From Patriarchy to Matriarchy: Ma Joad's Role in The Grapes of Wrath

As the Joad clan disintegrates under the pressure of dispossession Ci and migration, Ma Joad emerges as a central, cohesive force. However, critics exploring the social thinking behind The Grapes of Wrath have tended to give her short shrift. Many of them have looked to the articulate Jim Casy rather than to the reticent Joads to explain the family's gradual realization that their survival depends on communal cooperation.' I wish to correct that imbalance now. I shall argue that the Joad family shifts from a patriarchal structure to a predominantly matriarchal one. So doing, they dramatize the influence of the anthropologist Robert Briffault on John Steinbeck as he tried to understand the Depression. Focusing too closely on the ideas of Jim Casy distorts the critical view of Ma Joad. She is too often, and mistakenly, set in opposition to the preacher, as if she shared the social values of her individualistic husband. In fact, she is receptive to Casy from the beginning and is thus marked as a cohesive rather than a fragmenting force. But the preacher does not have to convert Ma Joad. Her communal feelings emerge independently of his pronouncements. Working from Briffault's theories on the matriarchal origin of society, Stein-