FROM TORTILLA FLAT TO THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT:
JOHN STEINBECK’S CRITICAL EVALUTION OF AMERICAN
CULTURE
_______________
A Thesis
Presented to the
Faculty of
San Diego State University
_______________
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
in
English
_______________
by
Lauren Valerie LePera
Summer 2011
iii
Copyright © 2011
by
Lauren Valerie LePera
All Rights Reserved
iv
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from
birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in
a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither
analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate
destination after many a pitch in many a muddled field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond
reckoning.
Cormac McCarthy
v
ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS
From Tortilla Flat to The Winter of Our Discontent: John Steinbeck’s Critical
Evaluation of American Culture
by
Lauren Valerie LePera
Master of Arts in English
San Diego State University, 2011
In the context of American literature, John Steinbeck stands as a writer able to delve
into the American psyche and study cultural changes unfettered by specific literary
classifications, such as modernism and post-war texts. Although commonly known as a
modernist writer, Steinbeck has evaded this literary branding and adopted a kaleidoscope of
writing styles and genres to communicate his views toward American culture. This thesis
tracks how Steinbeck uncovers the qualities of “the American” in almost any capacity from
economic hardships to wartime and even the abundance of consumerism. The analysis begins
with the comedic, celebratory treatment of the paisanos living in the Monterey hills through
Tortilla Flat (1935). Steinbeck continues the glorification of social outcasts in the witty
Cannery Row (1945), a text which explores the male and female gender roles within
American culture specific to the 1940s era of post-war prosperity. Next, the second chapter
examines Steinbeck’s exploration of his own family history in East of Eden (1952) and
unveils the mask of American idealism, especially in regards to marriage and domesticity,
agrarian idealism, and the American Dream. The final chapter discusses Steinbeck’s scathing
critique of consumer culture in The Winter of Our Discontent (1961). In Steinbeck’s final
piece of fiction, the characters within the novel encounter the loss of morality due to a culture
obsessed with material wealth and economic prosperity. This novel suggests Steinbeck’s
complicated opinions of American culture within his final years. By the end of this thesis, I
suggest that through all of Steinbeck’s various phases from the 1930s to his death in 1968,
Steinbeck recognizes America’s faults, yet still remains loyal to the country he spent decades
examining.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
ABSTRACT...............................................................................................................................v
INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................................1
CHAPTER
1
“THE WHOLE GOD DAMNED SHABBY LOT OF US”: A
CELEBRATION OF STEINBECK’S MOST BELOVED SOCIAL
OUTCASTS.................................................................................................................10
How Mack, Danny and the Other Male Characters Learned Their Lesson
About The Rejection of American Capitalism.......................................................14
The “Perpetual Moonlight of Cannery Row”: The Bear Flag Restaurant
and The Deconstruction of the Perpetual Family Ideal .........................................25
2
THE BATTLE BETWEEN ILLUSION AND REALITY: EAST OF EDEN
AND THE PERILS OF IDEALISM............................................................................35
“She’s No More a Wife Than an Alley Cat:” Adam’s Romantic Idealism ...........39
Beware of The Deadly Poppy Fields: Agrarian Idealism and The
American Dream....................................................................................................47
3
NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT: THE CONSUMERIST
SEDUCTION OF AMERICA AND ITS EFFECTS ON MORALITY ......................56
Welcome to the Machine: The Destruction of Nature and The
Mechanization of America.....................................................................................59
“Taking Stock”: Ethan’s Familial Burden .............................................................64
Cultural Myths and Mickey Mouse .......................................................................71
CONCLUSION..................................................................................................................78
WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................................81
1
INTRODUCTION
There are few artists that can truly capture the spirit of America in all of her unique,
complicated phases. F. Scott Fitzgerald is one. Ernest Hemingway is another. Literary giants
from the twentieth century flood the curriculum and find themselves classified into their own
elaborate, hyper-specific genres—modernism, pre-war and post-war texts, postmodernism,
realism, Southern gothic, etc. Few authors transcend these categories, some have even
attempted to rid themselves of this literary branding, but to no avail. One canonized author in
particular who has managed to evade a literary niche and showcase his talents beyond the
confines of stylistic classification or content is John Steinbeck. Several critics mention
Steinbeck’s separation from literary-isms and highlight his transgression of conventional
limitations. For example, literary criticism places Steinbeck outside the confines of
modernism,
He was a modernist outside the traditional boundaries of modernism, his prose
shaped by myth; his sentences honed, like Hemingway’s, to the essential; his
visionary characters as thoroughly deflated as Fitzgerald’s […] He refused to be
pigeonholed as a realist, a writer of fiction, a committed social critic, a regional
writer. This fierce independence is one of his most salient features as a writer.
(Shillinglaw and Hearle 2-3)
Evident by the multifarious genres and subjects explored throughout his lifetime,
Steinbeck escapes formal categorization and exists as a rogue American author, untamable
by normative literary restrictions.
Steinbeck published works in every decade of his life, beginning with Cup of Gold
(1927) and concluding with America and Americans (1966)1. Steinbeck’s freedom from the
1
There are several journals and unfinished works published posthumously, notably Journal of a Novel:
The East of Eden Letters (1969) and The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976).
2
confines of a specific literary genre allowed for both criticism and celebration of everything
within American history. Often censured simultaneously for sentimentality and pessimism,
Steinbeck’s constant critique of American culture emblematizes his thematic focus on all
things quintessentially American. Capitalism, consumerism, and the façade of the American
Dream top the list and exhibit his ability to discuss the “American” in almost any situation,
whether it is a time of war, a period of economic depression, or even a time of abundant
prosperity. Eloquently phrased by critic Rajni Chadha , Steinbeck’s writing encompasses the
complete scope of American culture: “Like America itself, his work is a vast, fascinating,
paradoxical universe: a brash experiment in democracy; a native quest for understanding at
the level of the common man; a celebration of goodness and innocence; a display of violence,
corruption and decadence” (17). Steinbeck evaluates all facets of humanity, including the
common man and the complexities that make up the American. As discussed in the following
chapters, Steinbeck explores profound themes unique to each decade, considering various
features of the sociohistorical background and situates his characters within these contexts.
This thesis explores the range of Steinbeck’s works, beginning with Tortilla Flat
(1935), continuing to the post-war celebration of social tricksters in Cannery Row (1945),
into the personal history of Steinbeck’s family in East of Eden (1952), and then concluding
with his biting criticism of American culture in The Winter of Our Discontent (1961).
Looking at Steinbeck’s texts from the 1930s through each decade into the 1960s reveals the
full spectrum of his feelings toward American culture in terms of the social and historical
events of each decade. Steinbeck’s fiction tracks the changes of a man who spent his life
examining those lives of his fellow Americans.
3
In the decades of the 1930s and 1940s, Steinbeck’s writings react to both the
unprecedented social, historical and economic climate of America and respond to his own
personal experiences with marriage, divorce and fatherhood. Steinbeck published small,
virtually unknown works and reached his first commercial success with Tortilla Flat. In the
mid-1930s, Steinbeck traversed the country reporting on the conditions of migrant farm
workers and the cruel treatment of these nomadic groups. His findings were published in the
San Francisco News as a collection called “The Harvest Gypsies” (1936), which later
became the factual backdrop for Steinbeck’s most recognized novel, The Grapes of Wrath
(1939). From the Great Depression to World War II, Steinbeck continued to release social
and war-oriented pieces (both fiction and non-fiction) about his experiences as a war
correspondent, and then eventually resettled his focus on the amusing, sentimental figures
immortalized in Cannery Row. This work certainly deviates from the somber writings earlier
in the 1930s and 1940s and reaffirms Steinbeck’s position as a dynamic, playful writer.
In Chapter One, I discuss the comedic qualities of Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row,
particularly in the sociohistoric context of the times and explore the trickster, non-normative
behaviors of the characters glorified in these two texts. Beginning with Tortilla Flat,
Steinbeck commences his sentimental approach to the figures of Monterey, California, with
the comical depiction of the paisanos occupying the hills above the bay. As discussed in
America and Americans, Steinbeck describes his fond memories of the early 1930s, living a
modest lifestyle and enjoying the simplicities of a time before the immense misfortunes and
economic plight of the Great Depression. In this early text, Steinbeck institutes his
continuous celebration of social outcasts and explores short, humorous episodes of the
paisanos (which Steinbeck describes as “a mixture of Spanish, Indian, Mexican, and assorted
4
Caucasian bloods”(Tortilla Flat, 2)) as a means to venerate these true characters resisting
capitalist pressures and social expectations. Early in the novel, Steinbeck establishes his
comparison of Danny and his friends to the Arthurian Knights of the Round Table. Although
Danny and his friends do not embody the traditional noble values of knighthood, this
juxtaposition implies Steinbeck’s valorization of their jobless, yet joyful, existence apart
from normative society. In this novel, Steinbeck celebrates the economic freedom of the
paisanos and utilizes a comedic approach to highlight the animated contentment of characters
resisting the confines of social pressures. Much like the fables of the Arthurian knights,
Tortilla Flat evolves in short episodes, each with its own moral lesson at the conclusion.
Similarly, Steinbeck derails the normative social subject in Cannery Row through a
parallel set of characters resisting social codes and determining their own rules and norms.
Through loose plotlines and comedic situations, Steinbeck adopts a forgiving tone when
describing these figures, even romanticizing their resistance to dominant culture. Notably,
Cannery Row discusses male and female gender roles and disrupts these conventional social
codes throughout the novel. In the male realm, Steinbeck criticizes the American privileging
of capitalism, especially male-oriented modes of business, and institutes the theme of
bartering subverts the conventional capitalist exchange of money for goods. This serves as
refusal of economic mores by the male characters. While both Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row
focus on the inversion of predominately male roles, Cannery Row also subverts femalespecific expectations of domesticity and compulsory motherhood. The presentation of Dora
Flood’s holy whorehouse introduces an atypical female-headed household and the
paradoxical practice of morality, religion and traditional family values within a nontraditional environment. As I see it, queer theory helps to explain the subversive dynamics
5
within the Bear Flag specifically in the queer domestic arrangement illustrated here.
Especially because of and through the sexual implications of the whorehouse, Steinbeck
problematizes the female role as a mother or saintly wife and discusses the vital importance
of Dora’s establishment within the community of Cannery Row.
While Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row mainly involve the comedic, merry tales of
Monterey, Steinbeck shifts into what he dubs one of his “big” novels (as opposed to what
Steinbeck himself calls his “little” books) and travels inland to the Salinas Valley in East of
Eden. In this novel, Steinbeck continues his typical critical approach and discloses the
dangers of American culture, especially the illusion of the American Dream. Fortunately for
literary historicists, Steinbeck kept a private journal (published posthumously as Journal of a
Novel: The East of Eden Letters) during the writing of this novel, which discloses many of
Steinbeck’s extremely personal thoughts and emotions regarding his family, the craft of
writing, and the work of reconstructing his family history. During the 1950s, Steinbeck was
married for the third time and moved to New York, the furthest point from his beloved
California. In contrast to the historical implications of his earlier works, Steinbeck
approached East of Eden as an opportunity to revisit his personal history and evaluate his
own emotions regarding family, marriage and his literary capacity to write another epic
piece, like The Grapes of Wrath. In a biography of Steinbeck, Jackson Benson cites the
“complicated and emotional” composition of East of Eden:
[…]there were pressures from all sides—from his audience, from the critics, and
even from his own agents and publisher—sometimes unspoken, but felt
nevertheless, to follow The Grapes of Wrath with a volume equally weighty and
significant. Gradually the pressure was drawn from the outside to the inside and at
last became an expectation that he held for himself. (The True Adventures 665)
Due to the personal significance of East of Eden, this novel separates itself from the
others and concentrates on grand philosophies of war, family, love and the human condition,
6
while retaining quintessential American elements. The text begins just before the Civil War
and concludes with World War II. Using the wars as bookends, Steinbeck frames the
American capacity for violence, the consistent battle between good and evil and the
destructive presence of disillusionment within the American psyche. East of Eden begins
early in American history and describes the human “struggle to survive in a world made
hostile by evil that confronts all of us” (Jain 82). Often considered Steinbeck’s magnum
opus, East of Eden engages, and destroys, glorified ideals perpetuated within predominant
culture, notably the social insistence upon romantic/familial expectations and the necessity of
a home and farmable land for one’s family. Especially in the context of the California Gold
Rush of the late 19th century, the mass immigration to the West constructed California as the
epitome of Eden, the land of milk and honey, overflowing with possibility. Through its
constant parallels to the book of Genesis, this glorified idealism transforms into a brutal
understanding of reality once the illusion is uncovered.
Like Steinbeck’s previous novels, East of Eden highlights the complete inversion and
disruption of illusory expectations within American culture, specifically capitalism, land
ownership, agrarian idealism and marriage, all of which can be seen as pillars of the
American Dream. In the novel, Steinbeck employs several angles to dismantle this idealism,
but does so most predominantly through the failed, bloody marriage between Adam Trask
and Cathy Ames. Adam carries detrimental romantic illusions and travels to California in
search of his own profitable plot of land, an Eden, to begin a family with Cathy. Although
managing to obtain fertile soil, Adam’s marriage with Cathy ends violently and his
sentimental, domestic illusions implode. Steinbeck follows the character of Adam to unveil
the menacing implications of American idealism and displays the violence committed against
7
him as a cautionary tale to showcase the brutal realities when blinded by idealism. Although
commonly compared to the story of Genesis, East of Eden includes numerous allusions to
children’s texts like Alice in Wonderland and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to advance the
theme of illusion versus reality. These two texts famously play with altered perceptions of
reality and detail the protagonist’s struggle to seek the truth and to evade disillusionment.
Both Alice and Dorothy experience distorted, hallucinatory states of disenchantment and
vehemently seek a way back home, back to reality. These intertextual references in East of
Eden highlight Adam’s struggle to see past the false construction of the American Dream and
shed his idealistic fantasies.
From the historical evaluation of East of Eden, Steinbeck returns to present-day
investigation of a similar type of disillusionment breeding within the vampiric organism of
consumerism, particularly during the late 1950s into the early 1960s. In the era of the 1960s,
Steinbeck published three texts: The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels With Charley:
In Search of America (1962) and America and Americans (1966). These three pieces embody
the most overtly critical, yet forgiving, writings of Steinbeck’s career; Steinbeck viciously
attacks different elements of modern culture, yet nevertheless, includes glimmers of genuine
fondness and hope for America and the American man. Although the era of “The Sixties”
brought positive social change, Steinbeck viewed the onslaught of materialism and
consumerism as a disease, a poison infecting the country and possibly contributing to its
moral degradation. Overall, the writings of the 1960s suggest Steinbeck’s critical view of
social decay in this period and demonstrate the escalating trend of American indulgence.
In Steinbeck’s final piece of fiction, The Winter of Our Discontent, which is the focus
of the third chapter of this thesis, he unveils a merciless tirade against the evils of capitalism
8
and consumer culture, notably through the moral destruction of Ethan Hawley. Of all of
Steinbeck’s works, this text conveys the most overtly critical examination of American
culture and suggests the possibility of Steinbeck’s mounting cynicism in the years before his
death. In America and Americans, Steinbeck claims, “I have named the destroyers of nations:
comfort, plenty, and security—out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which
rebellion against the world as it is and myself as I am are submerged in listless selfsatisfaction” (400). The punchy pessimism and nihilistic undercurrent in The Winter of Our
Discontent confirms Steinbeck’s opinions presented above and suggests the cynical approach
towards modern culture in his final novel. Steinbeck cites “comfort, plenty and security” as
the key destroyers of our nation and includes these three ideals as the contributors to Ethan
Hawley’s moral downfall, representative of the overall decline of American culture. Evident
by his brutal treatment of modern society in this text, Steinbeck reflects upon the
insurmountable evils pervading America and compared to earlier works like Tortilla Flat and
Cannery Row, displays a drastic shift from the carefree tone of the 1930s and 1940s.
Although the critique of American culture represents a chief element in Steinbeck’s
fiction, the characters in The Winter of Our Discontent are handled much differently in
contrast to his earlier pieces. Steinbeck celebrates and romanticizes prostitutes, drunks and all
social outcasts in his early texts while still implying a light, comedic analysis of the wrongs
within predominant society. The celebratory, forgiving tone in texts like Cannery Row differs
severely from the verbal assault against society in The Winter of Our Discontent. Steinbeck
highlights the moral battle within Ethan Hawley and uncovers a dark tale of loneliness,
economic inadequacy and the evils of material wealth in America. For the purposes of this
thesis, the theoretical backdrop of Jean Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society (1970) provides
9
an analytical foundation for the consumer takeover explored in The Winter of Our
Discontent. Baudrillard’s text predominantly analyzes Western cultures and in the discussion
of America, Baudrillard suggests the importance of the object and the ravenous consumption
of goods in a capitalist system. In the foreword to The Consumer Society, J.P. Mayer
proposes, “Consumption, as a new tribal myth, has become the morality of our present
world” (ix) and this statement proves especially true in the context of Ethan Hawley. Ethan
experiences great pressures from his family and peers to elevate his place in society and
provide the consumerist goods representative of economic success. The prevalence of
consumerism has replaced morality in our culture and Ethan finds himself in the midst of a
moral breakdown due to the social necessity of material wealth.
