The Grapes Of Wrath: A Comparative Analysis

In the novels Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (1989) and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939), both authors explore the enduring strength of the human spirit, complex family dynamics, and the power of hope to create change in one’s world. The message of both texts is that people are both big and small; they can enact powerful change in the world around them, but even the most righteous change enacted by one person alone cannot affect great numbers.

Esquivel’s Tita, bound to her home by family tradition as she falls in love, and Steinbeck’s Tom, forced from his home by the Oklahoma Dust Bowl Crisis, both live in what are possibly the most trying times in their lives, but they both endure against frightful odds. Tita is trapped

in her family home for years, not being able to tell anyone of her hidden love, however she finds outlets for her grief; caring for her lover’s child, cooking meals with her emotions, and crying privately. However, her strength crumbles away when her lover leaves town with his wife; although he still loves her, it breaks her heart to be apart from him. So Tita becomes heartbroken - however she still continues caring for her mother and completing her duties at the family ranch. When Tita did allow herself to cry, it was empty and tearless: “…she cried without tears, which is said to hurt even more like dry labor.” (Page 160). In carrying on, however, Tita learns to become numb to her own pain, and shows her ability to move on and continue to have hope.
In the Joad family, there is a faith in all people to survive and rely on one another. This concept of the symbiotic survival of the human life force is shown in Ma Joad's comment, "We're the people — we go on.” (Page 359). In the tireless migration from dusty Oklahoma to lush California, many families perish or give up - but every person relies on each other. They are all searching for a better life than the one they left behind, and they all experience the same tragedies. These people find the ability within themselves to keep on moving forward, day after day, and not allow their spirits to be broken.

The familial communities that Tita and Tom live in are completely different; Tita’s mother and sister are harsh and unfeeling towards her, and often cause her emotional pain; Tom’s large family is loving and open to all, and his mother is often what gives everyone hope to continue to California.

In Like Water for Chocolate, it is mostly female figures that dominate Tita’s family life: her cold and sometimes violent Mama Elena, her jealous sister Rosaura, and Nacha the family cook, who raised Tita and is essentially her mother figure. Within her own family, Tita feels out of place and alone, and feels most comfortable with the one member of the household not related to her. This speaks volumes about how her mother and sister treat her - while Tita strives for freedom to love, freedom to be an individual, and freedom from the family ranch, her mother and sister are the direct opposition to her fulfilment of these goals. Mama Elena still grieves her dead husband, and thus denies Tita any chance to love when she herself cannot. Tita is also forced to care for Mama Elena, and is therefore unable to leave the ranch or form experiences of her own. Tita’s sister Rosaura marries Tita’s lover and attempts to take him away from her for good - in the process breaking Tita’s heart. However, by the end of the novel Tita’s mother and sister are dead, and Tita has the freedom to do all the things she wanted. From this, Tita emerges stronger, because her family’s treatment made her strong enough to be able to change her own

destiny.
Love will most often be expressed by the mother figures in The Grapes of Wrath: Ma, Sairy Wilson, and Rose of Sharon. Ma, the titular mother figure, loves all as though they were her children. She is the first to extend food and shelter to strangers, and she is willing to welcome Casy the ex-priest (and social pariah) into her family, and is willing to feed the hungry children at the Hooverville camp, even though they are unclean and branded by the others as undesirable. Sairy Wilson's compassion during Granpa's death, despite being sick herself, is another example of basic human love extending outside the family, and then becoming that of family - the love that accepts all humans in need as family. Ma expresses this when she observes, "They was the time when we was on the lan'. They was a boundary to us then. …We was the fambly — kinda whole and clear. An' now we ain't clear no more.” Rose of Sharon is slow to embrace this ideology, focusing instead on her own comfort and well-being for the majority of the novel. In the end, however, she, too, becomes part of this embracing of all humankind when she offers her milk to the starving stranger after she suffers a miscarriage. This change in Rose of Sharon occurred because she saw the hope that she could give to other people, and how one small action could change a less fortunate person’s life.

Tita wanted to change her family tradition so that no daughter would have to suffer as she did, and Tom wanted to change the power that the banks had over farmworkers - both protagonists wanted to change the inequality they saw in their own microcosmic world. Tita saw and recognised what was problematic in her world, but could do little to change it so long as her mother was alive. However, generations later, Tita’s great-niece finds Tita’s cookbook in the ruins of the old ranch, and thanks her for the abolishment of the family tradition binding the youngest daughter to caring for her mother. The reason Tita was able to eventually abolish it, after her mother’s death, was because she never let the hope inside her die. As one of the characters says on Page 104: “Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves…A pleasant warmth grows within us, fading slowly as time goes by, until a new explosion comes along to revive it. Each person has to discover what will set off those explosions in order to live…” As Tita finds singular moments of beauty and love in her largely unhappy life, this keeps her inner flame of hope ignited until the day she is ultimately reunited with her lover.
Tom observed that losing the farm "took somepin' outa Pa," and one displaced tenant stated, "I am the land, the land is me.” (Page 216). Since the men - the Joad men and all the displaced men - were all a part of the land, when that land was taken away the men lost a part of themselves. They lost their livelihood, the thing they had grown up on, but also the pride of being able to provide for their family. Tom’s strongly individual nature, and his years away from the farm, gives him the strength to fight for the social welfare of all people. The other men had spend their entire lives in the same agricultural town and were somewhat lost and weak without it. Throughout the novel, Tom becomes increasingly aware of the injustices around him and tries, in little ways, to obstruct and prevent them. In Chapter 20, Tom prevents and innocent man from being arrested even though his actions put himself in danger. After his friend’s death Tom plans to spread the concept of everybody being a small piece of a bigger family. Tom finds a fellowship with humanity: a deep identification with others and the human situation in general. Tom leaves the novel on page 463 by telling his mother to take each day as it comes. Ma goes back to camp with Tom's wisdom and tells the rest of the family that all they can do is "jus' live the day." In this way, Tom has changed his family’s view on life and living.

In conclusion, while Esquivel’s De La Garza family and Steinbeck’s Joad family are very different in tradition and dynamic, both provide insight into how the human mind works under intense and strenuous situations; as well as the protagonists’ ability to overcome hardships and tragedy within the families because they have hope for a better life. Further, the change each protagonist has been able to create within their own small community may not be important to huge numbers, but the few it does affect, it affects deeply.