In “Discourse in the Novel,” the Russian theoretician Mikhail Bakhtin states,

[T]he central problem in prose theory is the problem of the double-voiced, internally dialogized word in all its diverse types and variants. … [T]he object is always entangled in someone else's discourse about it, it is already present with qualifications, an object of dispute that is conceptualized and evaluated variously, inseparable from the heteroglot social apperception of it.¹

In The Pastures of Heaven, the object Steinbeck approaches dialogically is the American “pastoral” West. The title of the book—which is explained in the initial, framing chapter as the exclamation of a Spanish soldier when he first came upon the valley by accident—itself provides clues to the conflicting nature of the various American discourses of the pastoral.

“The pastures of heaven,” however, is only one of many possible translations of “Las pasturas del cielo.” Del can mean either “of the” or “from.” Cielo is the Spanish word for both “heaven” and “sky.” Moreover, the relatively unambiguous pasto is the common Spanish word for “pasture.” Pasturas, which means either “pastures” or “fodder,” is such an unlikely word for a Spanish corporal to use that it suggests the possibility that Steinbeck employed it specifically because of the ambiguity involved in any translation of the term.²

Thus, by presenting his audience with the translated title as if the “original” Spanish—which is, of course, a name of his own construction—is unproblematic and monologic, Steinbeck accomplishes a number of things. For readers with even a basic understanding of Spanish, he underlines at the beginning of his book the bilingual consciousness that Bakhtin says is crucial for the appreciation of language as discourse (p. 62), while he simultaneously subverts the idyllic implications so much a part of American pastoral expectations. Furthermore, by never mentioning even the possibility of variant translations, he emphasizes the contested nature of discourse, the way in which each discourse tries to achieve hegemony by denying the existence, or at least the validity, of other discourses.

The discourses that are dialogically opposed to one another in The Pastures of Heaven represent variations on two competing perspectives—rural and urban—on the pastoral. The book's structure enacts the collapse of that most American of pastoral discourses: Jeffersonian agrarianism; and the catalyst that sets off the collapse is the intrusion of urban, industrial culture into the valley.

The body of the book, that which takes part in the valley itself, is the story of two symbolically conflicting families and forces—the Munroes and the Whitesides—and the story of a failed romance. This core of stories set in the valley is further framed by the opposition, both structurally and symbolically, of the heads of the two families—Bert Munroe and John Whiteside—who as Fontenrose notes are the characters who appear most frequently in the book.³

This opposition and the failed-romance plot form the structure that ties together the separate stories. Bert's section is the first story set in the valley, and John's section is the last. Bert and his family are new to the valley. John's father Richard had been “the first citizen of the valley,” and John in his turn has become the first citizen of the Pastures of Heaven. Bert and his family came from town. John was born in the valley to a family with dynastic intentions.⁴

Early on in the story of the Munroes, Steinbeck alerts readers that the site of contestation will be language and thought itself. The Munroes' moving into the valley causes a rearrangement in the community's discourse about itself that is presented as being both mental and physical,

The Battle farm was haunted. They had always considered it so, even those who laughed at the idea. Now a man came along and proved them wrong. More than that he changed the face of the countryside by removing the accursed farm and substituting a harmless and fertile farm.

(p. 18)

In reality, the old farm has been changed; however, because discourses do not change or readily share their authority with other discourses, one farm is “substitut[ed]” in discourse for another.

Furthermore, that Bert's thoughts are presented as “coming to him” (p. 19), rather than being the results of his own reasoning, suggests that his Battle farm is the home of a discourse that speaks through Bert without his being conscious of it. As Bakhtin puts it,

Only a single and unitary language [or discourse], one that does not acknowledge other languages alongside itself, can be subject to reification. … Characteristic for the novel as a genre is not the image of a man in his own right, but a man who is precisely the image of a language.

(p. 336; italics in the original)

It is not surprising then that the home Bert makes for his family out of the Battle farm is the city dweller's reified vision of pastoral comfort, with “steel beds painted to look like wood” and the whole “made to look like a hundred thousand other country houses in the West.” It is a vision of rural life mediated by the experience and discourse of an industrial and commercial America. It is no longer a farmhouse; instead, it has become a place of rest where neither the seventeen-year-old son nor the nineteen-year-old daughter appears to do any work.⁵ The result is a change in discourse corresponding to the change in function: it has become a “country house” (p. 12).

