The Pastures of Heaven Read Free Page A

of Darwin led to biological determinism and to atavistic scenes in which characters revert to primitive states of animalistic behavior; the influence of Karl Marx, coupled with problems emanating from the urbanization of America and the economic problems at the end of the nineteenth century, engendered the portrayal of socio-economic forces that overwhelm individual lives. These themes came to replace for a time the ethical dilemmas so prevalent in Realism, in which characters struggle, as does Huck Finn, to make morally difficult decisions. Internal struggle is not significant in the context of external determinism, which overwhelms individual prerogatives. Beginning with The Pastures of Heaven, these concepts came to play an important role in the fiction of John Steinbeck.
    These themes led the Naturalist to focus on the lives of lower-class characters struggling for survival in an alien and often hostile society, one insensitive to their personal needs for fulfillment or self-expression. Often these characters are in some way grotesque, retarded, or misshapen victims of genetic accident, or people obsessed by greed, sexual craving, or a compulsive plan for success that ultimately destroys them. Since the characters themselves are incapable of explaining the complex causal history of the events that sweep them along, the personalized narrative methods of Realism, in which simple characters tell their own stories, is replaced with a dominant, omniscient narrator who can relate deterministic factors far beyond the knowledge of the characters affected by them. Since the underlying assumption of Naturalism is that reality is not only comprehensible but stable and available for detailed, scientific analysis, the tendency is for symbolization, for dominant images that embody determining forces—for example, the variety of gold symbols that pervade Norris’s McTeague. The plots of Naturalism tend to depict the downward spiral of impending tragedy, and there is normally very little suspense about the final outcome of events. No one emerges triumphant in a Naturalistic novel, since simple survival constitutes a moral victory. The style of Naturalism lacks the grace of Realism, and artistic subtlety and the skillful turn of phrase give way to narrative exposition and the rational explanation of the implications of depicted events.
    John Steinbeck was not a dedicated student of American Naturalism, and his fiction does not exhibit an uncompromised utilization of these tendencies, yet in theme and method his work has greater affinity to Naturalism than to any other tradition in American literature. As his letters indicate, he was familiar with the work of Sherwood Anderson, whose Winesburg, Ohio is perhaps the greatest influence on The Pastures of Heaven. As a college student and aspiring writer in the 1920s, Steinbeck was aware of the growing popularity of such Naturalistic writers as Erskine Caldwell, James T. Farrell, and Edith Summers Kelly, as well as the older generation of Naturalists, Crane, Dreiser, Norris, and London.
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    The Pastures of Heaven is certainly a compendium of Naturalistic tendencies, dominated by an omniscient narrator who establishes characters through expository comment rather than dramatic revelation. There are no deep mysteries within Steinbeck’s characters that are beyond the reach of the narrative intelligence, no background influences that the narrator cannot explain, no events to come that are impossible to predict. Omniscience is a powerful tool in the telling of the story, but it obscures the subtleties of the human personality, subordinates organic development, and tends toward the depiction of static characters who emerge, predictably, as the victims of circumstances beyond their control.
    In the stories in Pastures, Steinbeck reveals as well the Naturalistic tendency for grotesque characters: Alice Wicks and Manfred Munroe suffer from retardation, Myrtle and John Battle from epilepsy