Control, Prohibition, and Censorship of Diversity in John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven

Abstract

Abstract:This article examines John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven (1932) as a study of the mechanisms through which a rural settler community enforces conformity and suppresses diversity. Moving beyond existing readings that situate the collection within the American Gothic tradition, it argues that The Pastures of Heaven stages a systematic confrontation between two opposing forces: the instrumental rationality of white settler culture, oriented toward control, efficiency, and the erasure of difference, and the non-normative individuals—racialized, disabled, foreign, or sexually disruptive—whose existence that rationality cannot assimilate. When confronted with what exceeds its categories, the community responds not with understanding but with censorship, variously enacted through prohibition, medicalization, expulsion, and violence. The article traces this dynamic across several stories showing how each enacts the same structural pattern of failed integration. Rather than proposing easy solutions, Steinbeck registers the tragic impossibility of genuine pluralism within a society whose foundations rest on colonial logic. The article situates this reading within the broader debate over Steinbeck’s ambivalent position on race, arguing that The Pastures of Heaven represents one of his most searching—if still limited—engagements with the systemic nature of racial and social exclusion in American life.