Of Mice and Men Essay
The question we are focussing on throughout the whole essay, which is the main theme, is whether Curley’s wife is a victim in the story or a tramp. The two different sides of Curley’s wife are hard to determine in Steinbeck’s ‘Mice and Men’, as she tends to swap roles from time to time. At points in the story we have reason to believe that that she is a victim, from the way she feels about Curley and her unattained future, which I will explore further on in the essay. I will also put across my points on how she can be a corrupting tramp by exploring her physical appearance, body language and other characters opinions of her. From Steinbeck’s letter we can see that she couldn’t really trust anyone from a young age because every time she trusted in anyone she got hurt. This shows her innocent side. There are not many points in Steinbeck’s letter that show that she is a corrupting tramp as he tends to mainly focus on her innocent side and he goes through all the times she got hurt and why she got hurt. I will now go on to explain my points in further detail.
In this section I will explain how Curley’s wife could be an innocent victim in her life and in the eyes of others. She is the victim of the ‘American Dream’, her desire to go to Hollywood and be an actress, which was a dream that she could not fulfil because of her mother denying her to leave at such a young age. On page 125 she proves that she really could have been an actress by the text stated ‘She made a small grand gesture with her arm and hand to show that she could act. The fingers trailed after her leading wrist, and her little finger stuck out grandly from the rest’. This small quote shows how talented she could have been and it makes you feel heartbroken that she couldn’t fulfil her dream. From then on she has been crestfallen and cannot trust anyone, this shows her innocent side. She was told by a man that he could put her in the movies; she was thrilled as she wanted to be a famous actress and be sexy like Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe but when her mother said she couldn’t go she opted for an easier option to get out of where she was by marrying Curley. She says in the text on page 125 ‘I don’t like curley, he aint a nice fella’ which proves that she was forced to get married to him as it was the last option. Because Curley was the easiest and possibly the last option, he didn’t actually love her and just wanted to use her. She knew this and even though he treated her badly, she couldn’t leave him as she did love him. Even if she didn’t she had nowhere else to go so she was basically trapped in her own home. Her life with Curley is miserable which makes her even more upset about not being able to fulfil her dream and have freedom. In the story she confesses to Lennie the one thing that she’s never confessed to anyone, that she doesn’t actually like Curley and that she can’t escape for fear of what might happen. You can see from this that she just needs someone to talk to as she is so lonely and can’t really confide or talk to Curley about anything. The people on the ranch give her the same amount of respect that Curley does. When they call her or see her around the ranch they don’t associate her with her own name, to them she’s just Curley’s wife and they call her ‘Jailbait’ and ‘Good looking’. You can tell she gets frustrated by having no one to talk to when she gets angry on page 123 and says ‘What’s the matter with me? Aint I got a right to talk to nobody? Whatta they think I am anyways?’ In the story we don’t even find out what her name is which shows how much attention she gets for her looks instead of her personality which is where she wants most attention. From this we can see that she just wants someone to talk to.
