Academic Article: "Turning wine into water: Water as privileged signifier in The Grapes of Wrath."

The author does a good job of explaining how the myths of the frontier and the "Garden of Eden" were bestowed upon the nation well into the dust bowl era. The idealology that lead to this point in history from the American standpoint and how Steinbeck mocks these ideas in relating to water in "The Grapes of Wrath" are well explained throughout the article.

The author explains how these myths caused the inevitable and unavoidable failure that the "Okies" would have to endure due to the lack of rainfall in a region that was asked to supply grain to an entire country. Whenever the Joads are driven from their lands by the capitalist banks, the Joads engaged in picking cotton. The Joads were contributing to the capitalist-based system that lead to the death of their lands, but the banks had the means to better thrive.

"Mining the land of nutrients and leaving it for dead demonstrates a new, production-oriented allegiance to the frontier myth. Treating the nation's breadbasket as an expendable resource necessarily assumes an infinte resource reservoir from which to replace it" (Cassuto, 78). Assuming that the west has an infinite supply of natural resources allows the plains to be expendable. The fact that the western region of the country was arid and could not support agriculture in the way the plains could (if the nutrients in the soil were rotated properly) was not accounted for by the government during these times.

".. the underlying motivation for both the Okies' behavior and that of the agribusiness concerns can ultimately be analyzed in hydrological terms" (Cassuto, 80) I found it interesting that the author tied the Dust Bowl to being caused by the Great Depression and poor agriculture management. These ideas show why what was a common drought caused the Joads and other farmers of the region to be succumbed by the new mechanized version of farming. The Joads then continue west chasing the frontier myth, and vast uninhabited lands eventually push them into California chasing work. The flooding Steinbeck uses at the climax of the story illustrates a very ironic focus on water at the end of the novel. The Joads, now disconnected with the land and their need for water, see the flood as a disaster.

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/EL267/2009/03/academic_article/#comments