Steinbeck exhausted the Great Depression in a house minded(p) to him by his father in Pacific Grove, California, where he survived by living on the land. From this vantage point, he composed his kickoff successful novel, Tortilla Flats (1935), a warmly humorous, episodic treatment of the lives of the Mexican-Indian-Caucasian jumble people the paisanos who lived in the Salinas Valley and whose earthy, uninhibited lives provided a chatoyant contrast to the valley's more "respectable" society (Timmerman 84). Thus began a career of attending to the plights and concerns of the workers, and the themes of the workers vs. the bosses, townspeople vs. country people, and past vs. present. Steinbeck is touch with the simple people who farm the lands, struggling to find a place for themselves in the world. His characters "glow with life," ("John Steinbeck Page") and job the simple passions of simpler times. Life is hard for these people, and the women are no exception.
A perhaps typical ?Steinbeck woman' is Ma Joad, the mother of the family traveling air jacket in The Grapes of Wrath. Ma Joad's strength is apparent
Osbourne, William R. "The Texts of Steinbeck's ?The Chrysanthemums.'" Modern Fiction Studies 12 (1966-67): 479-84.
Like the land, Elisa is " unopen(a) off" from the rest of the world. It is winter, now, and there is little for her to do, so she is at work in her garden. And also like the "black earth," Elisa is "shining like metal," at work in her "closed pot" of a world.
Elisa is frustrated as a woman, and so has taken on masculine qualities, so she is source depicted as a woman whose strengths are actually besides much for the tasks at hand. "She was cutting down the over-the-hill year's chysanthemum stalks with a pair of short and powerful scissors," the reader learns. She has too much energy for the job. "Her face was eager and mature and freehanded; even her work with the scissors was over-eager, over-powerful.
The chrysanthemum stems seemed too small and unaffixed for her energy." Thus, we get a sense, early on, of Elisa's promise, of her effectiveness. But it is also checkered and limited by her circumstances and by her stereotypical region as a woman, and as a farmer's wife.
Beegel, Susan F., Susan Shillinglaw and Wesley N. Tiffney, Jr. Steinbeck and the environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997.
It is not the tinker or his attentions that amuse her. Instead, it is the sharing of what she has grown from the bitter, hard earth, her chrysanthemums, a symbol of her potential for wholeness. When the tinker says that he knows someone who would like her flowers (in an attempt to authorise her sympathy and get some work), she opens up to him like a flower in the sun, "The irritation and resistance melted from Elisa's face." Her look grow "eager and alert," and Elisa's enthusiasm for the sharing of the flower buds grows with her ecstasy at the possibility of such expansion.
Steinbeck, John. "The Chrysanthemums" from The Long Valley. Penguin: 1986.
"John Steinbeck." entrance Indiana Teaching & Learning Center. 1998. 5 A
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