The four texts presented in this analysis demonstrate the progression of Steinbeck’s
experiences as a writer and reflect the changes in his approach to the treatment of
America(ns) throughout his life. In the three decades between Tortilla Flat and Steinbeck’s
death in 1968, he witnessed America during wartime, saw the plight of economic transition
and traveled broadly throughout America and overseas in an attempt to define the nature of
the human condition. And in this time, Steinbeck provided valuable historical and social
documentation of the American individual and American society. Importantly, beyond such
literary and historical importance, Steinbeck’s immense body of work can tell us much about
our times and ourselves.
10
CHAPTER ONE
“THE WHOLE GOD DAMNED SHABBY LOT OF
US”: A CELEBRATION OF STEINBECK’S MOST
BELOVED SOCIAL OUTCASTS
Although widely known for the grand, sweeping tales of American literature, several
of Steinbeck’s shorter novels contain a wealth of comedy, ironic misfortunes and a sharp,
playful tone absent from his more epic pieces. Novels like Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery
Row (1945) showcase the bittersweet, yet comical interactions between characters and
generally, these characters occupy the bottom tiers of the social stratum; drunks, thieves and
prostitutes constitute the main focus of these two novels and receive an overwhelming
glorification atypical of dominant American feelings towards the moral dissent. The social
outcasts displayed in Steinbeck’s novels glorify the “angel-headed hipster” figure
immortalized in Ginsberg’s “Howl” nearly a decade later: the overworked, underpaid, beaten
down, joyous individual free from the constraints of social propriety and capitalist pressures.
At this point in Steinbeck’s literary career, the characters of Tortilla Flat initiate the author’s
exploration of the non-typical American personality while Cannery Row reinforces
Steinbeck’s celebration of these rogue figures.
When considering these texts, the question remains: why does Steinbeck celebrate
these characters? By tracing the evolution of Steinbeck’s fiction, beginning with the analysis
of beat characters in Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck adopts a forgiving tone toward the prostitutes
and drunks in these early novels and creates comedic scenes to highlight the carefree
existence of these trickster figures. Looking forward nearly 30 years after the publication of
11
Tortilla Flat, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish academy, Anders Österling, had this to say
about Steinbeck’s characters in his presentation speech at the Nobel Prize award ceremony,
His sympathies always go out to the oppressed, to the misfits and the distressed;
he likes to contrast the simple joy of life with the brutal and cynical craving for
money. But in him we find the American temperament also in his great feeling for
nature, for the tilled soil, the wasteland, the mountains, and the ocean coasts, all
an inexhaustible source of inspiration to Steinbeck in the midst of, and beyond,
the world of human beings. (Österling)
In this presentation speech, Österling refers to the unyielding “craving for money” found in
Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent, which represents a darker side of Steinbeck’s
fiction and provides a scathing commentary on the commodification of America; however,
Österling also mentions the incredible compassion Steinbeck has for “the oppressed, to the
misfits and the distressed” illuminated in texts like Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row which
demonstrate this sympathetic, elated approach Steinbeck adopts when illustrating these
characters.
In Steinbeck’s own memories from America and Americans (1966), he describes the
mood of the 1930s when all Americans began to feel the looming economic stress: “for
entertainment we had the public library, endless talk, long walks, any number of games. We
played music, sang and made love. Enormous invention went into our pleasures. Anything at
all was an excuse for a party: all holidays, birthdays called for celebration” (21). Sound
familiar? Looking back as an older man, Steinbeck paints an incredibly nostalgic portrait of
the early 1930s before his in-depth expeditions into the heart of the Great Depression.
Through the characters of Danny, Pablo and Pilon, Steinbeck celebrates the comedy and
misunderstood nobility of the true “characters” of Monterey, Tortilla Flat specifically, and
creates lively quasi-vignettes about the lessons to be learned from these gentlemen. Noble
traditions like wine consumption and hunting for treasure may seem like silly endeavors to an
12
educated audience, but in fact, the deceptively idle activities of these characters illustrate the
economic pressures of the ‘30s and attempt to provide a truly American sentimentality for the
underdog.
Through the celebration of these court jesters of American literature, Steinbeck
deconstructs social stigmas associated with rogue/abject characters, including the literary
archetypes of prostitutes, local bums and the town drunk. In the opening paragraph of
Cannery Row, Steinbeck describes its citizens: “Its inhabitants are, as the man once said,
‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man
looked through another peephole, he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and
holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing” (5). Here, Steinbeck immediately
establishes the microcosm of Cannery Row through the image of the “peephole” to showcase
the larger macrocosm of America; despite its marriage to the hyper-specific locale of
Monterey, Steinbeck implements these characters to represent stereotypical figures present in
every American town. The comparison of “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches” to
“saints and angels and martyrs and holy men” suggests the natural American dislike and
distrust of these types of individuals and Steinbeck’s attempt to disrupt this social order.
Typically, these types of iconoclasts threaten the social organization designed with clearly
specified guidelines pertaining to work ethic, religion, modesty, etc. and engender a natural
dislike by those following the prescribed social codes. As seen throughout both texts,
Steinbeck exalts non-typical, non-normative characters who reject the pillars of capitalist
society: the domestic setting, the institution of marriage, the role of the wife and the
American work ethic.
13
In works like Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, Steinbeck implements an indirect
condemnation of American culture by following, and glorifying, characters outside the
normative social structure. These non-normative characters constitute the main focus of each
novel and demonstrate their stark separation from middle-class values and social
conventions. Here, Steinbeck utilizes rogue figures to scrutinize the world around them;
whereas texts like The Winter of Our Discontent show a protagonist’s subscription to
American social expectations and the desperate attempt to assimilate into the capitalist
machine, Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row concentrate on social outcasts in order to highlight
the problems within predominant culture and how these unique characters resist such culture.
Through their existence outside of accepted social values, Steinbeck presents their separation
from modern society as a representation of their freedom, and of course, the beauty within
their liberty.
In both Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, Steinbeck brings elements of non-normativity
and social abjection to the forefront of either text—notably the inversion of masculine and
feminine social expectations. In Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, Steinbeck concentrates on
the central characters of Danny and Mack, respectively; while traipsing alongside their
renegade constituents, Danny and Mack represent the inversion of traditional masculine
social roles, especially in relation to American business, commercialism and capitalism.
These main figures embody the sacrilegious countrymen figures that negate all forms of
social propriety and disassociate themselves with commercial successes, including material
goods. Meanwhile, Cannery Row also deconstructs the typical female role through the
portrayal of Dora’s Bear Flag Restaurant. Here, Steinbeck challenges the criteria of social
femininity (domesticity, marriage, compulsory maternity) and heightens this sense of
14
transgression due to the sexual implications of their domestic space. Steinbeck stresses the
traditional values taught in Dora’s “home,” however, the sexual deviances that take place in
the home completely subvert and problematize all social expectations of femininity,
specifically marriage and the domestic setting. The male characters in Tortilla Flat and the
females in Cannery Row showcase Steinbeck’s vast range and suggest his comedic interest in
these subversive characters from two early works.
HOW MACK, DANNY AND THE OTHER MALE
CHARACTERS LEARNED THEIR LESSON ABOUT THE
REJECTION OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM
In the small coastal town of Monterey, California, there are few characters praised as
much as the fictional personalities contained in Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. Quotes from
Cannery Row perch on flowing banners atop the tourist-infested streets; the local Cannery
Row Brewing Co. showcases its beer menu, including “Madame Flora’s Red Light Special”;
and specialty Steinbeck tours tote visitors up and down Cannery Row. This is Monterey
now—a commercial cesspool of knick-knacks and souvenirs Steinbeck would have certainly
detested. Through these early texts, Steinbeck celebrates the originality and freedom of the
characters immortalized in Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. Their separation from modern
and commercial culture formed them into comedic, likeable characters and Steinbeck’s
generous treatment of them proves his appreciation for those outside normative culture.
In either text, Steinbeck develops the complete inversion of normative values and,
particularly through the male characters, analyzes the inversion of traditional American
feelings toward the rise of commercialism and capitalist business. Both Tortilla Flat and
Cannery Row feature similar male characters: unemployed war veterans returning to their
homes and settling in small groups of like-minded individuals. Steinbeck situates these
15
characters as those acting outside of mainstream culture and celebrates their complete
inversion of social expectations. In Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck compares Danny and his cohorts
to a moral gang of Arthurian knights; although traditional knights are generally honored for
their utmost nobility and chivalry, Danny and his friends are playfully paralleled with these
gentlemen. Steinbeck dignifies them for reasons other than chivalric ideals—notably through
ironic gestures of comedic recklessness and depravity. By comparing them to knightly
figures, Steinbeck suggests these characters should be praised in similar regard, even despite
their lack of traditional morals. Even though Danny and the boys create norms within their
own subculture, Steinbeck implies the social mores enacted here might not be necessarily
wrong and celebrates the gang’s liberation from conventional social morals.
In a similar fashion, Mack and the boys of Cannery Row embody the antithesis of the
diligent American work ethic and seek pleasures outside of the normative capitalist system.
This text presents the male characters as high philosophers and purveyors unbound
autonomy; as Doc mentions, “in a time when people when people tear themselves to pieces
with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed” (Steinbeck, 133).
Especially in the context of the post-World War II era of American prosperity, Mack and the
boys find themselves outside of the normative obsession with commercialism and are
celebrated for this rejection of modern culture. Steinbeck himself has cited Cannery Row as a
“nostalgic thing, written for a group of soldiers” (America 160). This novel has also been
described as a book “to show the sickness and disease eating into the vitals of human society
even without the onslaught of violent and destructive war” (Chadha 122). Clearly, Cannery
Row considers World War II and its effects on the American psyche, the evolution of
consumerism and how these things infect the American public. Like a disease “eating into
16
the vitals of human society,” the aftermath of the war bred a heightened sense of
consumerism and greed for the majority of America; Mack and the boys remain largely
unaffected by these prevalent ideals and assume the status of social outcasts because they do
not subscribe to normative principles.
As shown in Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, the male characters fail to participate in
the work force and they depend on the agrarian notion of bartering to acquire goods and
services typically paid for by average Americans. This notion of bartering takes place in both
texts and suggests an alternative to the buying/selling of goods in dominant culture. The
trading of goods without money exchanging hands defies the capitalist belief of selling goods
for profit and demonstrates their lack of concern for this concept. Here, Steinbeck reflects
upon their inversion of capitalist values, specifically problematic because of their gender.
Like Dora’s Bear Flag Restaurant discussed later, Steinbeck disrupts the gender dynamic
established by the ruling elite and subverts the male association with production and the
American work ethic. Although quoted in an article about Tortilla Flat, the following
passage applies to both texts: “society is useful as far as it provides the paisano with enough
to eat and drink, but social value itself exists only vis-à-vis personal economic freedom.
There is no virtue in having to earn what is literally a living, and therefore paisanos work to
avoid work in order to enjoy a free life” (Levant 1089). The social paradox of “work to avoid
work” essentially explains the motivations for Danny, Mack and the rest of the boys; they
deliberately choose not to work and this allows them the personal economic freedom to
obtain money/exchangeable goods when they need it, but still enjoy life without working for
a living. Their system of bartering allows them the personal economic freedom to enjoy life
while undermining the overwhelming social value of the American workingman.
17
In Tortilla Flat, Danny and his friends dismantle the capitalist desire for personal
wealth and seek only the vital necessities for their survival—mainly wine. Any number of
goods can be exchanged for wine. Early in the text, Danny steals food from a restaurant:
“Danny felt better about the theft then. If that was the way they felt, on the surface he was
guiltless. He went back to Torrelli’s, traded the four eggs, the lamb chop, and the fly swatter
for a water glass of grappa and retired towards the woods to cook his supper” (Steinbeck 8).
Danny had plans to steal the products, but the restaurant employee tells him they would have
thrown it out regardless and this assuages Danny’s sense of guilt, somewhat. In this short
passage, Steinbeck highlights the elements of the Arthurian Round Table motif in the text
and insinuates the folkloric appreciation for the archetypical Robin Hood figure; stealing
from the rich, Danny retires into the hills of Monterey, or Sherwood Forest as in the parable
of Robin Hood, to enjoy his wine. Steinbeck attempts to engender sympathy for Danny, the
penniless war veteran, however, the constant theme of bartering for wine refutes this
sympathetic tone employed here. Rather, Steinbeck satirizes the Round Table motif and
celebrates Danny and his friends for their economic freedoms and drunken debauchery
instead of their upstanding moral motivations, as in the Arthurian tales. By comparing the
realism of Danny and friends to the unfeasible morality of Arthurian knights, Steinbeck
devalues the superiority of the knights and shows preference to the immoral decadence of the
paisanos.
Later in the text, Pilon trades a vacuum cleaner to Torrelli for more wine:
‘Torrelli says he bought a sweeping-machine from Pilon, and when he hooked it
up to his light wire, it would not work. So he looked on the inside, and it had no
motor’ […] Pilon looked shocked. ‘I did not know this machine was at fault,’ he
said. ‘But did I not say Torrelli deserved what was the matter with him? That
machine was worth three or four gallons of wine, but that miser Torrelli would
give me no more than two.’ (Steinbeck 110)
18
Here, Pilon cheats Torrelli into exchanging a broken vacuum cleaner for a few gallons of
wine. In this novel, the vacuum cleaner represents the onset of technology and its everlasting
marriage to capitalism. The electric vacuum cleaner was originally given to Sweets Ramirez
and although having no electricity in her house, she pretended to use the machine and was
seen “pushing the cleaner back and forth, while a loud humming came from her throat”
(Steinbeck 104). Both Sweets and Torrelli see the vacuum cleaner as a symbol of social
status and consider its beneficial social effects in the community of Tortilla Flat. Steinbeck
includes this modern machine as an implication of the changing market of American
capitalism; especially in the agrarian setting of the hills of Monterey, the vacuum cleaner
seems out of place in the homes of the paisanos and their fascination with the machine
anticipates the American obsession with new technologies and improved advertising
strategies.
Similarly, Cannery Row examines the theme of bartering in relation to modern
machines. Steinbeck utilizes the relationship between Mack and Lee Chong, the local grocer,
to demonstrate this system of barter within Cannery Row. At sporadic times in the novel,
Mack and the boys decide to work and try to “make a little piece of change” (Steinbeck 51),
usually at the detriment of other characters, specifically Doc or Lee. Mack determines he will
help Doc acquire frogs, but needs means to obtain these elusive creatures. In the following
exchange between Mack and Lee, Steinbeck showcases Mack’s talented bartering skills:
‘Lee,’ he said, ‘Doc over there’s got a problem. He’s got a big order from the
New York Museum. Means a lot to Doc. Besides the dough there’s a lot of credit
getting an order like that […] I think a guy’s friends ought to help him out of a
hole when they can, especially a nice guy like Doc. Why I bet he spends sixty
seventy dollars a month with you.’ Lee Chong remained silent and watchful. His
fat finger barely moved on the change mat but it flicked slightly like a tense cat’s
tail. Mack plunged into his thesis. ‘Will you let us take your old truck to go up
Carmel Valley for frogs for Doc—for good old Doc?’ […] Lee was worried but
19
he couldn’t see any way out. The dangers were all there and Lee knew all of them.
(Steinbeck 53-54)
Like Torrelli in Tortilla Flat, Lee knows the dangers of bargaining with Mack and the boys,
but finds himself backed into a corner when propositioned. Mack displays his refined
bartering skills and convinces Lee to let them borrow his truck. In this business transaction,
Steinbeck illustrates the humor within this text and how Mack disregards traditional capitalist
guidelines. The comedic banter in these types of scenes affirms Steinbeck’s thread of
nostalgia woven throughout the text and demonstrates his ridicule of accepted modes of
business interactions. Particularly, the use of comedy deconstructs the American importance
on capitalism and exposes the superfluous significance of the traditional exchange. Rather
than emphasizing Lee’s possible profit from this transaction, Mack plays into the sanctity of
male-oriented friendships to convince Lee to let them borrow the truck. Although Lee
understands the risks, he allows Mack to use the truck based on his persuasive reasoning. In
this scene, no money exchanges hands, which defeats the established system of exchanging
goods for profit and undermines the conventional American system of male-oriented
business.
