Social class control and domination in America: A critical revisitation of the Great Depression as lived by Americans, through the novel The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck

Abstract

One of the crucial events that have marked the world in general and the United States of America in particular in the early twentieth century, has been the Great depression ; it was a great economic crisis faced by the America, the already most powerful nation of the world. And if America was a victim, it clearly no doubt that the Great Depression was an international concern. In America, even though all social classes of people have suffered this economic crisis, the main victims have been the lower class, the one composed of employees and farm workers who have been exploited and despised by those wealthy people, bankers and employers, with government being passive. This has turned many into permanent migrants in search of better living. Such a situation could not go without drawing the attention of many writers, and the novel, The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck is set in that context. Steinbeck has then sought to expose and condemn both the American’s upper social class disastrous policy and attitudes toward the working class, and the American government’s siding with the rich to worsen the great majority of people bad condition. In the novel, Steinbeck’s protagonists have first been deprived from the land they were born to live on, and have been obliged to migrate just to face an increasingly worse situation that will turn them from peaceful peasants into defensive murderers.