Reading Religion in John Steinbeck's "The Pearl"

How does God interfere with Kino's quest for social mobility?

Hey.

This is an essay I wrote sometime during lockdown, unaware in a couple months that I’d have a place to post these essays. If it sounds more evidence-based and removed than other posts, that’s the reason why.

With this month being packed with final work, I’m resigned to these older, less conversational, more “academic” essays. For now.

Here’s a PDF of The Pearl. If you read it — let me know!

Thanks again!
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In The Pearl by John Steinbeck, several converging themes describe the turmoil of Kino upon discovering a pearl — an emblem of unimaginable wealth. He and his family are agonized by the weight of transformative potential: from deprived bush-shack rustics to clothed and confident people, married and educated. While some tropes are evident to a casual read (the corruptive power of wealth, inequality, greed, and the strength of family) there remain some locked by closer examination. These smaller themes are larger in interpretive scope, and are equally important in the realm of analysis despite occupying a smaller space. One in particular is religion, and how it constructs the worldview of a character and their society. In literature that incorporates poverty as a basis of disenfranchisement, religion is reliable in providing powerful social commentary. In this novel, Kino’s find propels him within dangerous range of God’s righteous power — plodding through suffering as a consequence.

“God” (beside occupying a specific, doctrinal image) often serves as a symbolic placeholder for natural order, purity, spiritual guidance and redemption. However, in The Pearl, religion is discreetly employed as a system of condemnation, despite being an important pillar in the village’s belief system. It begins delicately, with the village reacting to Kino’s newfound possession. They make an important realization:

“Now the neighbors knew they had witnessed a great marvel. They knew that time would now date from Kino’s pearl, and that they would discuss this moment for many years to come.”

Kino’s pearl becomes a distinction of time, and with the town being a smaller-scaled model of society, it carries a religious weight, one similar to our annual designation of the birth of Christ.

Then comes a description of the village mapping their language depending on Kino’s hypothetical outcome:

“If these things came to pass, they would recount how Kino looked and what he said and how his eyes shone, and they would say, ‘He was a man transfigured. Some power was given to him, and there it started. You see what a great man he has become, starting from that moment. And I myself saw it.

And if Kino’s planning came to nothing, those same neighbors would say, ‘There it started. A foolish madness came over him so that he spoke foolish words. God keep us from such things. Yes, God punished Kino because he rebelled against the way things are. You see what has become of him. And I myself saw the moment when his reason left him” (26).

Steinbeck omits God in the description of Kino’s positive hypothetical. If he is awarded with the wealth and opportunity, it would be “things coming to pass” — the village supposing it happens naturally and organically (albeit miraculously) to Kino, as it should, stumbling into the “Pearl of the World.” It is not an act of direct intervention.

However, oppositely, if the pearl produces misery, they believe it is an intentional disciplining act of God, and interestingly, for rebelling “against the way things are” — Kino disrupting the village’s natural order, treading into an uncomfortably close distance to extreme power, and facilitating God’s hand into pious retribution. (Though, in both hypotheticals, Kino rebels against “the way things are,” inherently in owning the pearl — even becoming “transfigured” in the former. His acquisition and owning of it in the first place makes the wrath of God inevitable.)

Shortly after, Kino is uneasily received by the priest, and at the conclusion of their dialogue:

“But Kino’s hand had closed tightly on the pearl again, and he was glancing about suspiciously, for the evil song was in his ears, shrilling against the music of the pearl”

Despite being overcome with the music of evil, Kino doesn’t verbalize his suspicion of his faith. Throughout the rest of the novel, the characters (including the townsfolk) similarly remain somewhat naive to the aura of cynicism, and still remain obedient to the punishing nature of their beliefs (of which the priest is a figure.)

Kino then seeks consolation from his brother. They remember the village’s old system of handing the pearls to an “agent” — who in good faith were entrusted with selling the pearls in the adjacent town. Instead, however, they were stolen, and the agents were never seen again:

(Juan Tomás): “‘I have heard our father tell of it. It was a good idea, but it was against religion, and the Father made that very clear. The loss of the pearl was a punishment visited on those who tried to leave their station. And the Father made it clear that each man and woman is like a soldier sent by God to guard some part of the castle of the Universe. And some are in the ramparts and some far deep in the darkness of the walls. But each one must remain faithful to his post and must not go running about, else the castle is in danger from the assaults of Hell’” (46).