As seen through this system of bartering, the characters celebrated in Tortilla Flat and
Cannery Row exhibit an exaggerated disregard for American business and commercialism. In
both texts, the audience must consider: what is held sacred to these characters? Wine, bottles
of whiskey, parties to commemorate their most favored acquaintances. And what is shunned?
A home, steady employment, the prison that is marriage. Although these characters may
appear irresponsible or reckless, it is their supposed irresponsibility that preserves their
individual sense of freedom from the social confines of labor and gender-specific roles in the
workforce. As shown through the system of bartering, Steinbeck criticizes the capitalist
20
traditions in American culture and glorifies the divorce from these traditions. Both novels
utilize the bartering system, an inversion of economic standards, while the characters
themselves represent the inversion of social codes enforced within this system. Steinbeck
depicts these characters as the anti-establishment and praises, even sometimes romanticizes,
their delinquency in the growing tide of modernity.
As seen in Tortilla Flat, the burden of material goods represents the break from
normative culture. Typically, the acquisition of goods designates economic success, but here,
Danny and his friends avoid all material burdens. Early in the text, Steinbeck describes the
freedom of the paisano lifestyle: “The paisanos are clean of commercialism, free of the
complicated systems of American business, and, having nothing that can be stolen, exploited,
or mortgaged, that system has not attacked them very vigorously” (2). When Danny returns
home from the war, he inherits two houses from his grandfather and the attainment of the
houses contributes to Danny’s demise. The passage above suggests the paisanos as an entire
group are free from the bondage of commercialism, but when Danny obtains the houses, he
becomes the exception to the rule. When Danny and his friends were once “clean” and “free”
from the complex entanglement of capitalism, the system found and “attacked” them with the
acquisition of two houses to worry over. This quote establishes the initial removal of Danny
and his friends from the social circle, however, the intrusion of the home symbolizes how the
system came to destroy them.
In the article “Tortilla Flat: The Shape of John Steinbeck’s Career,” Howard Levant
dissects the paisano sentiment toward American economics: “The paisano is irresponsible in
the sense that his personal freedom is the only possession that he really treasures, and since
freedom is necessarily in conflict with possessions, with the assumptions of ‘American
21
business,’ it is expressed most frequently in specifics as an economic freedom” (1089). Here,
Levant examines the role of personal freedom within the paisano community and questions
the claim of the paisano as “irresponsible.” They are only irresponsible in the context of
dominant society. When they first enter the house, Steinbeck describes the burden settling on
Danny’s shoulders, “Pilon noticed that the worry of property was settling on Danny’s face.
No more in life would that face be free of care. No more would Danny break windows now
that he had windows of his own to break […] But one cry of pain escaped him before he left
for all time his old and simple existence” (Tortilla Flat 13). This quote suggests Danny’s
careless days have finally ceased. While others seek property of their own, Danny views the
acquisition of the houses as an encumbrance, a heavy weight on his shoulders and painfully
accepts his newfound responsibility.
Eventually, the incredible burden of owning property breaks Danny and represents
the nemesis to their liberated, boundless behavior. Danny’s last words: “Then I will go out to
The One who can fight. I will find The Enemy who is worthy of Danny!” (Steinbeck 196).
Danny’s final proclamation designates his great financial/material burden as the enemy he
must fight and defeat. The Enemy (capitalism) wins. Danny’s death shatters the spirit of
knighthood within the group and represents their final symbolic break from normative
culture. Danny embodies their connection to mainstream society, mainly through his land
ownership, and now that Danny has died, the boys have lost this relationship. In this final
split from normativity, and each other, Danny’s friends allow the sacrificial burning of
Danny’s house: “In a reverie, they watched the flame flicker and nearly die, and sprout to life
again. They saw it bloom on the paper. Thus do the gods speak with tiny causes. And the
men smiled on as the paper burned and the dry wooden wall caught […] Thus it must be, O
22
wise friends of Danny. The cord that bound you together is cut” (Steinbeck 206). Here,
Danny’s surviving friends conquer the Enemy Danny died trying to fight; the use of natural
imagery suggests the fire that engulfed Danny’s house represents nature’s final attempt to
release them from the burden of property ownership. The words “sprout” and “bloom”
insinuate connotations of a flower fulfilling its ideal state, just as the fire allows Danny’s
friends return to their contented state of economic freedom. The fire severs the tight cord of
capitalism and frees them from material burden. The element of destruction present in fire
implies a considerably dangerous outcome, however, the men welcome the fire and let it
consume Danny’s house.
Similar to the natural imagery included in Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck develops the
predatory essence of capitalism in Cannery Row. This novel pins Mack and the boys against
the normative predators of male businessmen and Steinbeck celebrates their resistance to
these values. Teetering on sentimentality, Steinbeck fondly portrays the figures of Cannery
Row and reflects upon their philosophical majesty. Mack and the boys are considered exiles
from the sphere of social normativity, but here, their value system is highly revered and
glorified. Early in the novel, Steinbeck prophesizes the cosmic placement of Mack and the
boys in the celestial setting of the Row:
They are the Virtues, the Graces, the Beauties of the hurried mangled craziness of
Monterey and the cosmic Monterey where men in fear and hunger destroy their
stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love
destroy everything lovable about them. Mack and the boys are the Beauties, the
Virtues, the Graces. In the world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured
bulls, scavenged by blind jackals, Mack and the boys dine delicately with the
tigers, fondle the frantic heifers, and wrap up the crumbs to feed the sea gulls of
Cannery Row […] Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step
over the noose while a generation of trapped, poisoned, and trussed-up men
scream at them and call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town,
thieves, rascals, bums. (18)
23
In this passage, Steinbeck reiterates the autonomy of Mack and the boys and their clever
evasion of the trap of American business, an especially conscious choice in the midst of the
cannery boom of the 1940s. The Monterey Bay was a particularly rich location for sardine
fishing and the 1941-42 season, “saw 250,287 tons of sardines […] the largest seasonal
landing in the history of the Monterey port. The demand for sardines was assured for as long
as the war continued” (Mangelsdorf 146). This sardine exploitation continued into 1945,
which was the second most productive year in Monterey history. In this setting, Steinbeck
criticizes the animalistic ruthlessness of American business (“tigers with ulcers”) and
celebrates those that exclude themselves from it. Even though Mack and the boys are called
“no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals, bums,” Steinbeck revels in
the appreciation of this atypical American figure and illustrates their freedom as the epitome
of what it means to be American. Here, Steinbeck displays his biting criticism of American
culture and accuses those in power of scavenging and corrupting not only American business,
but perpetuating American ideals completely rejected by Mack and the boys.
This passage focuses on the consumption of food, the stomach and the upper part of
the body to showcase the sickness of regurgitated principles within American culture,
especially when consumed and digested. Throughout the text, Steinbeck comments on the
freedom of Mack and the boys; not only are they free from the constraints of work, marriage
and overall social decorum, Mack and the boys completely disregard and refute these
institutions. In this passage, Steinbeck begins, “the hurried mangled craziness of Monterey
and the cosmic Monterey where men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to
secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them”
(Cannery Row 18). And what is this “certain food” these men fight for and whom do they
24
fear? This passage contains several natural elements and the inclusion of the stomach and
food ingestion suggests the animalistic, predatory nature of modern capitalism. The animals
noted in the passage above represent predatory, and scavenging, figures; Steinbeck
references the “tigers,” “bulls” and “jackals” of normative culture to contrast the initial
comparison of Mack and the boys as “the Virtues, the Graces, the Beauties,” a respectful,
enlightening description of their presence in society.
The setting of Cannery Row mixes the social delinquents, like Mack and the boys,
with the elite businessmen fishing for money from the massive canning industry. By blending
the two distinct social groups, Steinbeck demonstrates how Mack and the boys evade the bigtime business and find their ways around it. Steinbeck suggests they “dine delicately with the
tigers, fondle the frantic heifers, and wrap up the crumbs to feed the sea gulls of Cannery
Row,”(18) which highlights their integral part of the locale and their conscious rejection of
commercialism. This quote illustrates the cunning strategy of Mack and the boys to allow for
social cohesion, while simultaneously ridiculing and evading the “noose” of American
business. Steinbeck reduces these businessmen to a basic animal level and describes the
necessary intelligence to elude the tight grip of capitalism. Especially in a masculine context,
the words “delicately” and “fondle” suggest the boys’ manipulation of these dominant figures
and present an interesting contradiction to the hyper-masculine element in American
capitalism. Like the male characters in Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck highlights their resistance to
the rising conformity, materialism and greed of capitalism and celebrates the non-normative
tendencies of his most prized characters.
25
THE “PERPETUAL MOONLIGHT OF CANNERY ROW”:
THE BEAR FLAG RESTAURANT AND THE
DECONSTRUCTION OF THE PERPETUAL FAMILY IDEAL
In the introduction to Cannery Row, Steinbeck unveils the significance of Dora’s
establishment by illustrating the Bear Flag as the continuous moonlight that gleams down
upon the sea-salted streets of the Row: “Then the darkness edges in and the street light comes
on in front of Dora’s—the lamp which makes perpetual moonlight in Cannery Row” (6).
This initial description of Dora’s Bear Flag Restaurant expresses the magnitude of Dora’s
role in the community; for a novel that mainly takes place at night, comparing the Bear Flag
to the incessant moonlight suggests Steinbeck’s nostalgic, melancholy affinity towards this
staple of the Cannery Row neighborhood. Several of Steinbeck’s critics cite Dora’s
establishment as the apex of evil and immorality in Cannery Row, however, if this is true,
why does Steinbeck provide such a generous, forgiving tone when describing Dora and her
girls? Like Mack and the boys, Dora’s presence on the periphery of normative culture allows
room for the exploration of sexual freedom and a stark opposition to the role of the woman in
the post-war era. Steinbeck deliberately pushes against the predominant ideologies
perpetuated by American culture and implements the congenial portrayal of Dora’s home to
disrupt these accepted ideals, notably the American importance of the family unit.
Imagine the typical American household of the 1940s: loving parents, sweet, chubbyfaced children, a comfortable home away from the polluted confines of city life. Maybe a
radio in the living room. This ideal may have existed elsewhere, but surely not in Cannery
Row. Especially in the context of the late 1940s and 1950s, Steinbeck’s presentation of
Dora’s Bear Flag Restaurant subverts the American preconceptions with the conventional
family unit and the gender roles enforced within the traditional “home.” By illustrating the
details of Dora’s female-headed whorehouse, Steinbeck dismantles the American ideal of
26
patriarchy within in the home, challenges the significance of marriage and legitimizes nonnormative, even considered deviant, sexual freedoms. Specifically, the all-female family in
Dora’s house, Gay’s tumultuous marriage and the tireless crusade of Cannery Row’s wives to
close the whorehouse demonstrate the dissention of normative family behaviors breeding
within Cannery Row. The presentation of these three social criticisms confirms Steinbeck’s
glorification of the culturally abject figure and the celebration of those that exist on the
periphery of social acceptance.
Primarily, the benevolent portrayal of Dora’s whorehouse affirms Steinbeck’s
repudiation of the traditional institutions of family, marriage and home life that are hallmarks
of capitalism. This non-normative home setting magnifies the dismissal of dominant
ideologies and allows for a queer theory approach to the sexual/gender politics apparent
within the Bear Flag. Queer theory encompasses binaries like “center/margin” and
“normal/pathological” to explain non-normative behaviors outside of LGBT communities
(“Queer Theory”). Dora’s Bear Flag Restaurant exemplifies an atypical domestic setting and
the term “queer domesticity” explains these domestic relationships apart from the
heteronormative, marital sphere. In Cannery Row, Dora and the girls at the Bear Flag
exemplify this skewed, abnormal family ideal, especially due to the presence of aberrant
sexuality constantly practiced in the home. In recent queer theory, the idea of queer
domesticity explores the cohabitation of homosexual couples, but it also relates to aberrant or
homosocial environments like the one seen in Cannery Row. The idea of queer domesticity
applied to Dora’s home environment explains the abnormal setting of the Bear Flag and
Steinbeck includes this home to demonstrate how traditional values can still exist in nontraditional settings. Even though Dora’s Bear Flag represents a cultural taboo, Steinbeck
27
takes the audience inside the whorehouse to highlight the customary family practices that
survive within it.
In order to explain the specifics of queer domesticity, theorist Nayan Shah proposes,
[…]at the turn of the [twentieth] century, normal or respectable domesticity
became increasingly defined by a self-contained household that had at its center
the married couple’s pursuit of reproduction. The space and social relations of
queer domesticity countered or transgressed these normative expectations. It
included emotional relations […] that upset normative heterosexual marriage, as
well as homosocial and homoerotic relations. (122)
Here, the Bear Flag embodies the antithesis of the “normal or respectable” domestic
arrangement Shah references in the passage above. Dora’s establishment transgresses all
accepted social boundaries and serves as a moral threat to the idealized notion of the
American family; due to the popularity of the nuclear family, socially normative expectations
turn on the heterosexual union and the “pursuit of reproduction.” Not only does the allfemale family subvert the social order, but the overall purpose of the Bear Flag severely
discounts the sanctity of marriage as a socially-revered institution and invalidates the idea of
sexuality reserved for the traditional married couple.
Queer domesticity disrupts the cultural significance of normative marriages and
rejects the social conventions of the traditional familial space. Although the idea of queer
domesticity challenges normative family roles, Caitlin McKinney introduces an interesting
paradox within alternative domestic settings:
Queer domesticity’s central paradox is that it may affirm hetero (or homo)
normative ideas of domesticity or kinship at times, or in certain ways, but it also
produces queer moments of excess, impropriety, slippage, or missteps against the
idealized norm. Social and discursive anxieties produced by these queer instances
of the domestic can present a challenge to the reified notions of the family as a
social institution. (5-6)
Although Dora and the girls exist outside of the “idealized norm,” they still display
normative feelings of “domesticity or kinship” and create a loving, albeit skewed, pseudo-
28
family. Despite the inclusion of normative values in Dora’s Bear Flag, it is still a whorehouse
and cannot fully mimic the heternormative practices in the “traditional” American home.
Dora commonly refers to the girls as “the kids” and attempts to recreate a positive familial
arrangement, complete with a concrete set of values found in heteronormative homes.
Early in Cannery Row, Steinbeck certifies Dora’s integral role in the community and
immediately highlights the values and morality reinforced within her fundamentally
honorable whorehouse. In the following passage, Steinbeck offers an affectionate portrayal
of Dora’s Bear Flag Restaurant:
A decent, clean, honest, old-fashioned sporting house where a man can take a
glass of beer among friends. This is no fly-by-night cheap clip-joint but a sturdy,
virtuous club, built, maintained, and disciplined by Dora who, madam and girl for
fifty years, has through the exercise of special gifts of tact and honesty, charity
and a certain realism, made herself respected by the intelligent, the learned, and
the kind. (19)
Evident by the laudable depiction of the Bear Flag, Steinbeck rejoices in the saintly
headquarters of the Row’s most angelic inhabitants. In this early description, Steinbeck
situates these ladies as the moral frontline of Cannery Row. Ironically, Dora’s house of
prostitution is considered the culmination of vice and immorality by the Row’s high-minded
ladies, however, Steinbeck utilizes these elements and heightens the Bear Flag as a social
necessity. This passage reflects upon Steinbeck’s comparison to Cannery Row as “a poem, a
stink” (5); the poetic beauty of the seaside town and its unbound inhabitants represent “a
stink” to the rest of normative culture due to the prevalence of loose morality, but here,
Steinbeck reveres the social outsiders. The passage above delineates the common
preconceptions of whorehouses and situates Dora’s establishment apart from her sordid
counterparts. Dora has gained the respect of the community as the Bear Flag prides itself on
its unyielding charity, virtue and honesty—notable values reiterated in the traditional
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American home. The melodious, fleeting rhythm of “fly-by-night cheap clip-joint” indicates
a stark contradiction to the grounded description of Dora’s “sturdy, virtuous club” and
acknowledges Dora’s as a firm, integral part of Cannery Row. Steinbeck injects concrete
values like “honesty,” “charity” and “decency” to invalidate the assumption that Dora’s
house is like every other sleazy clip-joint.
As referenced in McKinney’s article earlier, the emphasis on Dora’s virtue suggests
their home, although considered immoral and non-normative, still reinforces sociallyrecognized teachings of love, religion and charity. What does this say about Steinbeck’s
attitude towards Dora’s establishment? How can a whorehouse reinforce normative values?
