SOURCE: Meyer, Michael J. “Finding a New Jerusalem: The Edenic Myth in John Steinbeck.” In Literature and the Bible, edited by David Bevan, pp. 95-116. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993.

Even as the earliest settlers set foot on the shores of America, one of the predominant goals that brought them to this new country was the belief that God had ordained a new Eden/Jerusalem/Canaan for His chosen people. The land, a fertile garden in the eyes of newcomers, appeared to have all the requirements of the Biblical cities and countries that were associated with faith and rebirth, with innocence and sinlessness. Therefore it was no surprise that the colonists, mostly devout Puritans, proclaimed America to be a reclaimed garden of Eden—a place where the true believer could claim what was impossible for his forefathers on the European continent—that is, a sense of hope that the new world would be a place to regain all that had been lost in Adam's fall. God had restored his faithful by providing a new country which would foster a re-embracing of the precepts of an Almighty Father and which would eventually become the regained Paradise so longed for by the faithful.

America symbolised a new opportunity for the Christians to recreate the early mythology of their religion; however, unlike Adam, these patriots were determined not to fall victim to the temptation of the demonic Satan, the snake who beguiled the first mother. Instead, inspired by their brotherhood in Christ, they would form an idealistic kingdom, a heaven on earth as they awaited the second coming.

This initial idealistic concept of the Puritans would later become the archetypal vision which would be labelled the American Dream. This Dream consisted of a vision of peace, prosperity and loving acceptance that mirrored the original Eden of the distant past. Not surprisingly, the idealism was destined to be strained by man's concept of his own self-importance and by his rejection of God's approbation in exchange for the monetary success (a sign of election) so attainable in this new land of milk and honey. The distorted dream thus became a concept of self-aggrandisement and accomplishment rather than a commitment to the moral precepts espoused by the Puritan founders. Yet, despite the setback, the vision of an America as a type of Eden continued to find its way into the literature produced by its people.

Of all the authors influenced by a desire to reclaim America's Edenic heritage and principles, John Steinbeck was perhaps foremost in shaping the myth of Eden into a wide variety of stories and novels, suggesting that the hope and idealism espoused in the Eden myth were essential qualities that Americans of the 1930s through the 1960s needed to recapture before real progress of the human race could occur.

Beginning with The Pastures of Heaven, published in 1932, Steinbeck began to examine the pluses and minuses which would be encountered in reshaping a new Eden for his time. The Pastures of Heaven, like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, was a collection of short vignettes involving the Corral de Cielo, a lush valley that Steinbeck populated with characters who were seeking renewal of life and hope in an isolated Edenic location in California. Steinbeck ironically had reformed an actual valley, the Corral de Tierra, to his archetypal Eden.

In chapter one, the valley is discovered by a Spanish corporal who is stunned by “the green pasturage on which a herd of deer browsed” and “by the perfect live oaks in the meadow of the lovely place.”¹ His exclamation of surprise, “Holy Mother! Here are the green pastures of Heaven to which our Lord leadeth us”,² stuck as the name of the valley, although the corporal did not live to enjoy it. Only a hundred years later is the place reclaimed when twenty families settled and lived prosperously and at peace on a land that was rich and easy to work. As Steinbeck notes as chapter one closes: “The fruits of their gardens were the finest produced in central California.”³

Ironically however, chapter two begins with a cursed farm, “sodden with gloom and threatening.” Although the farm was bounded by the best and most prosperous farms of the valley, the first owner, George Battle, seemed to bring with him an unsettling sense of futility. His son John continued the tradition with mad religious obsessions and was eventually killed by a snake's poisonous bite. After another owner, the Mustrovic family, mysteriously disappears, the farm is seen as cursed and passes to another family, the Monroes. The Monroes were based on an actual family, the Morans, that Steinbeck was acquainted with, and they are identified by the author as the antagonists of the novel who seem to inherit the curse despite their good intention to restore the land to perfection.

Seemingly influenced by former failures, Bert Monroe, the patriarch of this clan, attempts to find a new Eden to start over and transform the tragedy of the past. Despite his hope that his own personal curse (failure in the competitive world of the city) and the farm's curse have cancelled each other out, one of the other settlers, T. B. Allen, suggests that the two curses may have mated and produced a “lot of baby curses that will infest the whole valley.”⁴ Again the Eden parallel is evident as the dual curses, like man's fall from grace, poison the property owner's heart and eventually cause the destruction of a perfect garden. The baby curses also bring to mind how Adam and Eve's fall had resulted and how original sin is being handed down to future generations. It also suggests how the promise of Eden eventually wilted under the temptation of Satan.

The imagery used suggests that initially Steinbeck felt that the American dream of a new Eden was little more than a fantasy utilised by individuals to cope with the reality of a fallen society. The following chapters illustrate that the attempt to restore Eden is eventually futile and four episodes can be cited that serve as specific evidence of Steinbeck's continued use of the image to make his point about America's continuing fascination with establishing a new paradise.

