Boundaries, Fences, Barbed Wire

Still working on Steinbeck's use of barbed wire in The Grapes of Wrath, re-reading it, awestruck by the easy humor and good-heartedness and bitter anger of the novel.


Besides the passage that initially attracted our interest (the ecstatic whipping with barbed wire under the influence of the Holy Spirit), the wire is also used in more mundane situations, as in this early scene:

They plodded up the little rise on the other side of the water-cut. Now that the sun was on the wane some of its impact was gone, and while the air was hot, the hammering rays were weaker. The strung wire on crooked poles still edged the road. On the right-hand side a line of wire fence strung out across the cotton field, and the dusty green cotton was the same on both sides, dusty and dry and dark green.

            Joad pointed to the boundary fence. “That there’s our line. We didn’t really need no fence there, but we had the wire, an’ Pa kinda liked her there. Said it give him a feelin’ that forty was forty. Wouldn’t of had the fence if Uncle John didn’ come drivin’ in one night with six spools of wire in his wagon. He give ‘em to Pa for a shoat. We never did know where he got that wire.”

Near the end of the novel, Tom has to crawl under a barbed-wire fence to get out of the camp where he and other workers are virtual prisoners. But in the early scene it is just a marker of property farmed by the hard-working Joad family—a marker, by the way, swept away by tractors sent by the bankers who foreclose on the property:

The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects. . . . Snub-nosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses.

The tractors destroy the work of generations and the Joad family and many others move on to California. Descriptions of abandoned houses and their contents reminded me of the book of photos by Eugene Richards, all shot at and in abandoned houses. 

Photo by Eugene Richards, from The Blue Room

Barbed Wire

Starting part two of our literary barbed wire today. Part one (Stretching and Cutting Fence from The Connecticut Yankee to "'Brokeback Mountain'" has been sent off for consideration by Western American Literature. We'll call part two "Barbed-Wire Flagellants, Worshippers, Prisoners, and Celebrants."


Steinbeck is our taking off point for flagellants (it's the former preacher Jim Casy speaking with Tom Joad):


“I says to myself, ‘What’s gnawin’ you? Is it the screwin’?’ And’ I says, ‘No, it’s the sin.’ An’ I says, ‘Why is it that when a fella ought to be just about mule-ass proof against sin, an’ all full up of Jesus, why is it that’s the time a fella gets fingerin’ his pants buttons?’” He laid two fingers down in his palm in rhythm, as though he gently placed each word there side by side. “I says, ‘Maybe it ain’t a sin. Maybe it’s just the way folks is. Maybe we been whippin’ the hell out of ourselves for nothin’.’ An’ I thought how some sisters took to beatin’ theirselves with a three-foot shag of bobwire. An’ I thought how maybe they liked to hurt themselves, an’ maybe I liked to hurt myself.”

Fifth printing of the first edition (1939) -- the battle hymn on both front and end papers:

We'll move on by the middle of the essay to Amy Irvine's Trespass, a memoir about living at the edge of the promised land. At one point in her attempt to live as a wilderness advocate among the ranchers of southern Utah, she discovers a coyote, newly shot and hung on a barbed wire fence. She identifies with the coyote.


We just got a copy of Dave Foreman's book Ecodefense, a handbook for the monkeywrencher. It pictures a similar scene and describes possible ways to cut such fences: