peal to the audience reading his books two generations after his death, for he so clearly means to exclude the possibility that women matter as much as men. His books are not simply books about the lives of men, books that choose to focus on men rather than women. If they were, they would be easier for a female readership, who might see his works as something like ethnographies in that case. Instead, his books are often actively misogynistic. He does not simply disregard women, but rather he consistently denigrates them.
This female existence-by-relationship to men is a marked characteristic of the female characters of Steinbeck, whose literary world at least was a world of male relationships, male friendships, different kinds of males dependencies. As Beatty (in Hayashi, 1979) notes, within the pages of SteinbeckÆs books and stories ôthere are very few [women] who are not married and who are not professional whoresö (p. 1). She goes on to elaborate this idea.
It would seem, therefore, that rather than viewing the woman as an autonomous individual, Steinbeck prefers to concern himself with women in their relationships, be they personal or professional, to men. Women, especially single women, seem to be compelled to act in certain ways simply because of the male presence and male expectations (Beatty, in Hayashi, 1979, p. 1).
It is as if for Steinbeck, the female character is given shape by male ones in the same way that iron filings are given a form by a magnet waved near them. As soon as the magnet is taken away, the female character and the reader is left with only a small pile of inert particles without the presence of the male animating force.
This paper examines the misogyny present in SteinbeckÆs work, looking at how women come to be defined exclusively in terms of their relationships to and dependence upon men. Steinbeck falls into the trap common not only in literature and other artistic forms but nearly universa...