Well, for one thing, many of the girls practice religion: “since the good half of the girls are
Christian scientists, [he] reads aloud his share of Science and Health on a Sunday morning”
(Steinbeck, Cannery Row 20). Steinbeck includes this intersection between amorality and
religious devotion in order to highlight the subversive behaviors within the Bear Flag.
Modern queer theorists argue contemporary, non-normative domestic settings replicate the
model of normative families to maintain social order, however, Steinbeck’s portrayal of this
atypical family can be viewed as subversive considering the social context of the 1940s. As
the rise of the nuclear family began to take shape, Dora’s depraved institution represents a
threat to the orthodox family, yet the girls still receive Christian theology lessons on Sunday
mornings. The convergence of amorality and Christian values under one roof suggests
Steinbeck’s play with the typical notion of the family and demonstrates the possibility of
conventional values within a seemingly corrupt environment, a subversive gesture in his
time.
30
Steinbeck continues this paradox within the domestic arrangement of the Bear Flag
and describes the charitable, maternal relationship between Dora and the girls:
Of her girls some are fairly inactive due to age and infirmities, but Dora never
puts them aside although, as she says, some of them don’t turn three tricks a
month but they go right on eating three meals a day […] There are normally
twelve girls in the house, counting the old ones, a Greek cook, and a man who is
known as a watchman. (Steinbeck, Cannery Row 20)
While the self-contained heterosexual marriage serves as the approved domestic situation,
Dora’s Bear Flag completely disrupts this familial ideal and discounts the modern insistence
upon heteronormative domesticity. Steinbeck exposes the outwardly normative values of
Dora’s whorehouse to criticize the social institution of marriage and celebrates the queer
lifestyle of Dora and the girls. Some girls cannot work due to “age or infirmities,” yet Dora
does not view them as employees; they assume the role of her children and receive excellent
care. At times, Dora calls the girls “the kids” and assumes responsibility of them as if she
were their mother. Later in the text, they make Doc a quilt from the fabric of their own
dresses, exhibiting their charitable qualities taught by Dora. Even though the male watchman
possibly represents a patriarchal figure, Dora maintains authorial control over the home; the
fact that Dora retains all authority reasserts the non-normative division of power and places
the male characters in subordinate roles, a complete inversion of typical gender
appropriations.
In Cannery Row, the Bear Flag acts as a symbol for freedom from social/gender
expectations; Steinbeck parallels the independence of the whorehouse with scathing
criticisms of marriage and the role of “the wife.” Through the use of “queer domesticity,”
Steinbeck suggests the possibility of contentment outside of normative relationships and
glorifies the autonomous position of prostitutes. Like the unemployment of Mack and the
boys, Steinbeck utilizes the sexual freedoms of Dora and the girls to represent the complete
31
break from normative culture, notably the confines of marriage and compulsory motherhood.
The girls of the Bear Flag experience sexuality apart from marital union and enact their
sexuality for its pleasurable implications, not for reproductive purposes. By including the
subject of prostitution, Steinbeck escalates the inversion of the female roles within Cannery
Row.
Although several male characters encounter non-normative sexual experiences, the
female characters of Cannery Row act as the more pointed transgressors of sexual norms.
Steinbeck employs the sexual disobedience of the female characters to magnify the greater
inversion of social roles, as opposed to the male figures. Theorists classify prostitution “as a
form of sexual deviance similar to homosexuality and psychopathic sexual behavior […]
based on the fact that prostitution violates the norms regarding sexual relations” (Carpenter
22). In the context of 1940s-50s American culture, the accepted sexual experience was
reserved for marriage and prostitution violates this defined sexual space, which
conventionally takes place in the home and for reproductive purposes only. In the initial
passage describing Dora’s whorehouse, Steinbeck mentions Dora gained the respect of the
intelligent, kind and learned members of the community, however, “by the same token she is
hated by the twisted lascivious sisterhood of married spinsters whose husbands respect the
home but don’t like it very much” (Cannery Row 19). Here, Steinbeck reveals his biting
critique of dominant culture, specifically marriage and the American dream; the juxtaposition
of “intelligent” inhabitants to the married spinsters implies this supercilious sisterhood lacks
the intellect and tolerance to accept the culturally abject figures celebrated throughout the
novel. Although an oxymoron, the term “married spinster” suggests the married women of
32
Cannery Row carry the stereotypical bitter, crotchety attitude of spinsters and view Dora’s as
a severe threat to marriage.
In the article cited earlier, Shah posits, “Sexual and social practices by which couples
sought intimacy outside the reproductive marriage were identified as disruptive to the family
and were perceived as a perversion, betrayal” (121). In light of Shah’s argument, Dora’s
whorehouse clearly upsets the “normative expectations” of marriage and ideal femininity
perpetuated by the “married spinsters” of the Row. The married men referenced in Cannery
Row “respect the home but don’t like it very much,” which showcase their respect for social
mores, but the lack of satisfaction they receive from this institution. Dora’s whorehouse
functions as an outlet for sexual exploration apart from reproduction and the marital bed, thus
the men visiting Dora’s exhibit their “perversions” by reacting against the home.
Here, Steinbeck reveals the actions of the “twisted lascivious sisterhood of married
spinsters” and demonstrates the immense threat the Bear Flag has on their marriages:
On top of that a group of high-minded ladies in the town demanded that dens of
vice must close to protect young American manhood. This happened about once a
year in the dead period between Fourth of July and the County Fair. Dora usually
closed the Bear Flag for a week when it happened. It wasn’t so bad […] But this
year the ladies went on a real crusade. They wanted somebody’s scalp. It had been
a dull summer and they were restless. (136-137)
In this passage, Steinbeck attacks the married spinsters in Cannery Row and employs violent
images to accentuate the maternal viciousness of these ladies. The animalistic connotation of
“protecting their young” underscores the instinctual force that propels a mother to defend her
child. Although this passage appears later in the text, the audience can assume it is the same
women classified as the “the twisted lascivious sisterhood of married spinsters whose
husbands respect the home but don’t like it very much” (Steinbeck 19). Steinbeck highlights
the fact that it was a “dull summer” and these ladies we “restless,” possibly insinuating these
33
ladies are left unsatisfied by their husbands. While their husbands and sons are at the Bear
Flag enjoying female company, the wives of Cannery Row grow restless and enact their
aggressions toward to the girls of the Bear Flag. Steinbeck includes several allusions to
quintessentially American treasures: “young American manhood,” “Fourth of July” and “the
County Fair.” By referencing these specific American institutions, Steinbeck parallels Dora’s
Bear Flag to other important landmarks of American culture. The whorehouse embodies the
antithesis of these revered traditions, yet simultaneously represents a vital sanctuary within
American culture. Throughout the text, Steinbeck criticizes the social significance of
marriage and cleverly includes scenes demonstrating the futility of marital union; these
scenes paired with the celebratory, welcoming nature of the Bear Flag highlight Steinbeck’s
consistent reaction against dominant culture.
The majority of Steinbeck’s texts stress this rejection of accepted American
institutions and depict the glorification of characters reacting against social norms; marriage,
domesticity and capitalism represent the major forces of typical American culture, all of
which are attacked in Steinbeck’s novels. Why does Steinbeck continuously critique
American practices? In Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, Steinbeck celebrates the nonnormative figures as a means to bring his biting criticisms to the forefront of the text. By
romanticizing the non-normative members of American culture, Steinbeck articulates his
dissatisfaction with modern civilization and consistently applies images of predatory, violent
figures to capitalize on the consuming nature of these values. These early novels present the
ironic, comedic instances found in Steinbeck’s fiction and as his career progresses, the humor
is somewhat stripped away and replaced with melancholy tales of morality and loss. Of
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course, Steinbeck’s later novels still carry shining moments of irony, but none criticize
American culture with as much comedy and ease as Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row.
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CHAPTER TWO
THE BATTLE BETWEEN ILLUSION AND
REALITY: EAST OF EDEN AND THE PERILS OF
IDEALISM
“The Salinas Valley is in Northern California” opens John Steinbeck’s epic piece,
East of Eden (1952), and identifies this specific locale as the focus, the life and the breath of
the characters depicted in its subsequent pages (3). To Steinbeck, the Salinas Valley
represents the center of the universe. Everything in this text is born from, or relates back to,
the Salinas Valley. The people and the land of the valley manifest in Steinbeck’s pen and he
writes their history. Mainly, this novel tells the story of Steinbeck’s ancestry, however,
through writing his own family history, Steinbeck writes the epic masterpiece that
encapsulates all of humanity and its faults. East of Eden chronicles the Steinbeck family
history and through this dramatic retelling, demonstrates the human capacity for jealousy,
violence, pure evil and even unfettered joy. Although at times East of Eden displays the
extremes of all human emotions, Steinbeck isolates the Trask and Hamilton families to
examine grand ideas while still focusing on American history, specifically. East of Eden
includes some of Steinbeck’s most philosophical, sagacious contemplations of humanity, yet
as he explores these macrocosmic ideas, Steinbeck retains focus on American culture and
retells the Trask/Hamilton history to pinpoint his larger ideas.
Fortunately for literary scholars, Steinbeck kept a journal of letters and personal
thoughts during the writing of East of Eden and these were compiled and published after the
author’s death. Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969) contains Steinbeck’s
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own letters to his editor and reveals the personal struggles of an author trying to write the
book of his career. Steinbeck confesses,
Maybe I can finally write this book. All the experiment is over now. I either write
the book or I do not. There can be no excuses. The form will not be startling, the
writing will be spare and lean, the concepts hard, the philosophy old and yet new
born […] But that we will have to see after the book is all over and finished and
with it a great part of me. (3)
Even before writing the novel, Steinbeck realized its incredible importance in terms of his
literary career, the challenging concepts addressed and especially, the piece of himself that
will be sewn into the pages. The families and settings depicted in East of Eden are not only
creations of the author’s mind, they are his ancestors and Steinbeck recognizes his
indubitable service to their memory.
Although many of Steinbeck’s novels respond to current controversies or national
trends, East of Eden is largely a text motivated by Steinbeck’s own personal history. In the
early 1950s, Steinbeck was married for the third time while raising his two young boys from
a previous marriage (Benson, The True Adventures 664). In Journal from a Novel, Steinbeck
explains his motivations for writing East of Eden:
I am choosing to write this book to my sons. They are little boys now and they
will never know what they came from through me, unless I tell them. It is not
written for them to read now but when they are grown and the pains and joys have
tousled them a little [...] I want them to know how it was, I want to tell them
directly, and perhaps by speaking directly to them I shall speak directly to other
people. (4)
As a book not written for nostalgic soldiers, nor the paisanos in the Monterey hills, but for
Steinbeck’s own sons, East of Eden mostly focuses on father/son relationships and through
these specific characters, Steinbeck retells much of American history. By speaking directly to
his own sons, Steinbeck hopes to “speak directly” to others and reveal the “pains and joys”
and truths of the overarching American story. As mentioned earlier, Steinbeck employs brief,
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macrocosmic moments in East of Eden in order to communicate grandiose ideas about
humanity, man’s view of the self and the capacity for good and evil existing in every living
creature. Through the use of detailed, grounded characters, Steinbeck allows these lofty
concepts to creep into the text, but still retains the story-telling quality unique to his writing
style.
The sweeping scenes presented in East of Eden showcase Steinbeck’s ability to
romanticize American landscapes while simultaneously obliterating their idealistic
significance in American culture. In typical Steinbeck fashion, this book explores American
idealism and the unrealistic expectations of romance, agrarianism, brotherhood and
especially the American Dream. Although Steinbeck sentimentalizes these idealized notions,
they are heavily criticized and corrupted by the false perception of the American Dream. In
the article “John Steinbeck: Novelist as Scientist,” Jackson Benson comments on the
overwhelming amount of Biblical symbols in East of Eden and argues the primary focus of
the text is not the Biblical symbolism, but individual freedom from idealism:
Although the Biblical materials in East of Eden may be more confusing than
useful, if we can look beyond them (or see that Steinbeck is using religious
materials to make a non-religious, philosophical point), we can perceive that the
primary movement of the work is toward freedom—freedom from destructive
illusion and self-delusion. (256)
Here, Benson introduces an interesting argument regarding the prevalence of
religious symbols in the text. According to Benson, the plethora of Edenic symbolism
demonstrates Steinbeck’s contemplation of larger philosophical ideas apart from traditional
religious teachings; implementing Judeo-Christian images to communicate a philosophical
point suggests Steinbeck’s ironic implication of Biblical allusions. Steinbeck plays with the
façade of the American Dream and the idealistic notions of success in America and discusses
the non-religious implications of free will, thereby disrupting the “destructive illusion” of
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fanciful idealism.
As mentioned in Steinbeck’s letters, East of Eden incorporates challenging
philosophical concepts, yet Steinbeck implements one of the most popular stories of the
Bible (Adam & Eve) to highlight the “non-religious” aspects of free will and American
liberty. In this text and others, Steinbeck continuously disrupts these idolized notions of
family, marriage and the glorification of the American landscape/frontier. American culture
romanticizes and stresses the importance of a fulfilling domestic atmosphere and as seen
through earlier texts like Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, Steinbeck annihilates the idealism
of these particular familial settings. Similarly, Steinbeck glorifies the agrarian landscape in
most of his works, but in East of Eden, he destroys this idealized image of lush acres of
fertile farmland, mainly using the barren land of Samuel Hamilton as an example. In East of
Eden, Steinbeck comments on the importance of the individual, especially in terms of
American values:
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the
most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the
mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any
idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what
I am and what I am about. (132)
Several of the leading characters in East of Eden falter and succumb to these unattainable
ideals within American culture—resisting their natural inclination of free will. In the quote
above, Steinbeck mentions the power of any “idea, religion or government” that limits the
freedom of unbounded individual thought and criticizes the larger oppressor that is American
Idealism.
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“SHE’S NO MORE A WIFE THAN AN ALLEY CAT:”
ADAM’S ROMANTIC IDEALISM
In the novel, the one-sided love affair between Adam Trask and Cathy Ames
represents the epitome of Adam’s detrimental illusions. Adam seeks the illusory domestic
ideal of American culture: a wife and a home for their children. Steinbeck introduces their
tumultuous relationship in the first part of the novel and illustrates their extremely altered
versions of reality. As Benson mentions earlier, East of Eden identifies the center of the text
as “freedom from destructive illusion and self-delusion”; Adam meets a brutally beaten
Cathy shuffling up the stairs to their home and immediately romanticizes the possibility of
love shared between them. In opposition to his brother Charles, the cruel realist, Adam fails
to see her true self and falls deeply in love with the illusion of romance and marriage. Charles
calls her a “two-bit whore,” and criticizes Adam for trusting “that bitch, that slut!” (123).
Adam cannot see through his whimsical illusions of love and projects these ideals onto
Cathy. Clearly, Charles understands Cathy’s true nature, while Adam is entangled in the false
perceptions of actualizing the American Dream.
In the first part of the novel, Steinbeck takes great lengths to explain the monstrosity
and wickedness that has manifested itself into the soulless body of Cathy Ames. After
delving into the monstrous circumstances of her birth, Steinbeck discusses the complex
moral dilemma housed within in her:
To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to
himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no
visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soulstricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must
not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is
monstrous. (72)
Here, Steinbeck highlights the indifference, the criminality and the complete absence of
morality within Cathy Ames. Due to her monstrous implications, Cathy defies accepted
40
social norms and exists outside the conventional ideals of normativity, social decency and the
laws of human nature. As Steinbeck divulges into Cathy’s past, he describes how she drives
the school Latin teacher to commit suicide, murders her parents, manipulates a
“whoremaster” and after being beaten mercilessly, she enters the story climbing up the stairs
to the Trask home—her lethal history unknown to the naïve Adam. Steinbeck often
characterizes Cathy as “cold” or “listless,” which hints at her disregard for social norms and
highlights her monstrosity, a trait Adam continuously denies.
