Voluntary Exploitation and Forced Assimilation: John Steinbeck's Critique of American Advertising in The Grapes of Wrath

Abstract

History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.Malcolm MuggeridgeAt its most utilitarian level, advertising has as its purpose to facilitate the promotion and sale of particular commodities. However, as Judith Williamson argues, [Advertising] has another function, which I believe in many ways replaces that traditionally fulfilled by art or religion. It creates structures of meaning (Williamson 11). Those structures of meaning, as the above quote from Malcom Muggeridge suggests, may be perceived as having nefarious motivations; specifically advertising's aim is to keep us constantly wanting more. This suggests that in addition to being a cultural institution in the United States, advertising is a powerful force that we as consumers willingly enable in its efforts to exploit us. Advertising encourages us to constantly desire and, in order to fulfill those desires, to constantly acquire more and more commodities. As a result of this perpetual desiring and the resultant quest for satisfaction, those within a capitalist economic system find themselves enslaved by the system. Consumers work in order to purchase commodities that they believe will satisfy their desires. However, they soon discover that material goods do not deliver on their promises, and the desire for a new commodity appears. As there is no other option available to a consumer within a capitalist structure but to assimilate to this exploitative system, assimilation to the never-ending cycle is inevitable.It is this theme of voluntary exploitation and forced assimilation that is at play in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the canonical American novel of Dust Bowl-era migrants looking for work and a better life. What they find, however, is that they are victims of the system, both as consumers and as commodities. The Joads are uneducated and unfamiliar with the oftentimes exploitive techniques incorporated into early twentieth-century advertising, and they fall prey to advertisements that exploit their human desires. Because of their ignorance of the darker motivations behind advertising, the Joads willingly allow themselves to be exploited by capitalism and the system's lieutenants that use them up and then cast them aside as disposable commodities.In his discussion of The Grapes of Wrath, Morris Dickstein writes,The plight and migration of the Joads [...], the Dust Bowl, the loss of a family home, the trek in search of work, the awful conditions for migrant farm labor, the struggle to keep the family together, became a metaphor for the Depression as a whole. This portrayal aroused sympathy and indignation that transcended literature and became part of our social history, as if Steinbeck had been reporting on a real family, which in a sense he was.(Dickstein 112)It was the moral outrage from the general American public that the novel elicited that, according to Dickstein and countless other Steinbeck scholars, earned the author the mantle of anticapitalist protest writer. And nowhere in his collected writings is his criticism of the capitalist system more apparent than in The Grapes of Wrath. As Dickstein suggests, Steinbeck's ability to verbally transport his reader to the time and place in the novel does tempt readers into accepting that the writer's pathos-laden tale of the Joad family is a story about the human cost of the environmental and economic catastrophe wrought by the Dust Bowl. That suffering and misery was intensified by the commercial culture that permeated the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, a culture that itself was fueled by advertising. And it is that culture that was the target of much of Steinbeck's social criticism in the novel.Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, Steinbeck was the third of four children born to middleclass parents. His mother was a former school teacher and his father worked as a manager in a flour mill at the time of John's birth. …