The Pearl

John Steinbeck

Fiction | Novella | YA | Published in 1947

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Background

Authorial Context: John Steinbeck

Now considered to be one of the most significant American writers of the 20th century, John Steinbeck was born and grew up in California, which would serve as the setting for much of his fiction: The Pearl is set in Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula. Steinbeck’s experience as a laborer and journalist throughout the 1920s led him to feature sympathetic, working-class protagonists in much of his fiction. He is best known today for his 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, which follows the struggles of Oklahoma tenant farmers who travel to California in search of work after losing their farms to bank foreclosures during the Great Depression; the novel won the National Book Award as well as a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. At the same time, Steinbeck also received intense criticism for his then-radical views on labor. Like The Grapes of Wrath, The Pearl examines the personal cost of exploitative economic policies, although within a different historical context.

Steinbeck demonstrated a lifelong interest in marine biology, which was his intended area of study at Stanford University, though he never completed his degree. In 1940, he took a six-week trip along the Gulf of California, collecting specimens with his friend Ed Ricketts, himself a marine biologist. During the trip, the two of them spent three days in La Paz, Mexico, where Steinbeck took note of a local folktale about a young man who discovers a magnificent pearl but is unable to profit from it. After returning from his trip, Steinbeck and Ricketts published their findings, including the folktale, as Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research. A few years later, when Steinbeck set out to write a script for a film to be produced in Mexico, he decided to adapt and expand the folktale. At the same time that he wrote the film script for La perla, which was directed by Emilio Fernández and released in 1947, Steinbeck wrote a short story titled “The Pearl of the World,” which was published in 1945. In 1947, he expanded the short story into a novella simply called The Pearl. Perhaps due to its shared origin with the film, the novella features a number of cinematic features, such as the description of musical motifs that support the action of the novel.

Historical Context: Colonialism on the Baja Peninsula

The events of The Pearl take place in the early 1900s near La Paz, Mexico, which is on the Baja California peninsula. The region’s Indigenous inhabitants first settled in the area some 9,000 to 10,000 years earlier, eventually separating into two main linguistic groups, the Cochimí in the south and the Yuman language family to the north. When Spanish explorers arrived the 1530s, they found tens of thousands of these Indigenous people living in small groups. Not until 1697 would the first permanent settlements be established by Jesuit missionaries, who introduced agricultural practices but also spread diseases that drastically reduced the Indigenous population. Over the next few centuries, Franciscan and then Dominican orders replaced the Jesuits as the Indigenous tribes continued to dwindle. Throughout this period, the region’s rich supply of valuable pearls was gathered relentlessly until the pearl beds were left practically bare, though some restoration has since been completed.

Within the novel, Steinbeck carefully depicts the fraught interplay between the wealthy European settlers and the Indigenous people whose labor they exploit. Although Mexico had attained independence by this time, Steinbeck shows the insidious, lasting effects of colonialism, including predatory economic practices and more subtle forms of religious persuasion. While his presentation of native cultures may necessarily lack in specificity and authenticity, Steinbeck presents the contrasts between Indigenous and European cultures as symbolic, generalized representations of various aspects of human nature, befitting his introduction of the text as a parable.

Literary Context: The Pearl as Parable

In the prologue to The Pearl, an unidentified speaker is quoted as describing the story that follows as a parable from which “everyone takes his own meaning […] and reads his own life into it” (3). In this way, Steinbeck explicitly positions his novella within the broader genre and tradition of parables, or simple stories used to illustrate broad, even universal, moral principles, often in symbolic terms.

While examples of parables can be found throughout history, traditionally, the word is most closely associated with religious discourse—specifically, the parables of Jesus recorded in the New Testament. That Steinbeck had these parables in mind while writing The Pearl seems unmistakable, given that one of Jesus’s parables also centers on a pearl. (Steinbeck also notably treats Biblical themes through the character of the preacher in The Grapes of Wrath.) As recorded in the King James Version of Matthew 13, the parable extols the actions of a wealthy pearl collector who finds a “pearl of great price,” symbolizing the kingdom of heaven, and sells all he has to obtain it. In this context, Steinbeck’s parable is likely to subvert a reader’s expectations, turning the classic parable on its head by making the pearl an object of great evil. Though Steinbeck was not particularly religious, he seems to have found in the form of the parable an apt vehicle for capturing truths about the human experience while inviting readers to approach the text with a perspective not typically applied to modern fiction.