What is a family? Certainly, it's not a name, for a rose by any other name...well, you get the idea. How about blood? Plausible, but the fact that any given human is a mere five genes away from a monkey compels me to believe that the key to familial ties lies beyond genetics. True consanguinity stems from experience. How often does one feel closer to a friend seen every day than a distant cousin visited briefly at the annual family reunion? The family is anybody who laughs or cries along with you, and that is the relationship that Steinbeck purports in The Grapes of Wrath. Sure, the actual members of the Joad nuclear family look out for each other more than anyone else, but look to Ma Joad's experiences throughout the novel, the broad scope of the interchapters Steinbeck employs, and an example of a "super-extended family" as the Red Cross Weedpatch Camp and see that Steinbeck intended for the role of the family to encompass far more than the dictionary would give it credit.
             Ma Joad is the quintessential matriarch. She keeps it together for the sake of the family going as far as to "welcome her role as a citadel of the family" (Steinbeck, 79). The limiting reagent for this phenomenon that is Ma Joad is probably the fact that she doesn't get away from the family much, but when she does interact with the greater world, her actions hardly differ. While inside the Hooverville she is presented with the dilemma of feeding her family when a pack of starving children shows up and resolves the situation not by shooing them away as prudent but dispassionate person would, but instead "she lifted the pot and set it down on the ground" so the children could eat. Of course, afterward she feels bad about the decision and is also accosted for it, but in the end, her kindness proves that familiar loyalty extends beyond a bloodline. Ma Joad did what she did against all reason, but despite this, she (as well as anyone reading) would think she did the ...