The Munroes thoughtlessly represent the force of the town and town values by speaking its discourse as if it were the natural discourse. And the conflicts between the Munroes' commonsense notions of what rural life should be and the discourses of this isolated farming community reveal the flaws and contradictions in the agrarian ideal, and serve as the catalyst for the action in the various chapters.⁶ Unconsciously then, the Munroes form the vanguard of the attacking army in what will become the farm battle, the struggle of Jeffersonian agrarianism to remain a viable ideology and life-style in twentieth-century America. Steinbeck foreshadows the victory of the discourse that speaks through Bert Munroe by making Bert the only character who reappears in the book after the chapter in which he is the main character.

For most critics, the climax of the battle between the Munroes and Whitesides is the fire that burns down the Whiteside house in the book's penultimate chapter. The instigator of the brush clearing that burns down the house is, of course, Bert Munroe. Bert, who has asbestos shingles on his house, tells John, “I've always wondered why you didn't have a band of sheep,” and then advises him to burn the thick brush off his hill to create spring pasturage. John wants to get a lot of men to help with the clearing, but Bert assures him that with five men there will be no danger (p. 215). Of course, when the beautiful house, the center of all the Whitesides' authority in the valley, and the focus of their dreams of dynasty, burns to the ground, Bert Munroe blames coal oil in the basement for the fire (pp. 217-19).

In reality, however, the end of the Whiteside dynasty is the result of a failed romance, and that romance fails, at least in part, because of pressures exerted by the contradictory pastoral discourses that it attempts to contain. The house symbolizes the family's dynastic intentions, but the dynasty fails before the house is consumed by the fire. On first reading, though, it may seem that the dynasty fails because of a successful romance; after all, it is the marriage of Bill Whiteside, John's only child, to Mae Munroe, and the young couple's subsequent move to Monterey—an implicit rejection of the country—that signals the end of the Whiteside dynasty in the Pastures of Heaven.

Still, a failed romance is what brings about the end of the Whiteside lineage in the valley. Furthermore, the failed-romance plot is important because it emphasizes that for the Whitesides the stakes of the battle with the Munroes are their continued existence as a lineage in the valley, and because it shows Steinbeck using other stories dialogically—one of the main resources that Bakhtin identifies for the creation of heteroglossia. Here Steinbeck refracts the romance plot of Owen Wister's The Virginian.⁷

Chapter Eight, the crucial section for the Whitesides, is where The Virginian comes into play. In The Pastures of Heaven, it is the story of Molly Morgan, the new schoolteacher. In The Virginian, the romance plot is based on the arrival of Molly Wood, the new schoolteacher. She comes to an isolated western community; she instantly becomes one of the most important people in the community because of her position and her personal merit; and she is the center of interest of many bachelors. That is the romance plot of Wister's novel, and of Molly Morgan's story in The Pastures of Heaven.⁸ From that point on, however, Steinbeck's story undercuts the romance plot of Wister's novel. Bill Whiteside is not Jeff, the laconic salt-of-the-earth hero of The Virginian. Bill does tend cows, but he is far closer to being one of the mooning shepherds of ancient pastoral than he is to being the romantic cowboy hero from Virginia. The outcome of the two romance plots is therefore very different.

While interviewing for the job of local schoolteacher, Molly Morgan develops such a sudden and great affection for John and Willa Whiteside and their home that when John offers her the position and asks where she intends to board she replies, “I want to live here.” And even though the Whitesides never take boarders, they agree to take her in.

Mrs. Whiteside's explicit concern about the arrangement seems to be that Bill will not measure up to Molly (p. 136). And Bill's reaction when he first sees Molly is less than promising. He is transformed into a lovesick puppy, while Molly becomes an important person in the valley. By virtue of being the teacher, Molly takes over as the favored arbiter of cultural and academic questions (pp. 135-36), a position similar to that once held by the original Whiteside in the valley.

The Whitesides have found the right woman for the dynasty, if only Bill can become a strong enough suitor to displace her long-absent father in her affections. Bill, however, shows himself to be singularly unperceptive about Molly. Molly tells him the story of her father's disappearance and of her hope that her father is still alive somewhere, but Bill calls her father “an irresponsible cuss” and wonders why dear old Dad has never written to her.

Bill's perspective is perfectly logical; however, it is also monologic. Molly's discourse is similarly monologic; she, despite all the evidence to the contrary, perceives the father who abandoned her family when she was a child as a good and loving family man. Bill fails to understand that Molly's discourse is driven by her emotions, and Molly is too afraid of the truth to be comfortable with Bill's logic. Locked as they are in their opposing discourses, each one evaluates what the other says in terms of his or her own discourse, and so they speak past each other.

