Female Characters in Steinbeck's Fiction

This essay will offer a very short biographical sketch of Steinbeck, bringing out the themes that seemed to concern him the most. It will then examine three women characters from his other works, including Ma Joad and Rose from The Grapes of Wrath, (1939), and Ruth Tiflin, Jody's mother in "Leader of the People," (1945). These women characters have been selected because they help us to set the character of Elisa Allen into a context which emphasizes both her similarities to other Steinbeck women characters and those traits which make her distinctive as a �Steinbeck woman.' It will be argued that Elisa Allen's appearance, actions, and speech depict some typical frustrations of a woman during Steinbeck's time, but that she is unique in her attempts to liberate herself from Steinbeck's typically masculine world (Renner 306). As such, Elisa Allen is Steinbeck's attempt to explore the authentic woman and her world, with all of its frustrations and yearnings for a freer existence.

Steinbeck spent the Great Depression in a house given to him by his father in Pacific Grove, California, where he survived by living on the land. From this vantage point, he composed his first successful novel, Tortilla Flats (1935), a warmly humorous, episodic treatment of the lives of the Mexican-Indian-Caucasian mix people the paisanos who lived in the Salinas Valley and whose earthy, uninhibited lives provided a colorful contrast to the valley's more "respectable" society (Timmerman 84). Thus be

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d there is little for her to do, so she is at work in her garden. And also like the "black earth," Elisa is "shining like metal," at work in her "closed pot" of a world. Our first introduction to Elisa is in the garden: She was thirty-five. Her face was lean and strong and her eyes were as clear as water. Her figure looked blocked and heavy in her gardening costume, a man's black hat pulled low down over her eyes, clodhopper shoes, a figured print dress almost completely covered by a big corduroy apron with four big pockets" ("Chrysanthemums"). Here, Elisa's femininity is hidden behind her work clothes, her figure "blocked and heavy," and her female attributes subsumed under the gardening costume. What makes this description noteworthy is its focus on the characteristics that have enabled Elisa to survive. She wears a "man's black hat," and her dress is "almost completely covered." The covered dress symbolizes the fact that Elisa's strength, almost masculine at the opening of the story, will transform. The strength combined with her love of her creation, her flowers the "masculine" and the "feminine"--could be the very thing to push her to try for "more" than a woman can dare to hope for. Elisa is frustrated as a woman, and

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