Ma Joad In John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath

In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck portrays the Joad family’s long and burdensome journey to California. The emotional and physical backbone of the family is Ma Joad. Ma’s main responsibility is to take care of the family, provide them with nourishment, warmth, healing, and encouragement. The family will only experience fear and physical suffering when Ma does, so she strives to withhold these emotions in herself. The family looks to Ma for amusement, and she brings great happiness out of little moments. Ma’s serene strength keeps the family together. Ma discovers this powerful strength in love. She is the symbol of Jim Casy’s perception of love, obtaining the same emotional sense of integrity as Tom Joad. A strong-willed and affectionate

woman, Ma develops as the family’s source of strength throughout the novel as Pa Joad slowly loses his position as leader and provider for the family.
Ma presents an excellent ability to keep herself together, along with the family, in the face of great chaos.

She represents the “citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken” (Steinbeck 74). Ma realizes she needs to protect the wholeness of the family and preserve its soul. On the Joad’s journey to California, Ma recognizes that the family is the only important thing: “All we got is the family unbroke” (169). Her efforts to teach Rosasharn in the way to be a strong woman, caretaker of the family, emphasizes Ma’s perspective toward her role within the family structure. Ma’s concern for the family to travel across the desert carefully helps her not to tell the family that Granma has passed away. Casy is astonished at Ma’s great strength: “ All night long an’ she was alone . . . there’s a woman so great with love-she scares me” (229). Towards the end of the novel, Tom has to go into hiding for killing another man. Ma secretly goes to see Tom, and her calm exterior breaks ever so slightly; she urges Tom not to touch her, saying that she can only hold on to her calm as long as he doesn’t reach out to her. Her strength to act decisively, and to act for the family’s sake, allows Ma to lead the Joads when Pa starts to stumble and hesitate. In the last chapter of the novel, Ma goes above her main concern for the Joad family to embrace society. She says, “Use’ ta be the fambly was fust. It ain’t so now. It’s anybody. Worse off we get, the more we got to do”

(445).
During the Joad’s trek from Oklahoma to California, Ma in her desperation to keep the family together, finds her position growing. As catastrophe threatens to rip the family apart, she shifts to a role of effective leadership. With each attack against the unity of the family, she slowly takes over Pa’s role as head of the Joad family. Her position within the family remains fixed in traditional feminine characteristics of nurturing and safety, and her main desire is to keep the family intact.