Chapter Eight of The Pastures of Heaven stops following the plot of The Virginian at the point where the hero rescues the schoolteacher from danger. Instead, Steinbeck's story at that point becomes the negative to Wister's positive. After their conversation about her father, Molly avoids Bill. When she decides to hike up to visit the shack which legend has it was built by the bandit Vasquez, Bill wants to go along. Uncharacteristically, he is willing to leave work for the day, if Molly will allow him to accompany her. Molly, however, believing that Bill lacks imagination, decides that she would rather go alone, reasoning that he would turn her “adventure” into a mere “trip” (p. 137).

As she is returning from her hike, Bill comes up the path to check on her; she has been gone a long time and people were beginning to worry about her. This action is as close as Bill will ever come to rescuing Molly from anything. Moreover, Bill, unlike the Virginian, is not injured, and Molly does not nurse him back to health. Instead, Bill, not knowing what daydreams have constituted her adventure, manages to mock all the romantic notions with which she had happily passed her day. From this point on, the romance plot only degenerates further.

Molly and Bill do not get married, and, most important of all, unlike the Virginian and his Molly, they do not fill their house with the large numbers of children necessary for a proper dynasty. It is interesting, though, that the inspection Jeff the Virginian undergoes from Molly's great-aunt is similar to the inspection Alicia Whiteside gives Bill's mother Willa when she becomes engaged to John (p. 204). After the inspection, Alicia decides that she can die, because there will be children. By switching the burden of being inspected from Jeff to Willa, and by making it John rather than Willa Whiteside who inspects Molly, Steinbeck both makes the point that dynasties dehumanize those who marry into them by turning them into breeding stock and emphasizes that it is mostly women who suffer from that dehumanization. Steinbeck further undercuts the notion, implicit in The Virginian, that passing the inspection will lead to lots of children and the desired dynasty by making Bill Whiteside an only child.⁹

Bill does not replace Molly's father in her affections; he does not win over the most eligible woman in the valley; and he does not secure the succession of the Whitesides in the Pastures of Heaven. Molly, still fixated on her father, is soon driven away from the valley by the fear that the lush who is Bert Munroe's new hired man is her father (pp. 140-44). The ultimate collapse of the house of Whiteside is a foregone conclusion.

But to say Bill has failed is to accept the value system of The Virginian's discourse, and that is exactly what readers should not do. To blame Bill is to fail to see Molly's responsibility for her own delusion, and to accept the ideology of male sexual dominance in the discourse of The Virginian.¹⁰ Steinbeck warns against such simplistic readings of Bill:

“Tell me the truth, Willa. Is he—stupid?”

“No,” she said consideringly. “No, he's not stupid. In some ways he's harder and brighter than you are. He isn't your kind, John. …”

(pp. 209-10)

Bill's “failure” in the romance plot is less important than his father's thematic failure of imagination. Bill is not John's kind; John Whiteside wanted a dynasty, as did his father before him. And Steinbeck makes it clear that the dynasty they have planned is pastoral in nature. Before Richard begins his search for a wife, he has acquired “a little band of sheep” (p. 192). There is a pastoral song competition when John reads Virgil and decides to try writing some poetry himself. The narrator sums up the pleasance and the pastoral suspension this way:

Most lives extend in a curve. There is a rise of ambition, a rounded peak of maturity, and gentle downward slope of disillusion and last a flattened grade of waiting for death. John Whiteside lived in a straight line. He was ambitionless; his farm not only made him a good living, but paid enough so he could hire men to work it for him. He wanted nothing beyond what he had or could easily procure. He was one of the few men who could savor a moment while he held it. And he knew it was a good life he was leading, a uniquely good life.

(pp. 207-08; italics mine)

The problem here is that this good life is unique. This pastoral dream requires the labor of many people to produce the ease of one man. In another veiled critique of the hypocritical “self-sufficiency” of dynastic agrarian culture, Alicia Whiteside, because she has become an invalid through her attempts to provide children for the dynasty, can manage to run the household only by employing neighboring country girls as domestic help. Clearly, for Steinbeck, dynasties are not the answer.

Richard Whiteside, however, proudly declares that the house should last five hundred years, and that he will be buried there to make it harder for later generations of Whitesides to leave. The neighbor's response to this attempt to extend paternal authority beyond the grave is telling: “It sounds fine, but that's not how we work out here” (pp. 190-91). In this symbolically most American of valleys,¹¹ patriarchal authority extends only until the child reaches adulthood. As Jay Fliegelman has shown in his study of patriarchal authority and the ideology of the American Revolution, the idea of a father imposing his will on a grown child runs counter to the ethos of the founding acts of the American nation.¹² Through the Whitesides, Steinbeck reveals that the most American, and supposedly most democratic, of ideals—Jeffersonian agrarianism—is in truth based on the most un-American and undemocratic of principles.