To contrast the harsh reality of Cathy’s wicked nature, Steinbeck displays the power
she holds over Adam during their initial encounters and the tenderness he offers to her
ravaged body. The passage above demonstrates Cathy’s depravity, a characteristic unseen to
the delusional Adam and through the juxtaposition of these two opposite interpretations,
Steinbeck establishes the battle between reality (Cathy) versus illusion (Adam). The early
scenes in the house of Charles and Adam Trask establish Adam’s romantic illusions and
here, Adam fails to notice Cathy’s devious behavior and he treats her as his injured damsel,
one whom he rescues from a cruel oppressor and nurses back to health. He turns a blind eye
to the devil within her and considers her a possible mate, a wife to bear his children. To
contrast the malevolent indifference of Cathy’s character, Steinbeck stresses Adam’s
romantic illusions and exposes his tender perception of Cathy:
Adam sat very still, looking at her. Her set and splinted arm lay on her stomach,
but her right arm lay on top of the coverlet, the fingers curled like a nest. It was a
child’s hand, almost a baby’s hand. Adam touched her wrist with his finger, and
her fingers moved a little in reflex. Her wrist was warm. Secretly then, as though
he were afraid he might be caught, he straightened her hand and touched the little
cushion pads on the fingertips. Her fingers were pink and soft, but the skin on the
back of her hand seemed to have an underbloom like a pearl. Adam chuckled with
delight. (Steinbeck, East of Eden 114)
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This passage demonstrates an intimate scene between Adam and Cathy; fittingly, Cathy does
not participate in this shared moment of sexual intimacy and this anticipates Cathy’s staunch
resistance to Adam throughout the course of the novel. In this scene, Steinbeck introduces
several sexual and domestic implications of Adam’s fondness for Cathy. Primarily, Steinbeck
implies the sexual, and somewhat reproductive, desires through Adam’s voyeuristic
exploration of Cathy’s body. Adam probes and pokes around her body while Cathy sleeps,
using his pointed finger to inspect the crevices of her hands. Steinbeck employs obvious
sexual descriptors like “warm,” “pink and soft,” but the phrase “underbloom like a pearl”
suggests both Adam’s sexual appetite for Cathy and his desire to procreate with her. Like a
pearl formed within the shell of an oyster, Adam imagines Cathy bearing his children in her
womb and creating a loving domestic space for their family.
The use of “nest,” “child” and “baby” indicate Adam’s paternal yearning for a child
and the fact that Cathy sleeps while Adam studies her, insinuates Adam’s disregard for
Cathy’s own personal desires. Adam ignores the “trap” of Cathy’s supposed innocence and
Steinbeck institutes the dangerous implications of his romantic illusions. In the early scenes
at the Trask house, “Adam benevolently ministers to her every need and sees in Cathy the
purpose for his life, a dream built upon the illusion of his own needs” (Hansen 225). This
quote explains Adam’s selfish motivations for Cathy; although he knows virtually nothing
about her, Cathy, a female of marrying age, symbolizes the missing piece to Adam’s
idealistic dream for a stable home and a family. In terms of the façade of the American
Dream, Cathy completes Adam’s desire for normativity and his “chuckling with delight”
suggests he realizes the missing piece to the completion of the ideal.
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While Adam pursues the possibility of a fulfilling love affair, Cathy decides to marry
Adam solely as a means of escape from her current predicament and does not reciprocate
Adam’s intense feelings of passion. Once they arrive in California, Steinbeck emphasizes
Adam’s romantic delusions and demonstrates Cathy’s apathetic demeanor. While Adam
hunts for their perfect home, he repeatedly asked Cathy her opinion, “Did she like it? Would
she be happy there? And he didn’t listen to her noncommittal answers. He thought that she
linked arms with his enthusiasm” (Steinbeck, East of Eden 137). The fact that Adam “didn’t
listen” and assumes Cathy shares his excitement for their new life insinuates Adam’s selfish
delusions of romantic idealism. Adam merely follows the path of social expectancy and
implements Cathy as the missing element to his achievement of the American Dream. Like
their initial encounter, the following passage exhibits their opposing expectations regarding
marriage, domesticity and each other:
He felt his heart smack up against his throat when he saw Cathy sitting in the sun,
quiet, her baby growing, and a transparency to her skin that made him think of the
angels on Sunday School cards. Then a breeze would move her bright hair, or she
would raise her eyes, and Adam would swell out in his stomach with a pressure of
ecstasy that was close kin to grief. If Adam rested like a sleek fed cat on his land,
Cathy was catlike too. She had the inhuman attribute of abandoning what she
could not get and of waiting for what she could get […] Her pregnancy had been
an accident. When her attempt to abort herself failed and the doctor threatened
her, she gave up that method. This does not mean she reconciled with her
pregnancy. She sat it out like she weathered an illness. Her marriage to Adam had
been the same. She was trapped and she took the best possible way out. She had
not wanted to go to California either, but other plans were denied her for the time
being. (Steinbeck, 159)
In this quote, Steinbeck underscores the presence of méconnaissance in their marriage. The
term “méconnaissance” relates to the misguided, misconstrued projections Adam places onto
Cathy; Adam carries these romantic illusions with him and projects his intense desire for a
wife and children onto Cathy. The original term méconnaissance derives from Lacan’s
discussion of the mirror stage in which an individual begins to develop a sense of self. The
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mirror stage occurs when an infant between the ages of six and eighteen months views itself
in the mirror; the infant witnesses the body as whole, but does not yet have the capacity to
control its actions or articulate itself as a unified form. As the child assumes a fictive identity
in the mirror, “the image in the mirror becomes for the child the ideal-I that it wishes itself to
become” (Fryer 50). David Ross Fryer continues, “Lacan concludes that when attempting to
understand the original constitution of the I, we should start not from reality, but rather from
fiction, not from the simple (re)cognition of the body in the mirror, but rather from the
(mis)representation of the unity in the mirror” (51). This misrepresentation of the self
functions within the relationship between Adam and Cathy; Adam projects his romantic
ideals onto Cathy and constructs her wifely role, while failing to understand the reality of her
uninhibited depravity.
Adam sees his beautiful, pregnant wife shining in the sun, moral and beautiful like
chubby cherubs in “Sunday School cards.” Meanwhile, Cathy weathers her pregnancy like
“an illness” and buys her time until she gives birth, anticipating her escape from Adam’s
romantic idealism. Adam gazes lovingly upon her growing belly, ignorant to Cathy’s attempt
to abort herself and the possibility that the fruit in her womb was not planted by Adam, but
by his brother Charles. Does Cathy conceal these truths from Adam, or it is that he is too
blind to see them? In terms of méconnaissance, these depraved truths inhibit Adam’s
actualization of the “ideal” self and underscore Adam’s misrepresentation of both himself
and Cathy. Adam fails to recognize the reality and constructs the fictional representation of a
loving family in his mind; in the passage, Adam dotes on Cathy’s maternal beauty and,
unbeknownst to him, Cathy has attempted to abort the fetuses growing inside of her. While
he fondly inspects her shining attributes, Cathy plots her escape and considers herself
44
trapped, both in her loveless marriage and the physical space of California. After giving birth
to the twins, Cathy refuses to see them and fails to give them any attention. Cathy possesses
the “inhuman attribute of abandoning” and flees the Trask house, pausing only to shoot
Adam in the shoulder on her way out. Although heart-breaking, the passage above
beautifully depicts the divergence of fantasy and reality present within the relationship
between Cathy and Adam.
In the contrasting passages referenced, Steinbeck illuminates the disconnect between
Adam’s romantic illusions and reality. In Benson’s article cited earlier, he identifies Adam’s
romantic delusions:
At the end of the novel, as Adam Trask is dying, he is being reborn to a new
perspective. Earlier, he could not see his wife for what she was because of his
romantic projections […] Now, at last, he gains an opportunity to see things as
they are when he realizes that man is not bound by the scheme of sin and virtue,
that man is free to be, and in being, he is what he is. (“John Steinbeck: Novelist as
Scientist” 256)
The romantic illusions of the American ideal hinder Adam’s use of free will and lure
him into Cathy’s diabolical scheme. Adam is bound by his idealistic expectations and lacks a
sense of free will in the early stages of the text. Benson mentions his enlightening rebirth at
the time of his death, however, his relationship with Cathy proves his enslavement to the
“scheme of sin and virtue” offered by Cathy and the twins she produces.
In East of Eden, Steinbeck’s ideas of freedom from sexual/domestic entrapment
support Benson’s argument; Steinbeck warns, “What freedom men and women could have,
were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality!
The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would
be a monster” (75). Clearly, Steinbeck references Cathy as the “monster” in this context due
to her lack of her genuine sexuality; Cathy possesses an overwhelming amount of sexual
45
power, but uses it to entrap others because of her absence of human emotion. Adam falls
victim to her sexuality and fails to see Cathy’s deceptive scheme due to his self-delusions of
romance. Steinbeck makes the connection between Adam’s obvious lack of free will under
Cathy’s web of deceit and the illusions of compulsory happiness prevalent in American
culture. Adam builds a false conception of Cathy and subscribes to the idealized values
perpetuated as the norm; through Adam’s participation of these overarching values,
Steinbeck demonstrates Adam’s absence of individual freedom and despite her depraved
motivations, Steinbeck portrays Cathy as the most free-thinking, realistic character in the
novel.
In East of Eden, Cathy represents the only character exhibiting free will and subverts
Adam’s image of her as a submissive, dutiful wife. Adam plunges deeply into his own
romantic ideals and enacts these social conventions—most of which he has little control over.
In contrast, Cathy acts upon her uninhibited notion of free will and resists participation in
romantic idealism, unlike Adam. Several critics cite Cathy’s comparison to Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland (1865), suggesting Cathy represents the figure of Alice, entangled in a
series of unfortunate incidents. In the discussion of Cathy and Alice, Carol L. Hansen posits:
Steinbeck’s association of Cathy with Alice is significant in that this fantasy—
with its correlation with free imagination and satire—again places Cathy outside
the biblical symbolism in the novel. In a sense, the other characters may be seen,
from her point of view, as puppets on a string. In an inversion of the norm, she
may also be viewed as a bewildered Alice caught in a nightmare world. For, in
her mind, she is not culpable but is instead an observer of the true monsters. (224)
As cited earlier, Steinbeck claims, “to a monster the norm is monstrous” and this idea
certainly pans out through the parallel between Cathy and Alice. In Alice in Wonderland,
Alice encounters strange characters as she travels through the dream-like hallucination of
wonderland and embodies the monstrous figure in these strange settings. Alice assumes she
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represents the normative figure, but in actuality, her normality is monstrous to the figures
illustrated in each fantastical location. The characters in Alice in Wonderland are enacting
their social norms and her supposed normativity is considered monstrous to them. In East of
Eden, Cathy embodies the inversion of normative values and views the normative characters
as the “true monsters” that enforce this accepted standard of behavior. Evident by her
complete resistance to cultural expectations, the characters of East of Eden consider Cathy
the monstrous figure, however, she views them as monsters due to their lack of free will and
unyielding subscription to societal ideals. As cited in the quote above, Cathy views the other
characters as “puppets on a string” because of their participation in cultural norms, reiterated
by Adam’s acceptance of the American ideal.
Once Cathy subverts Adam’s idealistic view of romance/marriage, Steinbeck unveils
the fallacy of Adam’s romantic projections and explores Adam’s lack of free will during their
brief affair. Here, Steinbeck highlights the dangerous implications of idealism in American
culture and completely inverts this revered ideal. After the painful realization of Adam’s
romantic illusions, Adam asks Samuel if Cathy was beautiful and Samuel replies, “To you
she was because you built her. I don’t think you ever saw her—only your own creation”
(Steinbeck, East of Eden 262). Like the Biblical story from Genesis, Adam creates Eve from
his own body just as Adam Trask constructs the false image of the ideal wife and domestic
space. The use of the word “creation” suggests this Biblical implication and suggests Adam’s
realization of his disillusionment—he was motivated not by Cathy, the individual, but by the
idea of a fulfilling marriage and complete family unit. Adam cannot clearly recall “who she
was—what she was.” He continues, “I was content not to know” (Steinbeck 262). Adam
possessed the ideal marriage/domestic environment, but only formed this ideal in his mind—
47
like Alice in Wonderland, a far cry from reality. Like Adam’s creation of Eve, he creates Eve
from his own image and likeness, just as Adam Trask attempts to replicate the ideal marital
space. Steinbeck depicts Cathy’s violent escape and Adam’s inability to embody the paternal
role to reveal the dangerous implications of romantic idealism.
BEWARE OF THE DEADLY POPPY FIELDS: AGRARIAN
IDEALISM AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
As mentioned in the introduction, the Salinas Valley emblematizes the idyllic setting
for East of Eden, a culmination of the ideal American farming location. Many of Steinbeck’s
novels identify the agrarian landscape as the epitome of the glorified environment, a type of
Promised Land, but in East of Eden, Steinbeck destabilizes this revered ideal. Primarily
through the barren depiction of Samuel Hamilton’s land, Steinbeck disrupts this ideal and
portrays the harsh reality to contrast the illusion of the American Dream. In Steinbeck’s own
words from America and Americans, he describes the American thirst for land and a home of
one’s own, “One of the characteristics most puzzling to a foreign observer is the strong and
imperishable dream the American carries. On inspection, it is found that the dream has little
to do with reality in American life. Consider the dream of and the hunger for home” (332).
This biting description of the American desire for home suggests a common theme
throughout many of Steinbeck’s texts, notably East of Eden—the “dream has little to do with
reality.”
This depressing realization comes to fruition in the agrarian idealism portrayed in the
text. Throughout East of Eden, Steinbeck utterly disrupts the “dream and the hunger” for
fertile farmland, the notion of “home” and the contented family living inside its walls. As
discussed earlier, the tumultuous marriage of Adam and Cathy exemplifies the constant battle
between illusion and reality in Steinbeck’s fiction. Steinbeck expresses the perilous
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implications of the American Dream through his illustration of characters obsessed with its
possibility and unyielding attempts to achieve it. Continuing the analysis of Adam and Cathy,
East of Eden also presents the idealistic nature of agrarian and natural landscapes of
California, especially during a period of American history when citizens flocked to
California in search of bountiful farmland. Written in the 1950s, Steinbeck begins his
narrative as early as the Civil War and follows the great migration of Americans and
European immigrants westward to California in the late 19th century. Even in Steinbeck’s
early writings from The Harvest Gypsies (1936), much of the country lived in destitute from
unimaginable drought, meanwhile, the crops of California blossomed with “the heavy grapes,
the prunes, the apples and lettuce and the rapidly maturing cotton” prime for harvest (19).
Steinbeck utilizes the characters of Samuel Hamilton and Adam Trask to retell the
human history of this period, while simultaneously using each man as a symbol for illusion
and reality. The analysis of this theme begins in the introduction to East of Eden in which
Steinbeck establishes the juxtaposition between the harsh times of drought opposed to the
years of plentiful rainfall in the Salinas Valley. The dichotomy between fecundity and
infertility symbolizes the illusory significance of this setting, especially when paralleled with
the characters of Samuel and Adam as shown later in this discussion. Although Steinbeck’s
presentation of the Salinas Valley captures an Edenic connotation, Steinbeck describes the
unforgiving nature of the valley as it wavers from fertile, lush acres of farmland in the rainy
season, to phases of drought, creating a barren wasteland where the farmers and the citizens
of Salinas suffer. In the opening chapter, Steinbeck demonstrates the vastly different seasons
in the Salinas Valley; in times of rain, the valley transforms into utopian fields “carpeted with
lupins and poppies” (4) while during the dry months “the cows would grow thin and
49
sometimes starve to death” (5). The introduction to the text constructs the possibility of both
the dream and reality and carries this theme to its conclusion. The juxtaposition disclosed
here continuously streams through the text and demonstrates the opposing forces of illusion
and reality.
Initially, Steinbeck mentions the fertile greenery of the valley and highlights the
vibrancy of the earth’s colors: “Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field
of lupins is more blue than you can imagine. And mixed with these were splashes of
California poppies. These too are of a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold
were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of poppies”
(East of Eden 4). This passage continues for several paragraphs and describes the distinct
colors of specific flowers burgeoning throughout the wet season. The romanticized, idealistic
tone of Steinbeck’s depiction of the valley validates the likelihood of the agricultural dream,
especially through the inclusion of “the burning color” of gold flowers blanketing the valley.
The “golden cream” of the fields designates the prosperous motivations for farming in this
area and the opportunity for eastern immigrants to acquire the wealth sought after by most
Americans. Here, Steinbeck emphasizes the profitability of farmers through the phrase
“golden cream”; the overuse of “gold” in this section denotes the possibility of fortune from
fertile farmland and also comments upon the Gold Rush that brought many settlers to the
area in search of the famed American Dream.
Mainly through the repetition of “gold,” Steinbeck implies the delusions of those
searching for the American Dream and continues the illusion of this fantasy through the
depiction of the poppy fields. Steinbeck’s image of the poppies implies a heavenly, dreamlike connotation, similarly depicted in the children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
50
(1900). The poppy fields portrayed in East of Eden closely mirror the famed scene from L.
Frank Baum’s original text in which the endless, and hallucinatory, poppy fields exemplify
Dorothy’s fantasy world. Dorothy and characters stumble upon the infinite pasture of
poppies: “They walked along listening to the singing of the brightly colored birds and
looking at the lovely flowers which now became so thick that the ground was carpeted with
them. There were big yellow and white and blue and purple blossoms, besides great clusters
of scarlet poppies, which were so brilliant in color they almost dazzled Dorothy’s eyes”
(Baum 93).
