...INCLUDE rOSEOFSHARON-BREASTFEEDING MAN What was the overall importance of women's roles in the novel? please discuss Rose of sharon and her final act of breast feeding the man.

Are you writing a report?

She'd just lost her newborn. The man was starving. She had nutrients not being used and he needed them. That's all there is to it.The presence of women in any story or situation make the whole thing a balanced, rounded affair. Without them, the story is off, because women are a part of everyday life...why wouldn't they be in the story?

Rose of Sharon seems to represent the quiet life force that matures through death to keep the "people" of the earth alive. Where the men are the active decision makers, the women are the stoic backbone. It's an idealised view of "Woman" who finds her strength in dust of reality. Compare Rose of Sharon in "Grapes of Wrath" with the "Fiance" in "Conrad's Heart of Darkness." In the latter, woman is a statue-like ideal on the pedistal, kept ignorant of the "dust" of life because to inform her of Man's true nature would have been "too dark altogether."This is one of the real powers of Stienbeck's novel. He takes "Woman" off the pedistal society has put her on, strips her of her friviolity, even her motherhood and gives us an image of "Woman" as the lifeblood of humanity at it's highest and lowest form.Conrad's "Woman' is kept apart from the "Horror" in which men toil to create the means to keep women on their pedistal which harkens back to the biblical myth of woman being the downfall of man. But Stienbeck has his "Women" struggling side by side with "Man" and endows them with a grace borne from their suffering as well as man's.