shared labor brings them no closer to true unity, no nearer to the “we,” than they had been before. To recognize and act collectively in the interests of the group, it seems, is not enough. Indeed, since the men remain divided and bitter after the failure of their dam, it seems that collective action in itself is meaningless.

Instead, what the novel presents as most meaningful are Casy's and Tom's conversions: the purpose and inner peace that each man finds, not in acting with others, but in “feeling” or “seeing” his oneness with all. Casy, presumably, is acting at Hooper's to organize the strike—but it is telling that the novel has no interest in elaborating such a role. Tom at the end does tell Ma what he aims to do: “‘What Casy done,’ he said” (571)—but again, what that means is left extremely vague, although Tom goes on to talk in eloquent detail about what he will be as the disembodied spirit of the people. The novel's two most important events, if we can call them events, actually occur in private—to Casy in jail, and to Tom while he's hiding out after killing the vigilante. Still more striking is the fact that both these “events” occur entirely outside the narrative. It is offstage, in solitude, alone with his own consciousness that each man somehow arrives at the new faith that Steinbeck is preaching to us, becomes the New Man who can redeem the waste land. Thus Steinbeck offers an essentially religious and mystical solution to the economic and political problems that inspired him to write the novel in the first place. For when we compare the rapturous accents of Tom's last speech with Ma to Pa's futile efforts to organize the migrants to battle circumstances together, we're left with the conclusion that people merely working together cannot succeed—while one person who has experienced unity with the “big soul,” whatever he or she does, cannot fail. Despite the narrative's persistent attention to external forces—natural, historical, economic, social—it ultimately points to what its own representation excludes, to an inward “act” of consciousness or spirit, as the only place the revolution can begin. And once Tom has been brought “home” to this sense of selflessness, it seems that the revolution is effectively over as well.

Of course, Tom's climactic scene with Ma, although it does bring the novel's central pilgrimage into Steinbeck's version of the Celestial City, is not the end of the story. Tom's apotheosis is followed by two additional moments of conversion, both of which are brought on by another kind of violence: the death in birth of the baby that Rose of Sharon has been carrying through the novel. Death in birth, in keeping with the pattern of uprooting and planting, destruction and new growth, leads to birth out of death. The first conversion is Uncle John's, and it occurs when he goes out into the rain to bury the stillborn infant. Up until this moment, John has been crippled by the guilt he has felt since his wife's death many years ago. But now, having been pushed around by the American economic system and knocked down by the floodwaters, John reaches a higher state of consciousness. With the wrath of an inspired Biblical prophet, he sends the dead baby down the flood as a judgment and curse on the society that produced it. In the swirling waters he has been cleansed of more than his guilt; he's been freed entirely from his fundamentalist Christian's sense of sinfulness; he's been politically radicalized. It is not he who is damned, but the nation.

Like Tom's unforgiving reaction to Casy's death, John's conversion from guilt to wrath is Steinbeck's way of insisting that his faith is a newer testament. To be saved, the nation needs to be converted, yet it will have to leave Christianity as well as capitalism behind. The novel's very last scene tries to build a bridge between the realm of spirit, where individuals find their home, and the world of action, where men and women can help each other; it redresses the imbalance of Tom's story, where the emphasis had been almost entirely on faith, by adding to that a doctrine of works. Thematically the novel's last scene is perfect. It is the moment of Rose of Sharon's conversion. Out of the violent loss of her baby (which she has “witnessed” with her whole body) comes a new, self-less sense of self. When she breastfeeds the starving stranger who would otherwise die, a new, boundary-less definition of family is born. Rose of Sharon's act is devoutly socialistic: from each according to ability, to each according to need. At the same time, the novel's last word on this scene, which is also the novel's last word, is “mysteriously”—a word that has no place in Marx's or Lenin's vocabulary. The scene's implications are as much religious as political. Iconographically, like Casy's death, this tableau of a man lying in a woman's lap both recalls and subverts the familiar imagery of Christianity. By calling our ultimate act of attention in the novel to the look of “mysterious” satisfaction on Rose of Sharon's face, Steinbeck keeps this scene in line with his focus on the private, inward, ineffable moment of conversion. Yet here we also see how that inner change can lead to redemptive action. The barn in which this scene takes place is not only “away in a manger”; it is also halfway between the social but bureaucratic world of the government camp and the spiritual but solitary state that Tom found while hiding out in the bushes. And what happens in this barn triumphantly completes the novel's most pervasive pattern: One family has been uprooted and destroyed; out of those ruins, another, a new one, takes root. Manself can change, and by change can triumph over the most devastating circumstances.