Baum’s version of the poppy fields parallels Steinbeck’s illustration of this fantasy
landscape in East of Eden; shortly after Dorothy and others encounter these fields, they
cannot contain their overwhelming impulse to fall fast asleep and refer to the poppies as
“deadly” because they fear the flowers will compel them to sleep forever. Commonly,
children’s fantasy tales rely heavily on the exploration of reality and illusion and the blurring
of consciousness and dreaming. Like Steinbeck’s intertexual allusions to Alice in
Wonderland mentioned earlier, his references to specific children’s stores contain elements
of fantasy and disillusionment, similarly experienced by the adults discussed in his novels.
As Dorothy discovers, the poppies contain a “deadly” strength and serve as a cautionary tale
to young readers—things are not always what they seem.
While the heavenly qualities of the rainy season represent the Edenic characteristics
of the valley, the dry season indicates Steinbeck’s inversion of this pastoral ideal. Steinbeck
depicts the dry season:
I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry
years too, and they put a terror on the valley […] The land dried up and the
grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places
appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sagebrush was
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gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled
dry twigs. (East of Eden 5)
The interpretation of the dry season demonstrates the severe contrast to the fantastic
beauty of the rainy season. From poppy fields of “golden cream” to emaciated cattle and
“scabby” hillsides, Steinbeck unearths the false expectations of California and its vast acres
of fertile ground. Steinbeck dismantles the façade of the American Dream and creates the
most terrifying landscape imaginable to showcase the reality of nature, a direct antithesis
from the heavenly descriptions of poppies mentioned earlier.
To further complicate the dichotomy of illusion versus reality, Steinbeck portrays
elements of both in Samuel Hamilton and Adam Trask. Samuel Hamilton, an immigrant from
Ireland, travels to California with his wife and upon arrival, fails to acquire the fertile land in
the valley and is left with the barren hills to build their homestead. Although living on barren
hills, his wife certainly was not infertile and she bore nine children, all delivered by Samuel
himself. In contrast, Samuel’s counterpart, Adam, settles in California and has his pick of
land. Adam finally chooses his perfect plot for his new family and it is here that things begin
to unravel for Adam. Cathy gives birth to their sons then escapes in a fit of violence, leaving
Adam depressed and lazy on his acres of lush farmland. Here, Steinbeck subverts the typical
ideal of the American Dream through the evaluation of two men, both possessing illusions of
grandeur while lacking one key element.
To begin with Samuel Hamilton’s sterile estate, Steinbeck satirizes the notion of
agrarian idealism through the unfulfilled promise of California acres overgrown with crops,
fruit and wheat running wild. The Hamiltons traveled to California, enticed by the Siren’s
song of prosperity and found themselves lacking the lush lands they imagined:
If the land had been any good the Hamiltons would have been rich people. But the
acres were harsh and dry. There were no springs, and the crust of topsoil was so
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thin that the flinty bones stuck through. Even the sagebrush struggled to exist, and
the oaks were dwarfed from lack of moisture […] From their barren hills the
Hamiltons could look down to the west and see the richness of the bottom land
and the greenness around the Salinas River. (Steinbeck, East of Eden 9)
Similar to the evaluation of the harsh land in the introduction, Samuel Hamilton possesses
the barren, dry hills overlooking the rich land in the crevice of the valley. Here, the lack of
water simulates the lacking notion of the American Dream and suggests that if the Hamiltons
owned fertile land, they would have acquired the seemingly unreachable fantasy. Steinbeck
includes clear descriptors to explain the depleted acres of farmland and the less-thandesirable location; the “thin,” “flinty” bones of earth peek through the thin crust of topsoil
struggling to survive. Nevertheless, the oaks “dwarfed from lack of moisture” contrast the
loving family contained inside the walls of the house. Here, Steinbeck plays with the ideal of
the complete family unit and the agrarian landscape as the fulfillment of the American ideal.
Although Samuel lacks the agricultural facet of the archetype, the family setting within the
home suggests the impossibility of fulfilling the overall dream.
In contrast, Steinbeck presents the inversion of Samuel’s inadequate realization of the
American Dream through Adam’s unfulfillment of the same dream. Steinbeck describes the
satisfying familial relationship of the Hamiltons, while highlighting their lack of agrarian
fertility. Inversely, Adam Trask possesses the “richness of the bottom land,” but lacks the
domestic contentment of the Hamilton family. Steinbeck disrupts the ideal setting of the
contented family sitting atop thriving terrain most poignantly through the story of Adam
Trask. In this scenario, Steinbeck subverts the American ideal through the emotionless
marriage between Adam and his wife Cathy—although the land is fertile, the home is
loveless, just the opposite of the Hamiltons. The following passage portrays the exuberant
environment of the Trask estate:
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He [Adam] inquired about the small wild plants of field and riverside and hill. In
damp places he knelt down and examined the game tracks in the mud, mountain
lion and deer, coyote and wild cat, skunk and raccoon, weasel and rabbit, all
overlain with the pattern of quail tracks. He threaded among willows and
sycamores and wild blackberry vines in the riverbed, patted the trunks of live oak
and scrub oak, madrone, laurel, toyon. (Steinbeck, East of Eden 137)
Steinbeck implements the opposing landscapes of the Trask and Hamilton estates; in contrast
to the “bones” poking up from the dry ground, Steinbeck stresses the plethora of live animals
crawling about Adam’s plot of land. The repetition of “wild” suggests the uninhibited,
uncultivated virility of Adam’s land and starkly opposes the “dwarfed” nature of Samuel’s
struggling plant life. As in the introduction, Steinbeck paints the landscapes of illusion and
reality, now exemplified by both men. Samuel Hamilton realizes the typical domestic
expectation, but fails to obtain the rural farm life supposedly overflowing in the dream land
of California. Adam Trask represents the antithesis of this ideal; Adam attempts to conform
Cathy to his domestic ideal, however, she escapes in a fit of violence and leaves Adam to
tend to his bountiful farmland.
Evident by the title, Adam pursues his own fantasy of Eden, but his own
disillusionment creates less of an ideal and more of an emotional hell. In Genesis, “east of
Eden” refers to the land into which Cain flees after killing his brother Abel and this place
carries the implications of betrayal against another; although “east of Eden” directly relates
to the betrayal against brothers, it also explains how Adam’s land has transformed into the
anti-Eden, a loveless and violent atmosphere marked by Cathy’s betrayal of her husband and
her own children (Moser, ed. Gen. 4.16). In a desperate attempt to create the ideal setting,
Adam chases the implausible dream and discovers its harsh reality once the illusion unfolds.
Throughout East of Eden, Adam represents the greater perpetrator of self-delusion and seeks
the familial/proprietary idealism of American culture:
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Steinbeck examines the foundations of the American consciousness in this novel,
and he places an American Adam in the illusory Promised Land in order to
demonstrate the failure of the myth of a man in a new world. And as a
replacement for the discarded dream of the Promised Land as well as a solution to
the problem of man’s isolation and loneliness Steinbeck once again proposes the
ideal of man’s commitment to man and place. (Owens 141)
Because much of this text explores the lonely isolation of man’s self-conscious, Steinbeck
utilizes Adam’s misperceptions to explain the dangers of illusion; once Cathy abandons
Adam and the twins, Adam experiences crippling loneliness, a strange reaction since Cathy
never expressed emotions of love towards him nor showed any interest in their home.
Steinbeck highlights the “myth of a man” and subverts the holy notion of the “Promised
Land” in America, especially California. Adam considered California as the ultimate space,
the Eden waiting to be inhabited, however, implemented this place, and his marriage to
Cathy, as the solution to his loneliness in Connecticut. Adam’s land to the “east of Eden”
demonstrates his failure to actualize this dream and portrays the plagues of loneliness that
follow him.
Along with the cautionary elements of illusion and grandeur, Steinbeck’s East of
Eden discusses the major shift in American industry as one of the tell-tale signs as the evergrowing belief in the American Dream. The invention and excitement surrounding new
industry suggests anyone can achieve this very-real possibility of overwhelming success in
America. Man becomes fascinated with the small chance of prosperity within new markets
and the shift from agrarianism to modern machinery allows this to occur. This shift provides
for greater idealism in American industries and in the psyche of the American to attain
greater success never considered possible. Steinbeck proposes, “when our food and clothing
and housing are all born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get
into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking” (131). Mass markets limit free thought
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and anticipate the idealistic qualities perpetuated by modern production. All other thinking is
essentially eliminated by the constraints of this new idealism and reality is buried deep within
this fantasy.
As Steinbeck so eloquently proclaims in the text, “strawberries don’t taste as they
used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!” (129). Much of this text explores the
dangers of idealism and the changing tide of American culture. Moreover, Steinbeck delves
into the human compulsion to continuously seek happiness, believing the self is never
satisfied, never content. In the wise words of Samuel Hamilton, he tells Adam of
“a cousin of his mother’s in Ireland, a knight and rich and handsome, and anyway
shot himself on a silken couch, sitting beside the most beautiful woman in the
world who loved him.” Samuel continues, “‘There’s a capacity for appetite,’
Samuel said, ‘that a whole heaven and earth of cake can’t satisfy.’” (158)
Man carries this continual sense of lacking, that there might be something better and this is
where the illusion arises. In our humanity, an impulse exists to create the best version of a
situation, of a place and when this dream fails to become reality, an ensuing discontent takes
hold. East of Eden explains the capacity of man to seek the myth, the illusion, and
regretfully, can never seize the dream manifested in his own mind.
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CHAPTER THREE
NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT:
THE CONSUMERIST SEDUCTION OF AMERICA
AND ITS EFFECTS ON MORALITY
All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.
John Steinbeck
Beginning in the 1930s and spilling into the 1940s, texts like Tortilla Flat and
Cannery Row feature analyses of male-oriented business and the inversion of typical social
expectations, notably marriage and the domestic roles of women. In the 1950s, East of Eden
focuses on the perils of American idealism, specifically the elusive notion of the American
Dream. Each of these major themes finds its way into The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), a
text which criticizes in one grand gesture every social expectation critiqued individually in
Steinbeck’s other works. Here, Steinbeck mainly concentrates on the detrimental effects of
consumerism in America and its moral implications while infusing, for good measure, social
criticisms of marriage, family and American ideals.
In the last years of his life, Steinbeck hit the road and published biting analyses of
America; non-fiction texts like Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962) and
America and Americans (1966) reveal the author’s view of the dramatic decline of American
culture and the immorality of the American condition. The series of non-fiction essays
entitled America and Americans offers cynical commentary on the state of the union such as,
“Why are we on this verge of moral and hence nervous collapse? […] I believe it is because
we have reached the end of a road and have no new path to take, no duty to carry out, and no
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purpose to fulfill” (Steinbeck, 397). While this sense of nihilism suffuses The Winter of Our
Discontent, it stops short of becoming a wholehearted abhorrence of the condition of
America(ns) in 1966. Steinbeck blames a large part of this “moral collapse” on capitalism
and the overwhelming presence of consumerism. In his estimation, the absence of morality
that comes along with these developments. Through the portrayal of the moral fall of Ethan
Hawley, Steinbeck suggests the bleak future of America, yet the conclusion of the novel hints
at a sense of possibility for future generations.
In the epigraph to The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck offers this disclaimer:
“Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to
inspect their own communities and search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part
of America today” (1). And what is this book about? Debatable morality, lustrous
temptresses, an insatiable appetite for fortune, commodification of goods, and unyielding
materialism. Steinbeck thus warns readers to look to their own communities to witness the
devastation of capitalism, the greed of our fathers, and the dissatisfaction that plagues great
success. Steinbeck’s final novel reveals the cynical tone of an author who has dissected
America and Americans for his entire literary career. Finally, the author surrenders. He is
exhausted. He has studied the “American” (at home and abroad) for decades and ultimately
offers a despondent, melancholy approach to his last set of characters, Ethan Hawley in
particular.
As Steinbeck’s final piece of fiction, The Winter of Our Discontent represents the
culmination of his trenchant attacks against typical American ideals such as marriage, the
domesticity of women, disillusionment and male-centered business. The culmination of these
criticisms manifests in this text in which Steinbeck holds nothing back. Written in the early
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1960s, this last set of characters encompasses Steinbeck’s entire body of work as he plucks
situational themes and issues from his previous pieces and incorporates them into his final
critique of American figures. The evils of capitalism surface through the juxtaposition of
nature versus modernity/the commodity, the family pressures acting on Ethan to attain a
higher economic status, and the compulsory happiness perpetrated by dominant capitalist
ideology. Notably, Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society (1970) provides a useful theoretical
backdrop for understanding Steinbeck’s critical approach to society in The Winter of Our
Discontent.
When paired with Baudrillard’s critical discussion of capitalism, Steinbeck’s texts,
both fiction and non-fiction, further explain the consumerist tendencies of modern Americans
and document the prevalence of consumerism in American culture. Baudrillard affirms,
In the phenomenology of consumption, this general ‘air-conditioning’ of life,
goods, objects, services, behavior and social relations represents the perfected,
‘consummated’ stage of an evolution which runs from affluence pure and simple,
through interconnected networks of objects, to the total conditioning of action and
time, and finally to the systematic atmospherics built into those cities of the
future. (The Consumer Society 29)
Here, Baurdrillard unfolds a comprehensive explanation of consumerism and the future of
modern cities. Buadrillard cites the “air-conditioning” quality of modern environments,
implying the manufactured quality of everything that exists in modern culture; this synthetic
environment suggests the constructed, disposable attributes of all facets of life in a consumer
society. The phenomenon of consumerism can be seen in the proliferation of “goods, objects,
services, behavior and social relations” which generally encompasses everything the modern
individual encounters daily. Also analyzed in Chapter Two, Steinbeck incorporates the
illusion of the American Dream as a central theme to his works and continues this theme in
The Winter of Our Discontent. The character of Ethan faces the moral complexities of
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modernism and as Baudrillard suggests, Ethan must conform to the “air-conditioning”
quality, the illusory element, of modern culture. Through Ethan’s fall from morality in his
attempt to attain financial success, Steinbeck unveils the elusive nature of the American
Dream.
WELCOME TO THE MACHINE: THE DESTRUCTION OF
NATURE AND THE MECHANIZATION OF AMERICA
What Baudrillard calls the importance and “celebration of the object” is clearly
communicated in The Winter of Our Discontent. In The Consumer Society, Baudrillard
comments on the prevalence of these objects: “the humans of the age of affluence are
surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they were in previous ages, but by
objects. Their daily dealings are now not so much with their fellow men, but rather—on a
rising statistical curve—with the reception and manipulation of goods and messages” (25).
Baudrillard compares human beings with receptors for goods and messages, as life is now
cluttered with the sending and receiving of information and the purchasing of goods. The
sanctity of the commodity has materialized as the primary sacrament for modern humans
living in the “age of affluence” and can be seen through insistent globalization and
construction of new industry designed for the “manipulation of goods and messages.” Later
in the text, Baudrillard suggests, “Happiness has to be measurable. It has to be a well-being
measurable in terms of objects and signs; it has to be ‘comfort’” (49). Here, the comfort of
the American individual depends upon happiness calculated in measurable terms, not only by
objects themselves, but by the cultural signification of these objects.
In the formula for social success in America, the accumulation of objects equals
calculable wealth, comfort, happiness, yet what exactly do these concepts signify? In the
context of modern culture, these objects instill a sense of power in their owner, a feeling of
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accomplishment and “comfort” sought by their consumers. Even Steinbeck discusses the
American dependency on the object: “We are also poisoned with things. Having many things
seems to create a desire for more things, more clothes, houses, automobiles […] We are
trapped and entangled in things” (America and Americans 396). The capitalist state is
responsible for this entanglement in things and the perpetuation of the commodity. In Society
of the Spectacle, Guy Debord likewise identifies the importance of the commodity as a
critical feature of capitalist social organization, “The commodity appears in fact as a power
which comes to occupy social life. It is then that the political economy takes shape, as the
dominant science and the science of domination. The spectacle is the moment when the
commodity has attained the total occupation of social life” (41-42). Debord’s argument
scrutinizes modern culture by demonstrating how society idolizes the commodity and allows
it to completely commandeer social life. Postmodern Marxists like Baudrillard and Debord
examine the omnipresence of the commodity in consumer culture and interpret the power of
the commodity as a main contributor to spectacular society.
