Ma: An Epitome of the Mother Earth

Woman, wife, mother, mothering and motherhood are synonymous; and sex-role stereotyping separates the social expectations of women from those of men. For women, the expressive traits (nurturing, obedience, affection, and sympathy) are hailed and rewarded as expected and normal behaviour; men are expected to be tenacious, aggressive, responsible and ambitious. Women who move outside of their designated boundaries in search of authority over their own lives are stigmatized as unfeminine, bad wives and mothers, and social deviants. Men, male vision, and the relationships of men to each other and to the rest of the world whereas women, without whom the men would have no world, have no independent identity of their own dominate the works of John Steinbeck. In this paper, the centrality of women in the works of Steinbeck specially to the action of The Grapes of Wrath has been traced.