Lennie and George are not the only ones that have a dream, one, very important character also has a dream, that is Curley’s wife. Curley’s wife dreamt of one day becoming an actress, a movie star, to perform in front of hundreds of people. ‘Went out to the Riverside Dance Palace with him. He says he was gonna put me in the movies. Says I was a natural.’ Just like Lennie, Candy and the rest of the workers, Curley’s wife is considered to be inferior, not for being mentally handicapped or old, but for being a woman.
I think that John Steinbeck relates the hopes and dreams mentioned in the novel to the famous ‘American dream’. Every man hopes that one day they will succeed and leave the ranch, have their own piece of land and work there, just like the American dream, Americans, during the ‘American depression’ dreamt of succeeding in life. He probably compared the lives of men living in America and during the American depression with the lives of mice and how similar they were. Men at that time had to keep moving around the country searching for jobs, and mice had to keep moving around because their home was constantly being destroyed by the farmers as portrayed in the poem ‘To a mouse’ by Robert Burns. The American Dream is the dream of an ideal successful life in America. ‘In the deepening gloom of the Depression, the American Dream represented a reaffirmation of traditional American hopes’ [Anthony Brandt]
Robert Burns once wrote a poem called ‘To a Mouse ’, in this , a farmer is ploughing his field and he destroys a mouse's home and all his provisions for winter. This causes the farmer to reflect upon the relationship between man and nature. The farmer says, ‘I'm truly sorry man's dominion has broken man’s and nature's social union.’ Both George and Lennie are like the mouse because they have a plan for the rest of their lives but it is destroyed by circumstances. Their dream was to buy their own land and a house but because Lennie killed Curley's wife their plans were ruined. Steinbeck uses this poem as influence to his novel. In his poem, Robert Burns compares himself with a mouse in life’s plans. He talks to the mouse and says he ‘realizes its need to steal the odd ear of corn’, and that he doesn’t really mind. At the end of of the poem, Robert Burns shows the relationship between the poem and reality, that everyone works so hard, and in the end it doesn’t pay off and is not rewarded.
Hopes and dreams are both things that make the story move on and also thicken the plot which grabs the reader´s attention and awareness to the story. I also think it is a very important factor that influences the course of the story a lot because, it relates real life to the mice, and as I have mentioned before, this is shown in Robert Burns’ poem, ‘To a Mouse’. I think this explains a lot of John Steinbeck’s use of Animal Imagery.
759 words
João Pedro Filipe 9W