Rose of Sharon

First I want to talk about Rose of Sharon (or as her family calls her Rosasharn) and her name. Ma and Pa have six kids: Noah, Tom, Rose of Sharon, Al, Ruthie, and Winfield. Rose of Sharon has the only odd name. The other siblings have normal "name" (as opposed to adjectives like Patience, Chastity; places like Dallas, Atlanta, Aurora [one of the kids I taught lessons too was named Aurora B., like the Aurora Borealis ]; or things like Satchel, Sunday, Violet, Orchid) kind of names. I figured that Rose of Sharon had to be something because that is a weird name to randomly come up with. After a quick Google search, I found that a Rose of Sharon is flower found throughout the world (Myers). The flower is a type of hibiscus and Japanese Beetles apparently love the Rose of Sharon shrub (Myers). So there is a little bit of information that I found about Rose of Sharon, the shrub.

The person Rose of Sharon undergoes a transformation in the book Grapes of Wrath. She starts off as a pregnant married woman with the idea that her and her husband are going to have a perfect life in California after giving birth to her baby with a doctor and even in a "hospiddle" (Steinbeck 164-165). She is also a complainer and needs her man who leaves her (who by the way was a crappy husband. He abandoned his pregnant wife without a word to her or her family. The other Joads thought he was "no guts, jus' too big for his overalls [Steinbeck 272], but Rosasharn didn't think so). But after she has her baby, Rose of Sharon is mature, maternal, and saves a man's life. She is a "mysterious" (Steinbeck 455) woman.

The end of the book is all about Rose of Sharon. She breast feeds a man back to help. A complete stranger dying in a barn. Breastfeeds him. He needs nourishment as he is dying, so instead of giving him some food she breastfeeds him. Okay now that I've gotten that out of my system, what kind of ending was that? What happened to the Joads? Do they die of starvation? Do they drown? Does Winfield catch pneumonia and Ruthie catch measles and between the two of them they kill their entire family? We will never know because Rose of Sharon had to breastfeed that man.

Myers, Vanessa Richins. "Rose of Sharon - Hibiscus Syriacus." Trees and Shrubs. About.com. Web. 05 Aug. 2011.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.