In conclusion, Steinbeck uses many of the central discourses of the American West—rural idyll, the cowboy individualist, and the yeoman farmer/backbone of democracy—dialogically in opposition to one another in The Pastures of Heaven to critique the pastures-in-the-sky nature of American national discourses of the West as garden—las pasturas del cielo. To interpret any of the discourses separately as the correct discourse is to make the same mistake Bert Munroe and John Whiteside make in being, as Bakhtin puts it, “image[s] of a language” (p. 336).

Notes

1. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 330.

2. Carlos Castillo and Otto F. Bond, eds., The University of Chicago Spanish-English/English-Spanish Dictionary (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), pp. 37, 139; Gabriel Berns, interview with distinguished scholar of Spanish translation, October 10, 1988; Jackson J. Benson, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (New York: Viking Press, 1990), pp. 39-41, 277-80. It is possible that Steinbeck never knew the peninsular Spanish “pasto”; however, given that he learned much of his Spanish working as hay boss, Steinbeck probably knew the New World Spanish “pastura.” Steinbeck certainly would have known the multiple meanings of “del” and “cielo.” Thus, it seems likely that he wanted the variant translations of “the pastures of the sky” and “the fodder for heaven” to be lurking in the background of “the pastures of heaven.” All subsequent biographical references are from Benson, passim.

3. Joseph Fontenrose, Steinbeck's Unhappy Valley: A Study of “The Pastures of Heaven” (Berkeley, California: Joseph Fontenrose, 1981), pp. 6-7.

4. John Steinbeck, The Pastures of Heaven, 5th ed. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), pp. 191, 188-220; all subsequent citations are to this edition.

5. Ibid., p. 17. Only a city dweller, in his “nostalgia” for a life he has never led, would believe that life as a small farmer would offer “rest and security”—one or the other perhaps, but certainly not both.

6. Louis Owens, John Steinbeck's Re-Vision of America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), pp. 76-77. Owens points out that although the Munroes act as catalysts, the incidents were bound to happen eventually, and they force the “victims” to reconsider the delusions by which they have been living. Also, the difficulty of recognizing that the Munroes are not “cursed” (Pastures, p. 19) wraps the readers in illusions just as surely as the valley's inhabitants have wrapped themselves in their illusions.

7. John J. Murphy, “The Virginian and Antonia Shimerda: Different Sides of the Western Coin,” in Women and Western American Literature, eds. Helen W. Stauffer and Susan J. Rosowski (Troy, New York: Whitson Publishing Co., 1982), pp. 162-78. Murphy delineates the importance of Wister's character to the myth of the West.

8. James D. Hart, The Popular Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), p. 207; Max Westbrook “Afterword” The Virginian, 13th ed. (New York: New American Library, 1979), p. 318; Robert DeMott, Steinbeck's Reading (New York: Garland, 1984); “Steinbeck's Reading: First Supplement,” Steinbeck Quarterly, 18 (Summer-Fall 1984), 97-103; “Steinbeck's Reading: Second Supplement,” Ibid., 12 (Winter-Spring 1989), 4-8; James Robert Parish and Michael R. Pitts, eds., The Great Western Pictures (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1976), pp. 383-85. There have been four movie versions of The Virginian, including the hugely successful early talkie version with Gary Cooper in 1929 (while Steinbeck was writing The Pastures of Heaven). And, although DeMott does not list The Virginian or any other books by Wister in Steinbeck's Reading or in either of the supplements, knowledge of Steinbeck's reading is necessarily incomplete. Still, The Virginian was the best-selling book in America in 1902—the year of Steinbeck's birth—and has remained in print for almost ninety years. Given that the Steinbecks were a bookish family, that young John loved novels of adventure, and given the above-mentioned plot similarities and the two teachers both named Molly, it seems probable that Steinbeck did, in fact, read The Virginian. This does not constitute proof, but the argument for coincidental similarity is less credible than the hypothesis that Steinbeck was familiar either directly or indirectly with Wister's archetypal Western tale.

9. Owen Wister, The Virginian, 13th ed. (New York: New American Library, 1979), pp. 314-16.

10. Bakhtin, Dialogic, pp. 311-12. “Incorporated into the novel are a multiplicity of ‘language’ and verbal-ideological belief systems. … The[se] … systems, while of course utilized to refract the author's intentions, are unmasked and destroyed as something false, hypocritical, greedy, narrowly rationalistic, inadequate to reality.” See also Murphy, “Virginian and Antonia,” p. 167.

11. Owens, p. 74, cites the European discovery of the valley on the first page and in 1776.

12. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), passim.