Grapes of Wrath: Rose of Sharon

Alright well aside from having a pretty awesome name and sharing it with one of my favorite songs albeit with different spelling, there is very little about Rose of Sharon that I actually liked. She was a dreamy teenage girl before the pregnancy and afterward she becomes reclusive and hardly ever talks. Due to this she really doesn't talk all too often but when she does it's usually a pretty important statement, or something along those eyes. She is Tom Joad's younger sister and the daughter of Ma and Pa Joad. I don't know why she escapes with such an awesome name when everybody else gets names like Tom, Ma, Pa, Noah, and John but hey whatever not like I named the characters. In the novel Rose of Sharon kind of plays a type of symbol for the Virgin Mary and the whole immaculate conception jazz because Steinbeck likes to put those oh so subtle religious symbols and themes into his novel. I really just didn't like Rose of Sharon because to me I couldn't really relate to her at all which I suppose is a good thing, but the whole being so reclusive aspect really made me kind of dislike her. And then the episode at the end of the novel where she feeds the stranger by breastfeeding him, while being all noble and a very thinly veiled symbol for the capability of mankind's regrowth and being able to treat it each other right despite all of our faults just struck me as pretty weird. I guess it's just a thing of living in the modern age but the image of this teenager suckling a grown man to keep him alive just seems a bit odd to me, but hey whatever. I guess the main reason for me not liking Rose of Sharon was that she was written to symbolize the Virgin Mary and stay there to give hope to the family that despite all the terrible events that happened the human capability and beautiful ability to give birth and sustain life was there to keep them going and stuff, but that just struck me as really cliched.