Rose of Sharon breastfeeds a starving man

Rose of Sharon breastfeeds a starving man is the culminating event of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, an act that transforms the novel's accumulated grief into a startling, wordless gesture of human solidarity. After the Joad family has lost their land, their elders, their home, and finally the newborn baby, Rose of Sharon—a young woman who has been self-absorbed, fearful, and abandoned by her husband—offers her body's milk to a stranger dying of starvation in a flooded barn. The scene resolves the novel's long arc of dispossession not with political victory or material rescue, but with a physical, intimate gift that crosses every boundary of family, propriety, and despair. It is the book's most controversial and most argued-over moment, and it is the one toward which Steinbeck said the whole story moved: a symbolic act that refuses to let the story end in nothingness.

Causes and Background

The scene is the product of a chain of losses that has stripped the Joad family to its irreducible core. By the time the family reaches the barn, Rose of Sharon has endured the desert crossing while lying beside her dead grandmother, the desertion of her husband Connie Rivers, and the stillbirth of her baby in a flooded boxcar. The flood itself, which drives the family from the boxcar camp, is the last in a series of natural and economic catastrophes that began with the Dust Bowl and the tractor eviction. The family has no food, no money, and no destination; they are walking through rain toward a barn they do not own, carrying a girl who has just delivered a dead child. The starving man and his son have been in the barn longer, the man sick and then too weak to eat even the bread his boy stole for him. The boy tells Ma Joad, "He's dyin', I tell you! He's starvin' to death, I tell you." The situation is one of absolute extremity: no institution, no money, no medicine, no hope of rescue.

What Happens

Ma Joad, after examining the starving man, meets Rose of Sharon's eyes, and the two women understand each other without words. Rose of Sharon whispers, "Yes." Ma smiles and says, "I knowed you would. I knowed!" She then orders everyone out of the barn—Pa, Uncle John, Ruthie, Winfield, and the starving boy—and closes the door. Alone, Rose of Sharon hoists her tired body, draws the comfort about her, and moves to the corner where the man lies. He shakes his head slowly from side to side, but she loosens one side of the blanket, bares her breast, and says, "You got to." She squirms closer, pulls his head to her breast, and supports his head with her hand, her fingers moving gently in his hair. The novel ends with her looking up and across the barn, her lips coming together in a mysterious smile. The act is performed without dialogue from the man, without sentimentality from the narrator, and without any assurance that it will save his life. It is a gesture of pure, physical giving.

Consequences and Aftermath

The scene has no aftermath within the novel; the book ends on the act itself. But its consequences are structural and thematic. The stillbirth of Rose of Sharon's baby—a child that never breathed—is directly juxtaposed with this nursing, so that the milk meant for her own infant is given to a stranger. The act completes the transformation of the Joad family from a self-contained unit into a part of a larger human whole, a movement that Jim Casy preached and Tom Joad later articulated when he said, "I'll be ever'where—wherever you look." Steinbeck insisted to his publisher that the ending could not be changed: "The giving of the breast has no more sentiment than the giving of a piece of bread." He had planned the final scene from the beginning, writing in his journal that he "fixed on the last scene, huge and symbolic, toward which the whole story moves." The scene has been attacked as sentimental and defended as the novel's most radical statement; it refuses to fade from view, and it insists that before the apocalypse, all gestures must pass from self to world, from communication to communion.