For all its thematic aptness, however, this ending has been widely condemned. I can certainly understand why adolescent readers, especially young women, are uncomfortable with the picture of a teenage girl suckling a middle-aged, anonymous man. We can see Steinbeck's divided attitude toward his readers at work in this scene too: He gives them an ending that is essentially happy, but also disturbing. I frankly find it harder to see why adult critics have singled out this particular scene to object to. Rose of Sharon's conversion does not occur more suddenly than Tom's or John's—or, for that matter, than Saul's on the road to Damascus. The scene is unquestionably sentimental, but Steinbeck's most dramatic effects are invariably melodramatic—Ma sitting with Granma's corpse across the desert, Casy's death, Tom's valedictory eloquence, the anathema John pronounces with a dead baby in his arms. The novel could hardly have the impact it does on most readers without these unlikely, outsized gestures. For that matter, almost all novels of protest try to pluck the reader's heartstrings, and homelessness and hunger in a land of plenty is an inarguably legitimate cause in which to appeal to people's emotions. Steinbeck's editors at Viking were the first readers to object to the ending. Refusing to change a word of it, he defended it on the grounds of “balance” (L 178). I find it a strange but powerful tribute to Steinbeck's faith in selflessness as the one means by which men and women can transcend their circumstances in a world that is otherwise so harshly and unjustly determined. I think it would be less powerful if it were any less strange.

In any case, whether the novel's last scene is esthetically successfully is probably not the most important question to ask. Having seen the starving migrants in the valleys of California, and determined to write a novel in response to that human fact, Steinbeck was shocked out of his modern assumption that art mattered more than life. At the end of a letter from the winter of 1938, recording in horrified detail his own reaction as a witness to the sufferings of the migrant families, he wrote: “Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies” (L 159). He wrote the novel in the belief to which the trauma of seeing the homeless, wretched families had converted him: that American society had to change, quickly and profoundly. This then leads to the largest question raised by the novel's several endings. Is conversion the same as revolution? Can the re-creation of society be achieved by an individual's private, inner, spiritual redefinition of the self?

That Steinbeck believed it could is the most “intensely American” aspect of the novel. “Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin”—those names are relevant to his vision, but the tradition to which The Grapes of Wrath belongs is best identified with a different list: Winthrop, Edwards, Emerson, Whitman. Steinbeck's emphasis on inner change as the basis of social salvation has its roots in the Puritan belief that the New Jerusalem is identical with the congregation of converted saints, and in the Transcendentalists' credo that, as Emerson put it, “The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul.” Harriet Beecher Stowe, as the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, has to occupy an especially prominent place on that list. Her great protest novel is also organized around movement as both a means to expose social evil and as the pilgrimage of the spirit toward home. And when Stowe, in her last chapter, sought to answer the many aroused readers who had written to ask her what they could do to solve the terrible problem of slavery, her response was, “they can see to it that they feel right.” It is in this ground that the seeds of Steinbeck's revolution must also grow. Tom and Rose of Sharon at last feel right when they have redefined themselves as one with the people around them. Steinbeck oppresses and exhorts, threatens and inspires, shocks and moves us to bring us each, individually, to the same point of communion.

Ultimately, of course, people's feelings are all that any novelist has to work with. Even if Steinbeck had gone on to specify exactly what Tom will do to realize the vision of human unity that he has attained, Tom could never act in the real world. He can only act on the reader, as Casy's example acted on him. Hiding out in the bushes or reading The Grapes of Wrath both occur in private. Any change that the novel might make in American society will have to happen first in the consciousness of its readers. But this doesn't answer the question raised by Steinbeck's politics of consciousness. The origins of the evils that the novel decries are, as many of the interchapters insist, social and economic. They result from patterns of ownership, margins of profit, lack of security, and the other characteristics of a capitalistic system with a dispossessed proletariat to exploit. Can anything but a social revolution change that system? Pilgrim's Progress, like the sermons Casy preached before losing his original faith, is about getting to heaven; that kind of salvation depends upon inner change. But Steinbeck wants to save the nation from its sins. Babies like Rose of Sharon's are dying because of social inequalities and economic injustices. Can the private, spiritual birth of a New Man or a New Woman—the unrecorded “event” that the novel leaves at the center of its narrative and its vision—affect that?