Rose of Sharon's final act

Rose of Sharon's final act, in which she breastfeeds a starving stranger in a flooded barn, is the novel's culminating and most controversial image—a gesture of radical, selfless communion that transcends family boundaries and embodies the novel's central theme of collective survival through shared sacrifice.

Context and Setting

After the stillbirth of her own baby, Rose of Sharon is physically and emotionally depleted. The family, driven from the boxcar camp by rising floodwaters, takes refuge in a rain-blackened barn on a slight rolling hill. Inside, they discover a man about fifty, his whiskery face gaunt, lying on his back, and a boy sitting beside him. The boy explains, "Fust he was sick—but now he's starvin'. He ain't et for six days." The man is too weak to move; when the boy stole bread and made him chew it, he vomited it up and grew weaker. The boy pleads for soup or milk, but the Joads have no money left.

The Decision

Ma Joad, who has just lost her grandchild, looks at Rose of Sharon huddled in a dirty comfort, then at the dying man. Her eyes pass Rose of Sharon's eyes and then come back to them. The two women look deep into each other. The girl's breath comes short and gasping. She says, "Yes." Ma smiles and says, "I knowed you would. I knowed!" She then orders everyone out of the barn, drawing the boy with her, and closes the squeaking door.

The Act

Alone, Rose of Sharon hoists her tired body up and moves slowly to the corner. She stands looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lies down beside him. He shakes his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosens one side of the blanket and bares her breast. "You got to," she says. She squirms closer and pulls his head close. "There!" she says. "There." Her hand moves behind his head and supports it. Her fingers move gently in his hair. She looks up and across the barn, and her lips come together and smile mysteriously.

Thematic Significance

This final tableau—subversively erotic, mysteriously prophetic, tantalizingly indeterminate—refuses to fade from view. Steinbeck insisted to his editor that the ending could not be changed: "The giving of the breast has no more sentiment than the giving of a piece of bread." The act transforms Rose of Sharon from a self-absorbed, abandoned young wife into a figure of almost mythic compassion. It completes the novel's movement from "I" to "we," from the isolated family to the larger human community. The gesture is gratuitous, offered to a stranger, and it is quick—as Steinbeck instructed, "It must be an accident, it must be a stranger, and it must be quick." In the souls of the people, the grapes of wrath have been harvested, and what remains is the possibility of grace.