The first story Steinbeck tells is of the Wicks family, whose patriarch is named Shark. Wicks' Eden is imaginary, consisting of a fictional ＄50,000 bank account and his beautiful daughter, Alice. The former makes him seem the perfect investor and earns him the respect of his neighbours who are unaware of the fantasy nature of his fortune. The latter is described by Steinbeck in terms of a natural Eden:

Her skin was as lucent and rich as poppies; her black hair had the soft crispness of a fern stem, her eyes were misty skies of promise something most people had spent all their lives looking for.⁵

Yet Alice's beauty is countered by her stupidity and dullness, and Shark has to be concerned that her innocence and naiveté will eventually lead her to fall from the chaste life he envisions for his treasure. The possible defloration of Alice is the loss of a human Edenic figure, a disfigurement of her former perfection. Defending Alice's purity leads Shark to monitor even her menstruation as evidence that she has remained unmolested.

The son of the Monroes, Jimmie, is the ultimate temptation for Alice, and, as such, Shark attempts to protect her from him just as he protects his imaginary fortune. The turning point in the story is a dance Alice attends while her father is out of town. The young men, especially Jimmie Monroe, are awed by Alice, and, in her innocence, Alice ends up kissing Jimmie.

When Shark returns, the kiss is magnified in his eyes to the ultimate fall from purity. Like Adam, in Shark's absence, his Eden has been destroyed. He contemplates shooting Jimmie in retribution for the loss he has experienced, but he ends up returning home a broken individual who must be ironically restored through his wife Katherine. He ultimately decides that his physical Eden must be left. However, enabled by Katherine's encouragement, Shark is able to create a new Eden of the mind, feeling that the lifelessness of his physical expectations could be restored by a life within, a paradise better by far than his fantasy fortune and his unattainable wish for his daughter's continued innocence.

A second story that illustrates Steinbeck's adherence to the Eden myth is the tale of Junius Maltby. Chapter six in the novel portrays Junius as an immigrant who spent his time as a clerk until his doctor suggested his ill health necessitated a move from San Francisco to the more efficacious pastures of heaven. Reforming both his Eden and his health, Junius lives the life of a natural recluse on two hundred acres of grassy hillside and five acres of orchard and vegetable life acquired when he married his landlady, Mrs. Quaker. Junius' concept of Eden is that of laziness: reading books, dangling his feet in the stream, and ignoring reality. When a smallpox epidemic kills off his wife and his two older sons, he is left with a small baby to raise. Since Junius is troubled by responsibility, eventually he continues his laissez faire attitude to both his land and to his child, Robbie. He hires an old German man, Jakob Stutz, to help him with the farm and to serve as a companion who can discuss great books with him. Both men share their passive life of philosophical speculations with the young child. Thus Junius says:

It seems to me that a good thing or a kind thing must be very large to survive. Little good things are always destroyed by evil little things. Rarely is a big thing poisonous or treacherous. For this reason in human thinking, bigness is an attribute of good and littleness of evil.⁶

Poverty and idleness thus become Junius' happiness. He is content to sit in the sun and dangle his feet in the stream, and his son follows his example until he is six and is required to go to school. Since Junius' Edenic concept does not agree with his neighbours, Robbie is teased and tortured at school and is the subject of pity from his teacher and the other mothers of his class.

Soon Robbie's behaviour and love of laziness begin to rub off on his peers, and the citizens begin to feel obligated to instruct the Maltbys what a real Eden is: success, clothes, and education. The visit of Miss Morgan, the school teacher, is designed to do just that. The ironically pretend-world and the disorganisation of the Maltbys has a surprising appeal to Miss Morgan as she exclaims: “How utterly lovely and slipshod.”⁷ The afternoon ends up being one of the most pleasant Miss Morgan has ever spent. She sees in the Maltby's Eden pleasure and relaxation an idyllic harmony. Therefore, she hesitates when the school board suggests donating clothes to Robbie to make him more presentable.

The gift of clothes proves counter-productive as Junius is offended and goes back to the city to resume his job as an accountant. Like Adam, he leaves the Eden he has created to attain what the selfish others believe is important. Robbie is to accompany his father, and the value of the land in currency becomes more important than the freedom and happiness of the Maltby's unusual lifestyle. This also illustrates Steinbeck's belief that the Edenic atmosphere is different for each individual, an idea he continues in the tale of Pat Humbert, who also attempts to create an Eden, in chapter ten.

Growing up with aging parents, Humbert finds himself criticised for his youth as his parents continue to isolate themselves and be unhappy and discontented with their lives. After their deaths, Humbert closes off the parts of the house that hold memories of his parents' negative attitude. However, he has been shaped by their depression and continues to hear their authoritative and demanding voices despite the fact that they are dead. The house becomes an opposite of Eden: “bleak and utterly dreary,”⁸ containing a wave of cold, lifeless air complete with the smell of funeral flowers and age and medicine. It is as though the house is infested by the ghosts of the past, of an Eden destroyed.

