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Finding Happiness Through Working With Nature
The 10's were a period of reflection for many Americans; an era of depression that forced many people to step back and re-evaluate the society in which they lived. After decades of moving away from agrarian America to a more urban, mechanized nation, widespread economic collapse served as the impetus to question this new way of life. What were the consequences of leaving behind agricultural life? How did the technological advances in the workplace distance man from his land and subsequently affect his performance and fulfillment in life? In both Willa Cather's Neighbor Rosicky and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath we find depression era characters struggling with nature, work, and the relation between the two. Both tales present a compelling case that the further man strays from the natural world, the worse his life becomes.
Neighbor Rosicky is a heartwarming story about a Czech immigrant, raised in the country, unable to find happiness in the city. Anton Rosicky had the typical life of an urban resident at the turn of the century. He was an immigrant who was a skilled tailor by trade and who moved from city to city to find work. Despite taking regular advantage of cultural opportunities only cities can offer, Rosicky learned one Fourth of July that the city just wasn't for him, "the lower part of New York was empty… the emptiness was intense… those blank buildings, without the stream of life pouring through them, were like empty jails."
New York's business and financial district, referenced by, "the lower part of Manhattan," only seemed to exist for work; when a holiday such as the Fourth of July came along it ceased to function. Rosicky goes on when he says, "this was the trouble with big cities; they built you in from the earth itself, cemented you away from any contact with the ground. You lived in an unnatural world, like the fish in an aquarium, who were probably much more comfortable than they ever were in the sea."
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This is the paradox of progress that Cather has us ponder. Cities, byproducts of work and economic progress, ultimately have taken us away from our natural world. Cement, steel and iron have replaced soil, seeds and foliage in a new, unnatural ecosystem. In Neighbor Rosicky, the relationship between work and "real work" comes down to the contrast between cities and the agrarian/natural life. Cather makes this case throughout the short story with frequent references to the urban/rural relationship. In each case that she makes, happiness is not found in a city, but in the country.
For example, Cather writes, "in the country, if you had a mean neighbor, you could keep off his land and make him keep off yours. But in the city, all the foulness and misery and brutality of your neighbors was part of your life. The worst things he had come upon in his journey through the world were human, depraved and poisonous specimen of man." This scathing indictment of urban life also highlights another of Cather's points; the concept of owning land. Earlier in the tale she wrote, "to be a landless man was to be a wage-earner, a slave, all your life; to have nothing, to be nothing."
Wage-earners, the type of urban workers that are ultimately taken from nature, are pitied by Cather. She casts those who work in the city as being part of a destructive cycle and that the only way to break the cycle is to find true happiness in the country. The Rosickys, Doctor Ed, and all the country folk within the story are, deep down, good, content individuals. The only person in the story who seemed out of place was Rosicky's daughter-in-law, Polly. Raised in the city and a former bookkeeper, Polly was having trouble adjusting to life in the country. It took the goodness of her father-in-law to realize her life would be ultimately more fulfilled there; "Polly remembered that hour long afterwards; it had been like an awakening to her. It seemed to her that she had never learned so much about life from anything as from old Rosicky's hand. It brought her to herself."
To Cather, true work takes place in the natural world. She is worried that the advent of technology and increasing urbanization of America will fundamentally change its character. The new mechanized work is unnatural and ultimately bad for the human psyche. Cather's case is summed up when she writes, "the worst they could do on the farm was better than the best they would likely be able to do in the city."
The selections from Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath offer an equally persuasive argument that economic and social progress was really moving humanity backward. The three chapters, with the Dust Bowl and the subsequent 'Okie' migration serving as a backdrop, paint a bleak yet hopeful picture of humanity. Just like Neighbor Rosicky, goodness, and ultimately happiness, is found in people closer to nature and forms of natural, agricultural work. All that is wrong with man is found in those that have become wealthy off the new sort of work that, in Steinbeck's view, has brought them financial gain at the expense of others. The 'shitheels,' further removed from the land than others, are further removed from happiness and fulfillment as well.
This is illustrated in this passage from chapter 15, "and these two, going to California; going to sit in the lobby of the Beverly-Wilshire hotel and watch people they envy go by… he with his worried eyes and she thinking how the sun will dry her skin… but the worried eyes are never calm, and the pouting mouth is never glad." Steinbeck casts their worries against the troubles of the migrating poor, and in doing so, shows that financial success as a result of unnatural work leaves one unhappy and pathetic.
The entire story takes place on Route 66, the endless highway that was at times full of despair and misery, but overall a hopeful road that would offer a pot of gold at the end of its rainbow. Route 66 seems unnatural, with its ribbons of concrete and cement carrying motorized vehicles across the plains. In many ways it was, as represented by those who were doing unnatural work, like a tire salesman. Taking people further away from nature seemed to harden them and destroy any sense of goodwill. This is seen in Chapter 1 when Steinbeck writes, "take it or leave it. I ain't in business for my health. I'm here-a-sellin'tires. I ain't givin' 'em away. I can't help what happens to you, I got to think what happens to me."
In this passage, Steinbeck critiques the way the new economy has changed the way people interacted with each other. A more compassionate, altruistic, agrarian society was quickly transforming into a capitalist system that put the individual first at whatever cost to society. Work and labor was the foundation of society, but it was being changed in a way that increasingly made it unnatural. In turn, individuals adapted in a way that often meant being cruel to others to save oneself.
A society turning heartless as a result of the changing economic conditions is contrasted multiple times in The Grapes of Wrath by examples of people close to the land, nature, and what it is to be good. One such example comes near the end of Chapter 15, when a poor migrant family comes into a roadside diner and asks for food. A rural image of a family taken away from nature is painted, "the boys in overalls and nothing else, ragged patched overalls. Their hair was light, and it stood up evenly all over their heads, for it had been roached. Their faces were streaked with dust. They went directly to the mud puddle under the hose and dug their toes into the mud." This impoverished family arrived at the diner and were eventually taken care of by the generosity of strangers. The sympathetic waitress, after basically giving away candy to the children, watched them go back into their car. "They leaped like chipmunks over the front seat and onto the top of the load, and they burrowed back out of sight like chipmunks." Steinbeck's comparison of the boys to chipmunks is telling us, in a direct way, that these were good people, close to nature, drastically affected by unnatural causes.
Both Cather and Steinbeck yearn for the days of old, when a day's work revolved around working the land on one's farm. The authors don't see progress as moving forward, but moving to a place where we will all unknowingly lose something, like the "fish in an aquarium." Both tales show the transformation of work in America not only affected people's pocketbooks, but also the way we treated one another. Neighbor Rosicky and The Grapes of Wrath do an admirable job of making the case that true happiness is to be found in nature, working in an agricultural setting. Whether it was Anton Rosicky or farmers forced to move from their land in Oklahoma, all dreamed of one day owning and working their own land.
In both narratives, the relationship between nature and work complements each other. True work is to be found in nature, and when both are present, one can be truly satisfied. Rosicky is a sterling example of a man who, through working with nature, got it right, "nothing could be more right for a man who had helped to do the work of great cities and had always longed for the open country and had got to it at last. Rosicky's life seemed to him complete and beautiful."
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