The Salinas Valley that he creates is comparable to other utopic fabrications such as El Dorado or Milton’s Eden than the town that physically rests in California.
Steinbeck’s romanticization of his childhood home reflects his left-leaning politics and social theories. Written a decade apart, the two novels’ structural similarities suggest that Steinbeck maintained a consistent social vision, and that these two novels function as incubators for Steinbeck’s idea of a utopic society. It is in this symbiotic social interaction that Steinbeck crafts his utopia along with the physical landscape that constitutes Monterey. Adopting the structure and themes of the Arthurian legend, Steinbeck created a 'Camelot' on a shabby hillside above Monterey on the California coast and peopled it with a colorful band of knights. These two novels possess striking commentaries regarding Steinbeck’s views on social status, materialism, and freedom all in conjunction with his larger socio-ecological confines.
My thesis will explore the idea of utopia that John Steinbeck intimates through the two novels Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, and how he crafts his utopia in concordant Marxist, social, and ecological frameworks.
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