The town acknowledges religion as a system of spiritual and material servitude. Losing their pearls as punishment for “leaving their station” or “running about” — throwaway phrases for challenging the mechanisms of power and destiny by climbing the ladder — foreshadows Kino’s punishment for rebelling against his fated social and economic position. The father’s sermon reinforces Kino’s eventual disempowerment and devastation as a righteous punishment. 

To the village, servility is important, and a consequence for maligning oneself with religious subjugation is necessary, not only for the individual, but for the structure of the community. While Kino’s village exists in poverty (“far deep in the darkness of the walls”), they radically accept this position and protect it, lest they be penalized for subversion.

This sentiment is emphasized when Kino turns down the offer made by the pearl buyers, and his brother says:

“We do know that we are cheated from birth to the overcharge on our coffins. But we survive. You have defied not the pearl buyers, but the whole structure, the way of life, and I am afraid for you,” and departs colloquially with “Go with God.” Kino again remains silent in his skepticism, but “did not even look up for the words had a strange chill to them.”

Kino feels the weight of judgement on him as he encroaches on unacceptable power.

At the end of chapter 4, after Kino is attacked in the night, he repeats in a beaten daze, “I am a man” in an attempt to both console Juana, and thwart her suggestion of destroying the pearl. In the beginning of the next chapter, it is the prophetic basis by which Kino assaults her, and kills the thief. After having been attacked by her officially violent husband, in one of the few comments on the marriage between masculinity and existential terror (or simply, patriarchy), it says:

“He had said, ‘I am a man,’ and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god. It meant that Kino would drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea. Juana, in her woman’s soul, knew that the mountain would stand while the man broke himself; that the sea would surge while the man drowned in it. And yet it was this thing that made him a man, half insane and half god, and Juana had need of a man; she could not live without a man … Sometimes the quality of woman, the reason, the caution, the sense of preservation, could cut through Kino’s manness and save them all” (60). 

While owning the pearl and breaking from poverty challenges the foundation of life and society, it simultaneously challenges Kino’s capability as a human. He becomes partly deranged in the stress of his persistence and his encroaching on an uninhabitable space of power. Juana juxtaposes Kino’s masculine determination with biblical subtext: he isn’t climbing Mount Sinai and parting the Red Sea in service to God and his enslaved peoples, but aggressing against these as an antithetical Moses: he isn’t performing these biblical phenomena faithfully, but rebelling against them.

Juana preemptively senses Kino’s failure — the symbols he is attacking are monumentally more authoritative than he, and would ultimately break him; despite this, she’s painfully aware of her reliance on him. While this confession could be safely left at the necessity of a man as a provider and protector in an area sapped of wealth (and gender reformation), there is (perhaps) a larger analogy: their society’s reliance on God as a creator and system of belief, and moreover, the opposition of humanity to reason, instead preferring the structure provided by faith.

The chapter ends with Kino’s home crashing in flames. Having lost everything except for Juana (who now painfully regrets their finding the pearl) and Coyotito (Steinbeck’s signature display of tragic innocence), he takes quick, desperate shelter with Juan Tómas. After deliberating his anguished plan to travel to the city (bearing the pearl and plans to sell it), they again depart: 

“Juan Tomas embraced his brother with the double embrace and kissed him on both cheeks. “Go with God,” he said, and it was like a death. “You will not give up the Pearl?” 

“This pearl has become my soul,” said Kino. “If I give it up I shall lose my soul. Go thou also with God” (67).

This holy departure (which overwhelmed Kino with the music of evil upon hearing it last) is now a death sentence into the unknown outskirts of his town, and into the mystery of escaping poverty. Leaving the village is the final threshold into an offensive with religious authority. While their parting phrase may be one of comfort and blessing, in this story particularly, it reinforces the difficulty and complexity of Kino’s mission. A destined man, he embarks into tragedy.