Ultimately, however, Pat struggles for a renewal, engaging in the company of others and falling in love with Mae Monroe, the daughter of the “cursed” family. Enticed by a wild rose climbing on the side of Humbert's house, Mae comments that she would really like to see the beautiful inside. This motivates Pat to envision and transform his residence to an Edenic garden. Not wishing to be seen recreating his paradise, Humbert travels by night to gain the acquired furniture and decorations for a refurbished and elegant home. Modelling his Eden on Mae's vision of a Vermont home seen in a magazine, Pat finishes the remodelling and dreams that the gloom and doom of his earlier years with his parents will be dispelled. But before he can show Mae the refurbished home, his vision is destroyed by the news of her engagement to Bill Whiteside, another resident of Las Pasturas. In despair, Humbert destroys the old furniture, clothing and decorations that stood for his parents and abandons his visions of an Eden that will appeal to Mae. Again Steinbeck seems to suggest that a literal Eden cannot be sustained against potential curses and falls, and yet America, like the residents of pastures, persists in hoping to attain such a goal.

The renewed paradise is a fantasy; harsh reality dominates the human desire to recapture the perfection of Eden. Steinbeck describes Humbert after his rejection as “shrunken and dry with disappointment.”⁹ Similarly, the newly decorated house/Eden is dark and utterly dreary in contrast to its potential as a symbol of renewal. Thus Edens are again shown to be fragile and different in the eyes of individuals.

The epilogue or chapter twelve is designed to parallel the Spanish corporal in the first chapter and to provide a framework to mirror the fantasies and dreams of the outside world when contrasted with the reality of the little valley. It depicts six individuals taking a tour of the Monterey peninsula. In fact, perhaps the passengers on the sight-seeing tour gave Steinbeck an idea for his later allegory, The Wayward Bus. In any case, their reaction to Las Pasturas is similar to that of the Spanish corporal.

Each sees in it his own definition of Eden, unaware that it is not exempt from the human condition, that it too is flawed by the fall. For the business man, the valley is a vision of riches and wealth: “Some day there'll be big houses in that valley, stone houses and gardens, golf links and big gates and iron work.”¹⁰ If he had the money, he would buy the property and subdivide it.

The young newlyweds like the peacefulness of Las Pasturas. But ambitions and expectations of friends draw them away from the dream possibility. They rationalise that they must face responsibility, rather than escape it.¹¹ Similarly, the young priest considers the potentials of a parish in Las Pasturas, but his idyllic vision of nothing dirty or violent, of quiet love, is dispelled with a realisation that this kind of ministry would not be ministry at all. The true Christian must be in the world, but not of the world.

Finally, the old man sees the potential of Las Pasturas for reflection, to make something out of his past and to understand the meaning of his existence. Even the driver envies the residents the peace and quiet of Las Pasturas. However, symbolically, the town is located at the end of the tour, and the sight-seeing bus must return from its mountaintop experience of an idyllic Eden toward the setting sun, the death-in-life of the real world.

Steinbeck seems to say in the framework as he does in the body of the novel that evil conquers, that mankind's dreams will constantly be destroyed by the encroachment of a sin-sick world. From vagrants and low-lifes to the prestigious settlers of Las Pasturas, no one is exempt from the dark side of existence, and that dark side, at least at this point in Steinbeck's career, is inevitably triumphant. It is this fact, the capitulation of man to evil, that marks the continuing attempt of Steinbeck to portray the dilemma of moral ambiguity. Affected characters may try to maintain a balance between good/evil, between dream fantasies and realities, but they should not be shocked if they are rudely awakened by the dominance of the latter. The bleak world of Las Pasturas leaves the reader sceptical about all Edens. The facts seem to indicate they are merely forgeries, lapsed gardens that frustrate and defeat the rebuilders.

As Richard Peterson summarises Steinbeck's emphasis, he concludes that the basic dilemma is man's inability:

… to adapt his vision to natural and human factors. Steinbeck does not deny the value of the dream … He does, however suggest that men of imagination and feeling have to be aware of the forces which threaten them. they will have to accept the cruel twists of fate and overcome the human mediocrity and idiocy which exist in ominous abundance in the world if they are to succeed in fulfilling their visions of harmony and peace which the tourists mistakenly believe exist in the Pastures of Heaven.¹²

Similarly Richard Astro in his analysis of Pastures [The Pastures of Heaven] states “that while man's highest function on earth may be to break through to an understanding of the cosmic whole and to act to benefit the social order, his fallibility often undermines his potential greatness. …”¹³

Notes

1. John Steinbeck, The Pastures of Heaven, Penguin ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1982, p. 2. All further references are to this edition.

2. Ibid., p. 3.

3. Ibid., p. 4.

4. Ibid., p. 20.

5. Ibid., pp. 26-27.

6. Ibid., p. 94.

7. Ibid., p. 104.

8. Ibid., p. 201.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., p. 240.

11. Ibid., p. 241.

12. Richard Peterson, “The Turning Point: The Pasture of Heaven” in Ted Hayashi, ed. A Study Guide to Steinbeck: A Handbook of His Major Works, New York: Scarecrow Press, p. 40.

13. Ibid., p. 41.