Doubting Thomas Joad

Abstract

John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) tapped a long tradition of biblical symbolism or biblical typology in American literature. As early as 1651 in his history of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford implicitly compared himself with Moses viewing the Promised Land from the crest of Mount Pisgah. Nathaniel Hawthorne reimagined the Fall in Puritan New England in The Scarlet Letter (1850), casting Hester Prynne in the role of Eve, Arthur Dimmesdale as Adam, and Roger Chillingworth as Satan. Both James Fenimore Cooper in The Prairie (1827) and Herman Melville in Moby-Dick depicted wanderers named Ishmael. Abraham Lincoln described Americans in a February 1861 speech as an “almost chosen people.” Stephen Crane portrayed a Christ-figure named Jim Conklin (J.C.) in The Red Badge of Courage (1895). And so on.Similarly, as Peter Lisca observes, Steinbeck stages in his novel the captivity of the oppressed in Egypt, their exodus, and arrival in Canaan/California, in this case an ironic land of milk and honey.1 Or as H. Kelly Crockett concludes, California “becomes the wilderness through which the Okies must wander indefinitely, the land of promise still a mirage.”2 Steinbeck's cast of characters features a family of twelve, among them two Toms, a Rose of Sharon, a Noah, a Ruth, and a John, who represent both the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles of Christ. More to the point, Rose of Sharon's husband Connie Rivers corresponds in this scheme to the biblical traitor Judas, who eventually deserts the Joads to return to Oklahoma to become a tractor driver earning three dollars—or thirty silver dimes—per day to remove the drought victims from their land. In the last scene, Rose of Sharon offers her breast to the starving man in the barn (or stable); that is, she is characterized as both a latter-day Madonna nursing the Christ Child and Mary (the “mystical rose”) cradling the body of the crucified Christ as in Michelangelo's Pietà. Most obvious of all: the “preacher” Jim Casy, who not only boasts the name of James, the brother of Christ, but the initials J.C., which identify him directly as a Christ-figure. (As if to reinforce the point, the actor John Carradine, another J.C., was typecast as Casy in John Ford's 1940 movie adaptation.) Or as Martin S. Shockley long ago stated, “Jim Casy unmistakably and significantly is equated with Jesus Christ.”3To this series of allegorical identities I wish to add one more: Tom Joad as Christ's disciple Doubting Thomas. To be sure, Shockley first observed what is now a critical commonplace—“Tom becomes Casy's disciple”4—but no one has ever associated him specifically with Doubting Thomas. Certainly Tom undergoes a conversion in the course of the novel from indifference (“I'm still laying my dogs down one at a time”) to faith and conviction just before he leaves the family. He testifies to his new belief in his final conversation with Ma: “I'll be all aroun’ in the dark. I'll be ever'where—wherever you look. Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever they's a cop beatin’ up a guy, I'll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an’ they know supper's ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why I'll be there. See? God, I'm talkin’ like Casy.”Shockley ends his quotation from the speech here—but in the novel Tom delivers two more sentences: “Comes of thinkin’ about him so much. Seems like I can see him sometimes.”5The last statement in particular is critical. According to the gospel of John 20:25–29, Thomas was initially skeptical when the other disciples report that Christ had risen from the tomb and appeared to them. Or as Thomas insists, “Except I shall see” Him “I will not believe.” Eight days later, Christ visits the doubting apostle, who testifies to his newfound faith by declaring, “My Lord and my God.” In the King James translation of the Bible, Christ then says to the previously Doubting Thomas, “because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed”—just as Tom Joad is convinced at last of Casy's omnipresence.