The Pearl Read Free

Cortez
narrative, the boy finding the pearl was intent on using it for money to buy drink, sex, and clothes. The tragedy in this version of the tale was that the pearl dealers in La Paz (the ironically named Village of Peace) would not give him a reasonable price for the pearl, and after realizing that he was the victim of their collusion, he buried the jewel. Owning such valuable property, he became the target for attack, and that night he was beaten. The next night, when he stayed with a friend, both boys were beaten; later, when he traveled away from the village, he was again tracked and beaten. So he returned to La Paz, dug up the pearl, cursed it, and threw it into the sea. In Steinbeck’s words, “He was a free man again with his soul in danger and his food and shelter insecure. And he laughed a great deal about it.” While a reader might question what was comic about an endangered soul and insecure living, one of Steinbeck’s points was that, as a single man, his protagonist could take chances with life. His existence was not threatened by his giving up the fortune.
    What was important about the legend as Steinbeck recalled it is that the boy had the sense to get rid of the object that was going to cost him his life. The original pearl story, then, is a parable of materialism, an example of the dangers of prosperity in a culture that thinks nothing of killing for money. But the pearl story as Steinbeck wrote it several years later is different, and it shows how complex his own state of mind was at this time of conjunction of war experience, Hollywood film experience, material success from
The Grapes of Wrath
and other ventures, with all the good things tempered radically by the deaths he had observed in the theater of war, as well as by the death of his marriage. The year 1944 was a time of personal change for John Steinbeck, and he was apprehensive about that change.
    His personal situation influenced his creation of
The Pearl
. When Steinbeck wrote his version of the story, he made the young man into the older Kino, a responsible married man with a wife and child to provide for. Kino is probably named for Eusebius Kino, the Jesuit missionary and explorer in the Gulf region (it was he who proved that lower California was a peninsula—a
baja
—rather than an island). In
Sea of Cortez
, Steinbeck had shown his knowledge of many of the explorers and missionaries, both Mexican and American, involved with the settlement of the Baja. That journal too has a spiritual overlay, as Steinbeck used it to explore several sets of principles for leading a good life.
    Juana, the name he chose for Kino’s wife, means “woman,” and as such she becomes the answerer, the solace for her husband’s disappointed idealism. As in his earlier fiction, particularly in the characters of Ma and Pa Joad in
The Grapes of Wrath
, Steinbeck drew male and female as complementary characters, with the woman having wisdom, common sense, and authority to balance the man’s more wistful and sometimes unrealistic hopes. With tempered sympathy, Steinbeck acknowledges that Kino is obsessed with hanging on to the pearl, and that in equating it with his pride, he fails to see that his more useful role toward his family would be protecting them. When he confesses that the pearl has become his soul. Kino admits that he will endanger his family rather than relinquish his prize, and his abuse of Juana when she tries to get rid of the pearl illustrates his growing fanaticism. In that unexpected violence, Steinbeck shows how far from any Jungian individuation Kino’s wealth has taken him—he is a monster of a male ego, not a caring and supportive husband. But behind Kino’s obviously rash behavior stands the tranquil wife, who watches over him while he sleeps and starts the fire each morning. Though all-knowing and all-caring, Juana in her role as submissive wife does not have enough power to make Kino listen to her warnings.
    Juana is also the mother