In The Winter of Our Discontent, the character of Ethan Hawley and the city of New
Baytown embody these criticisms regarding consumer culture. Steinbeck highlights the
infestation of modernization through the contrast between natural imagery and the heavy
hand of machinery. Steinbeck begins,
[Ethan and Joey Morphy] had come to the corner where Elm angles into High
Street. Automatically they stopped and turned to look at the pink brick and plaster
mess that was the old Bay Hotel, now being wrecked to make room for the new
Woolworth’s. The yellow-painted bulldozer and the big crane that swung the
wrecking ball were silent like waiting predators in the early morning. (9)
Here, Steinbeck flexes his cynicism and illustrates the perfect pairing of contemporary
mechanics with natural images to underscore the loss of nature and old-world antiquity with
the influx of machinery.
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The image of the “crane” initially establishes the juxtaposition between the natural
environment and the construction site portrayed in this scene. The “crane” marks the shift
from the natural environment to the mechanical invasion of America, particularly through the
destruction of nature due to trends like urbanization and the construction of consumerist
locations. Steinbeck mentions the “yellow-painted bulldozer,” “the big crane,” and “the
wrecking ball” as landmarks in the future of America; its push toward consumerism will
bring more scenes like this and eventually destroy America’s original history, symbolized by
the old Bay Hotel. The images of destruction suggest an all-encompassing moral apocalypse
and the elimination of the American historical setting due to extreme urbanization. Through
the contrast of nature versus machinery, Steinbeck stresses the “yellow-painted” machine,
highlighting the fact that it is painted yellow and does not exist naturally. The frigid images
of the machine contrast the earthly connotation of “silent like waiting predators in the early
morning.” Using the conflict between predator and prey, Steinbeck creates the inevitable
consumption of nature by capitalism (predator) and the destruction of nature and historical
antiquity (prey).
Early in The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck introduces the “mourning” of the
loss of antiquity and displays the view of local history as “old” and ridicules the importance
of modernism (the “new Woolworth’s”). Ethan and Joey “automatically” stop to revel in the
destruction of their antique town and shame the advent of new drug stores. The Bay Hotel
exemplifies the obliteration of historic locality in America (a “pink brick and plaster mess”)
and faces destruction to “make room” for the bright neon lights of capitalism. As suggested
by Baudrillard, daily life consists of less contact with fellow men and more interaction with
goods. The construction site interrupts their conversation and predicts the decline of human
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interaction due to consumerism and the commodity. The Woolworth’s will house a surplus of
commodities for sale and demonstrates the need for measurable wealth in terms of goods as
social signifiers. Evident by the construction of Woolworth’s, Steinbeck conveys the rise of
this phenomenon happening throughout America, even in unspoiled fishing villages like New
Baytown. Steinbeck’s own theories about America explain this incessant need for modernity
in terms of social strata: “the top people have the newest models, and lesser folk buy the used
homes turned in as down payments on the newer ones” (America and Americans 334). Like
the Bay Hotel, tired goods are exchanged for the newer, shinier ones and give their owners an
accomplished feeling of social mobility. The desperate need for social mobility floods the
novel and represents a main motivator for Ethan’s moral questioning.
Later in the text, Steinbeck describes the quaint, tourist-oriented popularity of New
England costal towns and references New Baytown as an example. Following the demolition
of the old Bay Hotel, Ethan reflects on the overpopulation and tourist infestation of these
small villages:
Sickness or the despair fell on New Baytown—perhaps an attitude from which it
did not recover […] New Baytown people…were spared the noise and litter of
summer people, the garish glow of neon signs, the spending of tourist money and
tourist razzle-dazzle. Only a few new houses were built around the fine inland
waters. But the snake of population continued to writhe out and everyone knew
that sooner or later it would engulf the village of New Baytown. The local people
longed for that and hated the idea at the same time. The neighboring towns were
rich, spilled over with loot from tourists, puffed with spoils, gleamed with the
great houses of the new rich. Old Baytown spawned art and ceramics and pansies,
and the damn broadfooted brood of Lesbos wove handmade fabrics and small
domestic intrigues. New Baytown talked of the old days and of flounder and when
the weakfish would start running. (Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent 161162)
Dressed in majestic prose, Steinbeck presents a scathing interpretation of modern culture and
the exploitation of bay front towns by wealthy home hunters. This passage displays the
perfect paradigm for Steinbeck’s ability to integrate natural, poetic imagery with an
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exceptionally critical, biting tone. As noted in the previous passages, earthly images mirror
the presence of new capitalism and the natural connotations highlight the overwhelming
proliferation of consumer takeover. Primarily, Steinbeck engages the reader in this
continuous conversation between the “good old days” and the callous dominance of
capitalism. The natural setting interrupts this pairing and phrases like “snake of population”
and “gleamed with the great houses” showcase this intersection of rural beauty and
manufactured commodification.
The passage suggests New Baytown “did not recover” from this consumer tyranny
and Steinbeck indicates this pillage of antiquity as the future of America as a capitalist state.
In this section, Steinbeck reveals the sneaky, twisted motion of the “snake of population” that
“continued to writhe out” the village and would eventually coil itself around the neck of New
Baytown and constrict it like its prey. The “snake of population” delivers an eerie
comparison of the tourist newcomers and illustrates them as wealthy predators hunting for
bay front properties. The terms “spilled,” “gleamed” and “puffed” act as dual meanings;
rather than describing a gleaming ocean, the words above adopt a pompous, inflated tone that
gestures toward the overabundance of American culture. Like the commentary on
Woolworth’s in the previous section, the vulgar “neon lights” and “tourist razzle-dazzle”
describe the onslaught of new goods and commodities flooding the area. In the sacred “old
days,” the denizens of New Baytown would discuss the “flounder and when the weakfish
would start running,” a far cry from appeasing tourists with knick-knacks under
manufactured neon lights. Steinbeck offers his relentless tirade against modernity by
describing the “noise” and “litter” that tourism brings to unspoiled areas. Ironically, beneath
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the pristine natural setting of New Baytown lies an abundance of men infected by this
consumer infestation.
“TAKING STOCK”: ETHAN’S FAMILIAL BURDEN
One of the more prominent manifestations of social pressure occurs in the family
setting. The family unit acts as its own microcosm of the overall economy and recycles the
ideologies adopted from the larger society. Especially in this text, the Hawley family
represents a subset of the overarching system of societal values and reinforces these learned
ideals within itself. In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983), Deleuze and
Guattari discuss the effects of the family within the capitalist system:
It would appear that the family becomes a microcosm, suited to expressing what it
no longer dominates. In a certain sense the situation has not changed; for what is
invested through the family is still the economic, political, and cultural social
field, its breaks and flows. Private persons are an illusion, images of images or
derivatives of derivatives […] Father, mother, and child thus become the
simulacrum of the images of capital, with the result that these images are no
longer recognized at all in the desire that is determined to invest only in their
simulacrum. (264)
Here, Deleuze and Guattari argue what happens to the family in a capitalist state. Because the
family represents a microcosm of society, it ends up recycling cultural ideologies proposed
by the dominant forces, notably capitalist-driven ideologies. In this passage, Deleuze and
Guattari suggest the individual person is an illusion and the community of “father, mother
and child” represents the embodiment of capitalist recirculation.
The pressure of maintaining the family ideal of the 1950s-1960s plays a significant
role in the moral decline of Ethan Hawley. In the text The Way We Never Were: American
Families and the Nostalgia Trap (2000), Stephanie Coontz focuses on the façade of the
American family and the consumerist rise that followed the predominance of the nuclear
family in the 1950s:
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The 1950s was a profamily period if there ever was one. Rates of divorce and
illegitimacy were half of what they are today; marriage was almost universally
praised; the family was everywhere hailed as the most basic institution in society
[…] For most Americans, the most salient symbol and immediate beneficiary of
their newfound prosperity was the nuclear family. The biggest boom in consumer
spending, for example, was in household goods. (24-25)
The 1950s are commonly referred to as the era of the “nuclear family” and as displayed in
Coontz’s argument, the revival of family as the “most basic institution in society.” The
nuclear family and the concentration on household goods propelled consumer spending to
incredible heights. Due to the prosperity of Americans in the 1950s, the family could now
enjoy household luxuries (television, refrigerator, car) and families experienced the social
pressure to acquire these goods as a quantifiable measurement of social placement. The
1950s also saw a rise in the “middle class” and therefore, an accompanying pressure to obtain
this social status.
In The Winter of Our Discontent, Ethan Hawley experiences this intense pressure to
acquire wealth and eventually brings great shame to the family due to his immoral means of
attaining it. The Hawley family looks to Ethan to provide them with the middle class niceties
enjoyed by other Americans. In order to demonstrate this pressure early in the text, Steinbeck
opens the novel with the following lines: “When the fair gold morning of April stirred Mary
Hawley awake, she turned over to her husband and saw him, little fingers pulling a frog
mouth at her” (3). The opening lines of The Winter of Our Discontent showcase Ethan’s
playfulness towards his loyal, honest wife. A playfulness Mary sees as his silly antics. A
playfulness Ethan utilizes to hide his anxieties from his wife. A playfulness masking the
troubles that haunt Ethan and keep him lurking the streets of New Baytown in the dead of
night. Steinbeck portrays Ethan’s teasing to emphasize the angst buried deep within his
psyche and ironically, Ethan plays these games with his wife in order to conceal the anxiety
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she instills in him. Even the immediate inclusion of the “gold morning” that awakens Mary
suggests this is the thing that moves her. The pressures to inflate the family to their former
stature and engender a fortune derive from Mary and Ethan allows this pressure to eat away
at him; Mary and the children create an image of the typical American domestic setting and
expect Ethan to provide it for them.
Due to Ethan’s inability to obtain their desired fortune, this produces a sense of
lacking within him and propels him to consider immoral means to satisfy their every wish,
especially Mary’s. Ethan ponders, “The structure of my change was feeling, pressures from
without, Mary’s wish, Allen’s desires, Ellen’s anger, Mr. Baker’s help […] Suppose my
humble and interminable clerkship was not virtue at all but a moral laziness? For any
success, boldness is required” (Steinbeck 91). This moment marks the beginning of Ethan’s
justification for his immoral decisions and suggests that pressures “from without” drive
Ethan to relinquish his “built-in judge.” Ethan carries the weight of his family’s economic
inadequacy and begins blaming his monotonous, incessant clerkship as the root of his
problems. Baudrillard posits, “a society achieves equilibrium not through its virtues but
through its vices, and that social peace, progress and human happiness are obtained by the
instinctive immorality which leads them to continually break the rules” (Consumer 42). Here,
Baudrillard’s idea of “instinctive immorality” perfectly explains Ethan’s compulsion for
boldness and illustrates his plans to shed his role as the lowly grocery clerk. In America and
Americans, Steinbeck continues this idea of instinctive immorality, “We scramble and
scrabble up the stony path toward the pot of gold we have taken to mean security. We
trample friends, relatives, and strangers who get in our way of achieving it” (330). Steinbeck
intentionally utilizes the pronoun “we” to express that “we” as Americans are all guilty of
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this immoral decadence and Steinbeck displays its implications through Ethan’s fall from
morality.
Ethan’s rationalization for his moral corruption derives from external pressures and
the “thousand moral rules” (Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent 91) broken for the sake
of maintaining the status quo; as Baudrillard proposes, citizens are plagued with “instinctive
immorality” in order to maintain social equilibrium. Ethan embodies this compulsory action
for immorality, as success is only achieved through “boldness” and virtue is essentially
insignificant. Ethan allows the illusion of “security” to take the wheel and betray his friends
(Marullo) and relatives (Danny) to acquire the fortune Mary so desperately desires, as
outlined in Steinbeck’s idea from America and Americans. Ethan acknowledges his change
in moral values by confessing “the structure of [his] change,” insinuating the low value of
moral responsibility when it comes to attaining wealth in America. Later in this section,
Ethan reveals the incredible burden of failure and unearths the reasoning for his immoral
consideration, “And if I should put the rules aside for a time, I knew I would wear scars but
they would be worse than the scars of failure I was wearing? To be alive at all is to have
scars” (Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent 92). Here, Steinbeck conveys an unyielding
nihilistic view of American culture through Ethan; Steinbeck states, “to be alive at all is to
have scars,” which suggests the brutal implications of life in America and its continuing
decline through the pressures of a capitalist organization. Ethan abandons his moral
consciousness and decides to erase the “scars of failure” he wears from the collapse of the
Hawley name.
Early in the text, Ethan mentions the futility of the Hawley name and cites his
profession as one contributor to its worthlessness. In the first chapter, Steinbeck references
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the “old” Hawley house as a mirror to the “old” Bay Hotel, both sites waiting to meet their
destruction: “The heavy bags of groceries for the holidays discouraged the walk. Ethan
moved wearily across the High Street and took his way slowly along Elm toward the old
Hawley house” (28). Here, Steinbeck reinforces the imminent devastation of old America;
there was a time when the Hawley name meant something in the community, but now, as
Ethan totes the heavy groceries back to the “old” house, he is reminded of how far the once
valuable Hawley name has plummeted. The “heavy bags of groceries” signify the
tremendous fall of the Hawley family name and demonstrates their decline in social class.
The use of “old” suggests the nostalgia for “the good old days” and offers an explanation for
Ethan’s moral degradation; in the old days, the Hawley name possessed historical
significance and now the commonplace grocery clerk has brought shame to the family’s
heritage. Steinbeck uncovers the depreciation of the Hawley name due to Ethan’s occupation
through key words like “discouraged,” “wearily” and “slowly.” The name has plunged to its
lowest point and Ethan’s desire for social mobility and wealth has created a greedy monster,
ready to fight and ironically, further disgrace the sacred Hawley name.
Ethan constantly alludes to the high ancestry of the Hawley family and how far it has
fallen since the death of his father, Capitan Hawley. Meanwhile, Marullo calls Ethan “kid” in
the grocery store. Ethan’s obsession with the sea and his romanticism of his father’s
occupation creates an even larger divide between himself and the old Cap’n. Ethan reflects
on his ancestry, “And my ancestors, my blood—the young ones on the deck, the fully grown
aloft, the mature on the bridge. No nonsense of Madison Avenue then or trimming too many
leaves from cauliflowers. Some dignity was then for a man, some stature. A man could
breathe” (Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent 47). Here, Steinbeck ridicules the modern
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preoccupation with the “nonsense of Madison Avenue,” the symbol for consumerism and the
fulfillment of frivolous goods, especially when contrasted to the dignified, albeit
romanticized, position of Atlantic fisherman. Ethan reveals his high regard for his ancestors,
even sentimentalizes their role, and reflects on the trivial features of his job in the grocery.
The phrase “a man could breathe” is twofold; primarily, the unrestricted openness of the sea
allows a man to “breathe” and contrasts the tight physical space of Ethan’s grocery store.
Secondly, “a man could breathe” insinuates the lack of modern pressures, like new curtains
for Mary or a car for the family.
As mentioned earlier, Mary accounts in no small measure for Ethan’s compulsion for
immorality, and the conversations Ethan shares with Mary highlight her humble
embarrassment of the Hawley name. When Ethan asks if she loves money, Mary replies,
“No, I don’t love money. But I don’t love worry either. I’d like to be able to hold up my head
in this town. I don’t like the children to be hang-dog because they can’t dress as good—as
well—as some others. I’d love to hold up my head” (Steinbeck 34). Hearing this from his
wife clearly affects Ethan’s pride; Mary has the Hawley name as well and even though she is
not related by blood, it still brings her shame. Mary self-corrects her improper grammar to
mirror dignified speech and practices the proper manner of speaking. Mary desperately wants
to enjoy the lavishness of high society and cannot bear that her children feel shame because
they do not dress as well as others.
In hopes of satisfying Mary’s middle-class desires, Ethan performs a kaleidoscope of
deceitful, conniving acts against those closest to him. Primarily, Ethan discovers Marullo (the
grocery store owner) has been living in America illegally and decides to turn in the suspected
alien. After Ethan reports Marullo to the federal government, Marullo is deported to Sicily
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and has no choice but to give Ethan ownership of the store. When Mary learns that Ethan
now owns the grocery, they share the following exchange:
‘You mean—you mean you own the store?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not a clerk! Not a clerk!’
She rolled face down in the pillows and wept, big, full-bosomed sobs, the way
a slave might when the collar is struck off. (238)
Here, Steinbeck emphasizes Mary’s incredible shame in the community and now, like a slave
freed from the shackles of poverty, Mary can hold her head up. The humiliation of
inadequate wealth holds Mary by the throat, tightly choking her neck and preventing her
from enjoying the privileges of a bourgeois lifestyle. The repetition of “not a clerk!”
validates Mary’s embarrassment as the grocer’s wife and Steinbeck comments on the taut
chokehold of capitalism.
