Community In John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath

Ralph walks through the door after a day at work to find his wife, Alice, icing his favorite dessert. When he inquires as to the occasion, Alice tells him it’s for the new neighbor and asks him to introduce himself later. Ralph’s good friend, Ed, joins him and they discuss plans to play checkers with the new neighbor, “cuz them old guys like playing checkers”. Mr. Sanchez knocks on the door and Ralph and Ed discover the new neighbor is a bit younger and more suave then they imagined. Fear and panic begin to swirl as they discover that he is a dance instructor who works nights and will be around their wives all day while they are at work.
All of Ralph’s worst fears come a few days later as he arrives home to find Alice and the other wives in their apartment building learning to dance the mambo with their new neighbor, Carlos. Ralph becomes even more furious when Alice offers a cold dinner instead of the usual hot meal. The whole experience is more than Ralph can take and he explodes again. Later, Carlos returns for the record player he forgot and
In this example, fear and misconceptions plagued Ralph and the other husbands constantly. The women on the other hand appeared to embrace Mr. Sanchez almost immediately. At face value, one might believe this is the difference between men and women, but actually it’s not. Given the 1950’s context, the women in the episode simply had more opportunity to interact with their new neighbor. The men couldn’t, because they worked days while Mr. Sanchez worked nights. Ralph also highlighted another aspect in the episode; Carlos is seen as being unfamiliar within their context in that he is a single, male, dance instructor while they were all married men who worked “dirty” backbreaking jobs. They didn’t have similar experiences and therefore had a difficult time relating to one another, at least at