Prophets in Babylon: Four California novelists in the 1930s

Margaret Catherine Jones, Purdue University

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the role played by prophet-figures, as moral teachers, visionaries, or sacrificial messiahs, in the work of four California novelists of the 1930s. In novels by John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, Nathanael West and Arnold B. Armstrong, the setting of Depression-era California becomes the scene of or occasion for the vision of a prophet-figure. Each of these visions tends to subvert the "California Dream" of unlimited prosperity and abundance for the individual. William Propter (After Many A Summer Dies the Swan), Tod Hackett (The Day of the Locust), Jim Casy (The Grapes of Wrath), and Dave Washburn (Parched Earth), all reflect critically upon and ultimately condemn an ideology which justifies predatory greed, whose figurative and literal correlatives are deprivation, sterility, violence and death, whether in the rural/agricultural setting or in the Hollywood dream palace. Portrayals of character and setting in the four novels employ parody as a device to denounce the existing order, and to offer visions of utopia, or of impending catastrophe. The prophet-figures, three of whom present utopian alternatives to existing social ideology and socioeconomic conditions, derive credibility and authority for their messages from the parodying of revered originals: religious teachers, labor leaders, Old Testament prophets, or the figure of Christ. The California rural/agricultural settings are depicted as parodic versions of Eden or of Canaan, the urban settings as parodies of the New Jerusalem. Only the rural settings are presented as susceptible to the transforming power of the prophet-figures' utopias.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Neufeldt, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American literature

COinS