Pearls in the Castle: Comparing Materialism and Gender in Fiction by Steinbeck and Jackson Yinkai Liu 8th Grade

How would you define happiness? Would you be content if you one day win the top prize in the lottery, find the world’s most precious diamond, or watch your product go viral? Fortune could allow you to buy luxury products and have a decent place to live without having to work at all. However, there are things that money couldn’t buy, such as love, friendship, and a sense of fulfillment. Even more, the lure of wealth could strike the darkness of the human heart, making people suspicious, greedy, or even destroy themselves. This concept is perfectly illustrated in the following two novellas. In The Pearl, the main character Kino found the world’s most perfect pearl and was finally able to realize his wishes, only to attract the greed of merchants and criminals. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, two girls Merricat and Constance poisoned their family members and drove out their cousin Charles Blackwood in order to pursue an isolated and elegant lifestyle. The themes of greed/human nature and role of female characters are present in both novellas. First of all, the superior life of one family made others in the community jealous and avaricious in both texts.

In The Pearl, news of Kino finding “Pearl of the World” “seems to move...