Naturalism and Steinbeck’s “Curious Compromise” in The Grapes of Wrath

What is it about?

In the seventy years since the publication of The Grapes of Wrath, the extent of the influence of naturalism upon the work and the quality of Steinbeck’s naturalistic discourse has been frequently debated. Only ten years after its publication, Woodburn O. Ross noted Steinbeck’s “partial affiliation” with naturalism, concluding that he is, “up to a certain point, the complete naturalist” (433). Prior to this, as David Wyatt observes in the introduction to his collection on the novel, Edmund Wilson “set the terms of the initial critical debate…by casting Steinbeck as the crudest sort of naturalist” (5). More recently, critics have noted a considerable sophistication in Steinbeck’s naturalistic-biological themes, in particular with regard to the ways in which naturalism is synthesized with numerous other discourses. Given that this issue has been rehearsed at length throughout the novel’s existence, the starting point for this essay is to assume that there are a number of naturalistic attributes detectable in The Grapes of Wrath. In what follows, naturalism is treated as just one of this novel’s discursive formulations amongst many other literary, philosophical and sociological theoretical bases. This complex blending and clashing of discourses—to paraphrase Barthes’ oft-quoted axiom—has previously been noted by a number of critics. Donald Pizer, for example, identifies “primitivist, Marxist, Christian, and scientific discourses in The Grapes of Wrath” (Bloom 86), while Ralph Willett and John White suggest that the novel embraces “nostalgia for the agrarian past, a documentary desire to record contemporary fact (soil erosion, foreclosures, industrialized farming, Hoovervilles), a populist faith in ‘the people’, and an indignation against man-made suffering” (229).

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