Chapter 6 is driven by natural imagery and language, including Kino, who enters nature under highly unnatural circumstances. He is described by Steinbeck as adopting the fervor of an animal, tactical and predatory:

“Some ancient thing stirred in Kino. Through his fear of dark and the devils that haunt the night, there came a rush of exhilaration; some animal thing was moving in him so that he was cautious and wary and dangerous; some ancient thing out of the past of his people was alive in him” (69).

“He watched the ants moving, a little column of them near to his foot, and he put his foot in their path. Then the column climbed over his instep and continued on its way, and Kino left his foot there and watched them move over it” (70).

Kino masquerades as an arbiter of destiny, asserting himself over these smaller subjects and obstructing their path. Just as he has “climbed over [the] instep” of God by attaching his destiny with selling the pearl, so have the ants in ignoring him.

As he and Juana travelled, a spring rose from the ground in the rocks. Steinbeck describes it with intensity: an autonomous ornament in the wild, which dried and reappeared, dispensed its water to nearby fauna, and was the communal fountain for wildlife. It shares allegorical value with the pearl, and with their religion — it is of God’s creation, defended and suffered for by offering the promise of survival. The passage ends:

“The little pools were places of life because of the water, and places of killing because of the water, too.”

This, too, extends to the other symbols in the novel: the Pearl has offered a delusion of affluence and a promise of life, amplified in Kino’s mind into neurosis.

On his journey, he discovers he’s being followed by trackers. Their symbolism precedes their pursuit of Kino, as the natural presence of death and intrusive knowledge of mortality is almost omnipresent throughout the text.

After killing the trackers, Kino and Juana solemnly return to the village. They are torn and abused, having suffered a violent pursuit, and the accidental death of their baby son: a victim of consequence, a sacrifice for a chance at material salvation. Kino’s hopeful-turned-vengeful sins have robbed the life of his son, and in absolute wretched exhaustion, their return is a noiseless spectacle:

“Her face was hard and lined and leathery with fatigue and with the tightness with which she fought fatigue. And her wide eyes stared inward on herself. She was as remote and as removed as Heaven … The people say that the two seemed to be removed from the human experience; that they had gone through pain and had come out the other side; that there was almost a magical protection about them” (88).

“Heaven” is interestingly employed with two separate, polarized meanings: the first, the ecstasy of finally being released from the nightmare-tension in owning the pearl and watching Kino sacrifice himself and destroy their lives to exchange it; second, the stunning, speechless horror in being a direct recipient of God’s wrath and antagonism towards their disobedience. Both meanings suggest her manner is outside the conventions of humanity. “Heaven,” as revealed by the foreshadowing, was always a “remote” destination for the couple. Being “removed from the human experience,” too, bears multiple interpretations: their stoic and traumatized demeanor, but also a characterization of the novel’s circumstances falling outside of human understanding; the affliction wrought upon Kino and his family exists outside the bounds of a “normal,” “natural” existence.

Coyotito’s death and the returning of the pearl back into the ocean are the novel’s final scenes of “justice.” God, however, is absent from both event descriptions. Does it reveal that the events in the novel were non-religious disasters, despite being shadowed by religious threat? Could this be their grave realization that God was only another cultural force that drove them to chaos, instead of an omnipotent, calculated entity as described by Juan Tómas?

Kino returning the pearl to the water is his strongest self-governed action, next to refusing the pearl buyer’s offers. Here, instead of submitting his fate to the chaos of opportunity, he makes the sober decision to cast it away, retrieving what is left of a life dismantled by social forces. He detaches his soul, and re-enters a life that forced him to consider it underneath the weight of social mobility. He exits his bout with God and resigns his chances.

While the characters of The Pearl use God as an explanation for Kino’s suffering, it's ultimately the pressure and trepidation of his society which lures him into distrust, fear, and violence. In some ways, the novel refutes “fate,” despite it being a determination of God, and a necessary component of Christianity. Does the novel deny God as an entity with any material influence, preferring religion as a manufactured system responsible for maintaining community form?

A central tragedy of The Pearl is the protagonist’s turmoil accredited to a system whose foundation is metaphysical. In this way, Kino can never experience success and social mobility — a forever soldier “in the ramparts” and “far deep in the darkness of the walls,” entrenched in poverty and bound to the judicial suffering of his actions. The destruction of his pearl is an absolute loss in that battle, and a permanent loss for any aspiration of which wealth was a barrier.