The comparison of Mary to a freed slave introduces the role of women, particularly
housewives, as contributors to the rise of consumerism. Returning to The Consumer Society,
Baudrillard discusses the role of women in terms of advertising in a consumerist culture,
Woman, whose fate lies with the paraphernalia (household objects), fulfills not
only an economic function, but a prestige function, deriving from the aristocratic
or bourgeois idleness of women […] the housewife does not produce, she does
not show up in the nation’s accounts; she is not recorded as a productive force.
She is, in fact, fated to be of value as a force of prestige, by her official
uselessness, by her status as a ‘kept’ slave. (97)
Baudrillard’s quote regarding the feminine paradigm, in which the cultural ideal of “woman
is sold to women,” distinctly relates to Mary’s fuss over household goods, a proper wardrobe
for the children and her overwhelming happiness for Ethan’s change in status.
Once Mary’s manacles of inadequacy have been removed, she can fully actualize her
role as the image of the idle wife in the bourgeois home. The position of the housewife
fulfills a certain economic function; due to her idle, leisure time, Mary serves as the
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consumer of “household objects” kept as a slave to her domestic function to further breed the
consumerist cycle. As Ethan “takes stock” of all the pressures acting against him, he
describes Mary’s wishes: “Item: By money, Mary meant new curtains and sure education for
the kids and holding her head a little higher and, face it, being proud rather than a little
ashamed of me” (Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent 45). Mary subscribes to the
cultural model of femininity and domesticity, fulfilling Baudrillard’s idea regarding the
“prestige function” of the housewife role and expecting her husband to satisfy her petty
fondness for the paraphernalia of modern life. The family unit serves as an entity to reinforce
certain dominant values accepted by mainstream culture. Following this idea, Mary exhibits
immense concern for the Hawley’s status in New Baytown and fuels Ethan’s obsession with
obtaining a great fortune for her own satisfaction. The Hawley family’s desire for materials
and increased wealth represent the main contributing factor to Ethan’s moral degradation,
evident by his depraved efforts to provide for their unnecessary desires, although considered
vital by American consumerist standards.
CULTURAL MYTHS AND MICKEY MOUSE
As Steinbeck affirms in the epigraph of The Winter of Our Discontent, the moral
devastation of New Baytown represent a microcosm, a fictional morsel of the real dilemmas
facing America as a capitalist nation. The text annihilates the deceptive illusion of the
American Dream and devalues the precious myth of American prosperity, a dangerous myth
generally devoid of any reality. As illustrated in East of Eden, the central protagonist, Adam,
becomes consumed with this façade of American success and creates an illusory world that is
not grounded in reality. A destructive fascination with the American Dream also occurs in
The Winter of Our Discontent though Ethan. Steinbeck implements a single image, a
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manifestation of all the reminders for the cultural myth of boundless prosperity to be
discovered and seized in the illusion of the American Dream.
Steinbeck concentrates the cultural myths of capitalism in the most horrid, blatantly
evil figure: Mickey Mouse. Naturally, modern American society looks to Mickey Mouse and
Disney World as the embodiment of childhood joy and the nostalgia of “better days,” but in
this context, Steinbeck employs Mickey Mouse as the ultimate symbol for capitalistic greed
and immorality. Within American popular culture, the smiling face of Mickey Mouse and the
Walt Disney amusement parks represent the height of childhood fantasy and are specifically
designed to remove visitors from the abominable reality of daily life. At pivotal points in
which Ethan faces moral intersections, the Mickey Mouse mask offers a constant reminder of
the value of monetary wealth and economic success in a capitalist system. Mickey watches
Ethan, taunts him even, and smiles down upon Ethan from his high place on the grocery store
shelf or listens to his daily sermons with the rest of the cereal boxes. The points in the novel
in which Mickey appears convey the most striking moments in Ethan’s gradual downfall.
Ethan learns the first rule of Joey Morphy’s Guide to Business Prosperity, “money
gets money.” Ethan unlocks the store and proclaims his opening sermon to the waiting
congregation of groceries:
If the laws of thinking are the laws of things, then morals are relative too, and
manner and sin—that’s relative too in a relative universe. Has to be. No getting
away from it. Point of reference. You dry cereal with the Mickey Mouse mask on
the box and a ventriloquism gadget for the label and ten cents. I’ll have to take
you home, but right now you sit up and listen. (Steinbeck, The Winter of Our
Discontent 57)
After receiving Joey Morphy’s advice, Ethan begins to understand the moral blindness
necessary for success in America. The Mickey Mouse mask represents a false identity for
Ethan; the mouse mask embodies the commodity, the consumer need for it and, if he follows
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The Morph’s advice, Ethan must first acquire money in order to make more, likely through
dishonest means.
Steinbeck introduces the theme of “ventriloquism” through the image of the Mickey
Mouse mask and this theme details Ethan’s inability to utilize his own free will; Steinbeck
suggests Ethan is merely a talking puppet and his puppeteer, capitalism, determines his every
move, his every thought. Here, Ethan is nothing less than a slave to the system and acts as a
cog in the capitalist machine. Ethan abandons his freedom of choice and transforms into a
functioning member of the system—feelings of economic inadequacy and immoral
motivations explain Ethan’s assimilation into predominant consumerist thought. The early
appearance of Mickey Mouse establishes Ethan’s exploration of dishonest, conniving
methods implemented by countless others who have reached economic success and here,
Ethan attempts to validate their lack of virtue by proposing that business ethics and morality
and sin are all relative, possibly even worthy of forgiveness. Although Ethan has not
committed any immoral act yet, the Mickey Mouse motif follows Ethan at each pivotal
moment in his ethical deterioration. Moreover, the material desires of his wife and children
deplete Ethan’s moral register, evident by his participation in consumer culture. Ethan says to
the Mickey Mouse cereal, “I’ll have to take you home, but right now you sit up and listen.”
Through this comment, Ethan implies how Mickey Mouse, the symbol for capitalism, does
most of the talking and the fact that Ethan must take it home confirms Mary and the children
embody the root of Ethan’s consumerist motivations.
As the novel progresses, Steinbeck illustrates Ethan’s continuous moral questioning
and far-fetched attempts at justification for immoral action. Midway through the text, Ethan
plots the specifics for a bank robbery and plans to use the Mickey Mouse mask to conceal his
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identity. Steinbeck describes Ethan’s plans: “I particularly noticed the Mickey Mouse mask
smiling down from its box in the pew of breakfast foods […] I found the extension hand for
grabbing things from top shelves and took a box down and stood it under my coat in the
storeroom. When I was back in the pulpit, the next Mickey Mouse in line smiled down at
me” (Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent 133). In this passage, Steinbeck cleverly
deploys the Mickey Mouse mask as a symbol for the American obsession with consumerism;
the mask represents the lengths to which Ethan will go in order to reach economic prosperity.
The incredible number of Mickey Mouse cereal boxes act as physical indications of Ethan’s
role as a slave to consumerism and his yearning for economic achievement. In this passage,
Steinbeck demonstrates the sway that capitalism holds over Ethan as he gazes up towards the
plethora of boxes on the shelf. The incredible amount of masked cereal boxes insinuate that
Ethan’s compulsion to acquire goods will never cease, that behind each box there is another
one waiting to be consumed. This action underscores the overwhelming abundance of goods
in our culture, notably commodified goods like Mickey Mouse cereal. At this point in the
novel, Ethan is midway through his metamorphosis from lowly grocer to renegade bank
robber, contemplating his lack of moral options and willing to commit serious crimes in
order to get ahead.
The image of Mickey Mouse and his smiling face features the presence of cultural
signifiers, predominantly the gratification of children in developed, wealthy nations and the
opportunity to purchase commodified goods in prosperous economies. In the discussion of
Disneyland from Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Baudrillard proposes,
Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is
real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer
real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no
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longer question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the
fact that the real is no longer real. (13)
By way of Disneyland, Baudrillard explains the hyperreal nature of the Mickey Mouse icon
and the use of the Mickey Mouse mask in the novel suggests the false representation of this
cultural myth. In a sense, the conspicuous figure of Mickey Mouse also serves as a “false
representation of reality (ideology)” and exists within the “imaginary order” reinforced by
dominant culture. Here, Baudrillard equates reality with ideology, proposing that the reality
we understand and enact everyday is an ideology facilitated by the dominant system of
values. In the novel, Ethan follows these social codes and the Mickey Mouse mask serves as
a signifier for the power of consumerism precipitated by the dominant ideology. Mickey
Mouse symbolizes Ethan’s complete participation and interpellation into this prevalent
system.
Eventually, Ethan’s questionable moral choices begin to buckle under the stress of
financial prosperity and here, Mickey appears again with a heavy head:
I hung the Mickey Mouse mask on the cash register by its rubber band so that it
covered the little window where the numbers show. Then I put on my coat and hat
and turned out the lights and sat on the counter with my legs dangling. A naked
black banana stalk nudged me on one side and the cash register fitted against my
left shoulder like a bookend. (Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent 228)
By this point in the novel, Ethan has turned in Marullo, gained ownership of the store
and indirectly killed his oldest friend, Danny, in order to gain the deed for a vital piece of real
estate. Here, Mickey makes one of his last appearances and hangs upon the register at the
grocery store, a fitting symbol to showcase Ethan’s immorality motivated by materialism and
greed. Steinbeck plays with the dual meaning of “register,” signifying both the physical
register as a necessary element in the exchange of money and Ethan’s moral register that is
now depleted after several sins committed against his fellow man.
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The image of Mickey Mouse implies Ethan’s final stage of his de-evolution and
explains the realization of his own immorality. Earlier in the text, Ethan has not yet
committed any definitive crimes and finds justification in the “it’s all relative” attitude
towards “manner and sin,” but now, Ethan hangs his head in shame and discovers how far
man can fall. In a deliberate movement, Ethan positions the Mickey Mouse mask to conceal
the “little window where the numbers show” of the cash register. Ethan was blinded by
greed, the possibility of great fortune and now that he comprehends the implications of his
sins, he attempts to hide the motivation for his immorality: numbers. The desire to acquire a
great fortune directly leads to Ethan’s detrimental moral collapse; even though he accepts the
overwhelming pressure from his family to attain financial success, Ethan knowingly
committed these sins and leaves him sitting in the dark contemplating the destruction of his
character. The appearance of Mickey Mouse in this scene depicts Ethan’s unmistakable
recognition of his moral breakdown and the added shame brought to his family. The power of
Mickey Mouse (the symbol for capitalism) has come full circle and the final image of
Mickey represents the “bookend” to Ethan’s bout with immorality.
Eventually, things get progressively worse for Ethan and he retreats to his sacred
Place in the conclusion of the novel. In this final scene, Steinbeck proposes, “there comes a
time for decent, honorable retirement, not dramatic, not punishment of self or family—just
good-by, a warm bath and an opened vein, a warm sea and a razor blade” (The Winter of Our
Discontent 276). This dark moment implies the simplicity of suicide for Ethan—it’s not a
dramatic undertaking, but rather a natural incident, emphasized by the birthing imagery in the
scene and the womb-like descriptions of the Place. For a brief moment, Ethan seeks the
comfort of death to absolve himself of his sins, however, he thinks of his daughter and resists
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the urge to finish the act, scrambling out of the secluded cave. This scene provides a hopeful
scenario and expresses Ethan’s deliberate choice to fight against discontent and right the
wrongs committed throughout the text. The descent of Ethan’s character signifies the
regrettable direction of American culture, yet as Ethan hurries out of the Place, Steinbeck
insinuates Ethan’s flee as a glimmer of hope and a sense of possibility for future generations.
In the last chapter of Part One, Steinbeck cites the inspiration for the title and quotes
Shakespeare’s Richard III, “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious by this sun of
York” (157). In this chapter, Steinbeck uses the word “discontent” three times in order to
illustrate Ethan’s deplorable transformation to amoral monster as he learns the nature of true
discontent. Although the quote from Richard III serves as a direct correlation to the issues of
wealth and fortune evident in The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck recognizes this
parallel and relates it back to specifically American issues. The epigraph states, “this book is
about a large part of America today” and Steinbeck includes the collective “we” and “us” as
victims/perpetrators of this consumerist takeover. Notably, Steinbeck hints at the winter of
“our” discontent, demonstrating the discontent all Americans experience in light of the
pressure that capitalism places upon society. Man has the capability to obtain seemingly
impossible scientific feats into the mysterious unknown of alternative universes, yet human
emotions like “anger” and “discontent” cannot be assuaged by modern science. As Steinbeck
mentions in the text, “we can shoot rockets into space but we can’t cure anger or discontent”
(155).
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CONCLUSION
In the final scene in The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck suggests some hope for
America. Ethan hurries to his Place with the intent to commit suicide, however, he thinks of
his daughter and considers otherwise: “I had to get back—had to return the talisman to its
new owner. Else another light might go out” (276). The ending to his final piece of fiction
indicates Steinbeck’s hope for the future vis-à-vis Ethan’s desire to return to his daughter, a
symbol for the coming generation. Throughout the text, Ethan attempts to battle the trend of
mounting consumerism, mainly for the satisfaction of his children who anticipate emerging
modes of life. If Ethan decided to end it all at the Place, the novel would have concluded with
a bleak view of the future, instead, Steinbeck asserts Ethan’s urgency to return to his family
as a promising nod towards things to come. In this manner, the last scene in The Winter of
Our Discontent illustrates Steinbeck’s sense of possibility for the new generation and
reevaluates the nihilism articulated throughout the text.
After the publication of The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck continued writing
non-fiction pieces, such as Travels With Charley in Search of America (1962) and America
and Americans (1966), as attempts to reacquaint himself with the country he felt
disconnected from. In the opening of Travels With Charley, Steinbeck explains,
In America I live in New York, or dip into Chicago or San Francisco. But New
York is no more America than Paris is France or London is England. Thus I
discovered that I did not know my own country. I, an American writer, writing
about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty,
warpy reservoir. (5)
In the traditional American fashion, Steinbeck hit the road in search of the America he
vaguely remembered and ended up rediscovering his great interest with “the American” and
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appreciating the journey. Even the critical essays in America and Americans demonstrate
Steinbeck’s affinity, fascination and sentimentality towards the American:
Something happened in America to create the Americans. Perhaps it was the
grandeur of the land—the lordly mountains, the mystery of deserts, the ache of
storms, cyclones— the enormous sweetness and violence of the country which,
acting on restless, driven peoples from the outside world, made them taller than
their ancestors, stronger than their fathers—and made them all Americans. (403)
In this passage, Steinbeck speculates the elements that shape the genetic formation of the
American—the magnificent landscapes, the violent past, the plethora of immigrants. Do
these things make up Americans? Steinbeck recognizes the faults, but also the triumphs of
America and highlights the complicated fusion of beauty and violence, good and evil,
prosperity and destitution that explains the nature of America. Dynamic characters like Adam
Trask, Tom Joad and Ethan Hawley embody these complex intersections and contain the
elaborate combinations that “made them all Americans.” Using these characters, Steinbeck
critiques the human qualities of the American individual, yet still demonstrates his faith,
affection and sentimentality for the American.
When following the trajectory of Steinbeck’s career as an author, each decade
expresses a different side of himself, the human condition and the shape of the American
species. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Steinbeck has his moments of vicious attack and
sentimental portrayals of America, yet still retains an aggressive loyalty to his country. The
various phases of Steinbeck’s career suggest a similar comparison to the stages of America;
the ebb and flow of politics, economic structures and social patterns demonstrate the everchanging quality of modern culture. In Steinbeck’s final words from America and Americans,
he proclaims, “We have failed sometimes, taken wrong paths, paused for renewal, filled our
bellies and licked our wounds; but we have never slipped back—never” (404). Steinbeck
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announces his unwavering conviction in the resilience of America and while he admits her
faults, illustrates the perseverance of a nation unwilling to retreat.
Despite the nearly five decades since Steinbeck’s death, he remains a vital part of the
literary canon and retains a scholarly significance in the present day. In the course of his
career, Steinbeck kept his finger on the pulse of American culture and surveyed the lives of
Americans, which became the dynamic characters portrayed in his fiction. In the context of
our over-stimulated 21st century world, the ideas presented in Steinbeck’s work are still
considered subversive and relevant in relation to the political climate and changing social
trends of the modern era. Steinbeck addressed themes of family and sexual politics, America
during wartime and the plight of the unemployed, all of which are still being argued today.
Even though the majority of Steinbeck’s works respond to specific historical events, his
ability to encapsulate and envelop the scope of humanity transcends American history and
moves into the realm of the human condition. Steinbeck’s fiction contains a heartbeat that
still pulsates today and depicts Steinbeck as more than just a relic of the past.
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