McGreggor

Chapter 7 of To a God Unknown is a revealling one. Being short, it introduces Elizabeth, the main character's wife-to-be. Joseph, the thirty-five year old land-obsessed, procreation-"engineer", meets Elizabeth, the obstinate daughter of an opinionated man, a seventeen year old teacher who has read the classics and will elevate the social status of any man. A desirable, pretty knick-knack.

Like so many women characters, Elizabeth isn't very interesting. She is the ultimate young school teacher, full of manners and ideals, a little stubborn but naíve and inexperienced, a willful girl who nevertheless (and to my surprise) would easily cave in to the song of a cheaper Rett Butler. If her thoughts after Joseph's impulsive proposal are of calculation and fear, Joseph beastly reaction uncovers a less than promissing future for this couple on the make.

Away from Steinbeck's mythic characters, emerges McGreggor, the photographic image of a man you can almost hear. A few lines is what takes for Steinbeck to bring this pseudo-marxist, unsettled man to life.

"In Monterey there lived and worked a harness-maker and saddler named McGreggor, a furious philosopher, a Marxian for the sake of argument. Age had not softned his ferocious opinions, and he had left the gentle Utopia of Marx far behind. McGreggor had long deep wrinkles on his cheeks from constantly setting his jaw and pinching his mouth against the world. His eyes drooped with sullenness. He sued his neighbors for an infringement of his rights, and he was constantly discovering how inadequate was the law's cognizance of his rights. He tried to browbeat his daughter Elizabeth and failed as miserably as he had with her mother, for Elizabeth set her mouth and held her opinions out of reach of his arguments by never stating them. It infuriated the old man to think that he could not blast her prejudices with his own because he did not know what they are.

Elizabeth was a pretty girl, and very determined. Her hair was fluffy, her nose small and her chin firm from setting it against her father. It was in her eyes that the beauty lay, grey eyes set extremely far apart, and lashed so thickly that they seemed to guard remote and preternatural knowledge. She was a tall girl; not thin, but lean with strenght and taut with quick and nervous energy. Her father pointed out her flaws, or rather faults he thought she had."

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The trouble with "To a God Unknown" by John Steinbeck by the Paperback Writer
To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck by the Fifty Books Project 2008