Explore some of the ways in which Steinbeck presents disadvantaged characters in"Of mice and men".

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Explore some of the ways in which Steinbeck presents disadvantaged characters in the novel.

Steinbeck presents many disadvantaged characters in the novel. In this controlled assessment, I will be looking at some of those characters.

One of the disadvantaged characters on the ranch is Curley’s Wife. We don’t know her name which means she has no individual identity; she’s just Curley’s property. No-one likes talking to her because they are scared of enraging Curley. ‘He’s scared Curley’ll get mad.’ Because of the lack of conversations she has with people, she gets very lonely. ‘I never get to talk to nobody. I get awful lonely.’ Curley’s Wife cannot escape from the image the men on the ranch have of her so she uses this image to get noticed and to talk to someone. ‘She had full rouged lips and wide-spaced eyes, heavily made up.’

Curley’s Wife had a hasty marriage to Curley which has failed because she doesn’t have a good relationship with him. ‘I don’t like Curley.’ Curley sees her as more of a trophy wife than an actual wife he can love and Curley’s Wife knows that. ‘He ain’t a nice fella.’ Moreover, Curley’s failure to satisfy his wife, either physically or emotionally, leads her to find comfort with other men, even with those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. She’s also said to have ‘the eye’ because of this. ‘Well – she got the eye.’ Curley doesn’t like her leaving the house and going to the ranch so she has to sneak around. ‘...Curley’s Wife can move quiet. I guess she had a lot of practice, though.’

Furthermore, we find out a lot about Curley’s Wife’s life before the ranch too. She tells Lennie how she got an offer to be an actress in Hollywood. ‘He says he was gonna put me in the movies.’ However, her mother said she was too young to go to Hollywood. ‘But my ol’ lady wouldn’t let me. She says because I was on’y fifteen. That guy said he was going to write to her, however, she never got the letter and to this day, she still thinks her mother stole her letters. ‘I always thought my ol’ lady stole it.’ She’s broken her trust with her mother that she may never get back.

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Just before her death, we see her true character and we see that under the entire facade, she was just an innocent and vulnerable woman who didn’t want to be lonely anymore. ‘And the meanness and the plannings and the discontent and the ache for attention were all gone from her face.’ She ached for attention because she never got any; she’s had no support from her mum or Curley. The actor who found her gave a hope that no-one else did, not even her family, a hope that she could make it to Hollywood and be somebody. She’s disadvantaged ...

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