Interestingly, as a very young man, John Steinbeck was
quite concerned about how he would be critically received. Prior to the publication of
The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck's father, Earnest, gave him the
following advice:
"You wouldn't be so worried about what others
think of you if you realized how infrequently they think of you at
all."
Although Earnest said
this to his adult son, it must have been family advice that the young writer
internalized as he was growing up, for if you look at many of his central characters,
they too have to learn not worry about what people
think.
For example, in The Grapes of Wrath,
as soon as the family moves out of Oklahoma, they encounter prejudice that
they had never had to put up with in the past. Tom Joad
marvels:
"Okie
use' ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you're a dirty son-of-a-bitch. Okie
means you're scum. Don't mean nothing itself, it's the way they say
it."
Ma Joad, the family
matriarch, knows that they cannot let the perceptions of others make them feel "little
and mean." Although they are poor, they can be generous. Ma and her family show their
character by being kind to the family they meet on the road, even burying their dead. Ma
feeds the starving children in one of the camps even though they barely have enough food
to feed their own kin.
Had they listened to the opinions of
the "masses" calling them dirty and scum, they may well have become dirty and scum. But
as Earnest Steinbeck so aptly observed, when the Okies (or whomever) were out of that
judgmental person's purview, it's unlikely that those "others" were given much thought
at all.
Be who you know yourself to be, not the aspersions
that might be cast upon you. This is a running theme throughout Steinbeck's work (think
Lennie and George in Of Mice and Men, or the "bums" on
Cannery Row, to name just two.)
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