I suppose that would depend on the reader, but I felt both sympathy and frustration with her. She is a very lonely person, married to Curley, who sure isn't the best husband in history. She is the only woman on the entire ranch, emphasized by Steinbeck in that he doesn't even give her a name, just "Curley's Wife", and she pretty much has no way to leave the ranch even for recreation or time with friends, much less permanently as she would like. So she is stuck with a jealous, angry husband, and a farm full of men who ignore her. Not a fun time.
On the other hand, to compensate for being alone most of the time, she flirts with almost any man within range, and this causes all sorts of trouble for Lennie and Slim and George, all characters we like in the book and root for. So while we sympathize with the wife, we also wish she would just go away and leave our heroes alone.
Curley's wife deserves sympathy for her injust death and that's about it, in my opinion. She brings on her own trouble throughout the majority of the text. I guess sympathy could come into play as we see that she does what she does because she has no opportunity for friends now that she married Curley. But, that was a consequence borne of her own choice.
Her death was not fair, it served a literary purpose so it could drive home the point about Lennie's underassessed condition, which we further look at as a representation for how we don't cut people much slack for being different or weaker than us. She did nothing to Lennie to earn the death, and after a person is dead, sympathy isn't even worth it because nothing can be done.
One interpretation of her in Steinbeck's novel of the alienated and displaced man is that she is an Eve, a temptress, who disrupts the important fraternity of men, and is, therefore, unworthy of any sympathy. In Chapter 2, when George notices her standing in the doorway of the bunkhouse she has "rouged lips" with red fingernails and red shoes with "red ostrich feathers." She leans against the doorway "so that her body was thrown forward" and smiles "archly and twitched her body." Her pretext of looking for Curley is false; Slim tells her that he has seen her husband going toward their house. After she leaves, Lennie remarks, "She's purty," and George scolds,
"Listen to me,....Don't you even take a look at that bitch. I don't care what she says and what she does. I seen 'em poison before, but I never see not piece of jail bait worse than her. You leave her be."
That Curley's wife does not love her husband and is merely concerned with her own pleasure and welfare is revealed in her conversation with Lennie in Chapter 5 in which she reveals that she married Curley to get away from the little town in which she lived:
Well, I wasn't gonna stay no place where I couldn't get nowhere or make something of myself, an' where they stole your letters....So I married Curley. Met him out to the Riverside Dance Palace that same night....Well, I ain't told this to nobody before...I don' likeCurley...
So, Curley's wife deserves little sympathy, although her death is tragic. For, in Steinbeck's naturalistic world, the indifference of the universe is evident, just as it is in Robert Burns's poem from which the novella's title comes. The best laid plans of Curley's wife and those of George and Lennie all go askew
I feel most sympathy for Curley's wife over anyone else in the novel. She has no identity, (ie no name) no respect, (as her husband of two weeks goes off with the other men to the whorehouse) no friends and no future.
She craves attention, any attention, and tries to get it the only way she knows how; the way that used to work in the Riverside Dance Hall. Only life is no dance for her. It is bleak, lonely and past its prime. I find it deeply tragic that a young vital woman reminisces that she 'could'a been in movies' when her life should be ahead of her with friends, family, children and love. Her husband seeks to avenge her death only to soothe his own injury. She is loved by no-one and mourned by no-one.
First, the story she tells about how she could have been a movie star or the star of a show really demonstrates her yearning for a better life and either a willingness to be duped or a desparate need to believe in a positive future for herself. The fact that she is so gullible might be enough to earn her sympathy, but beyond that we can consider what drives her to be so gullible. If she has any intelligence, she knows that she is being lied to, yet she chooses to believe the lies because they represent what she feels she needs out of life - a future.
Second, she didn't know what she was getting into exactly when she married Curley and she becomes trapped. The outcome of her marriage is an exact counterpoint to the dream she had of becoming independent and famous as a film star.
I think that Curley's wife does deserve some sympathy. She obviously had no idea what she was getting into when she married Curley. (Perhaps she never thought about the move.) She lives on the ranch with no women around and because Curley is so jealous, she is very lonely because he does not want any of the men talking to her.
I don't think she is terribly bright—or perhaps she is simply not realistic. She has dreams of being a star and here she is living on a farm in the middle of the Great Depression where everyone in the country is suffering, including the film industry. She should be more realistic and thankful that she has a home. Certainly other women have faced a similar situation of living on a farm with only farmhands around, etc. Perhaps my only expectation of Curley's wife is that she might have found other more constructive ways to fill her time other than hanging around the men; but instead of embracing her life as it is, she dreams of what she wants it to be, and living on the farm has no place in that dream.
Curley's wife is an example of how our perception of a character can change without the character actually changing. She is portrayed as both a villain and victim throughout the course of the novel. Despite Steinbeck's rendering she emerges as a relatively complex and intricate character who through the course of the novel, our feelings become sympathetic towards. Throughout the novel she is shown in different lights, as from section 2 to section 5 in the novel, her character evolves and her sweeter and more vulnerable side is shown in contrast to her first appearance which portrays her as imposing and a trouble maker.
Throughout the course of the novel, it appears women are treated with contempt and Steinbeck generally depicts women as trouble-makers who bring ruin on men and drive them mad. Aside from wearisome wives "Of Mice and Men" offers limited rather misogynistic descriptions of women who are either dead, maternal figures or prostitutes.
We first hear about Curley's wife when Candy describes her to George. He describes her using expressions such as "she got the eye" and "tart". Through Candy's words we develop an initial perception of Curley's wife as being flirtatious and even promiscuous. This perception is further emphasized by Curley's wife first appearance in the novel. Steinbeck appears to use light symbolically to show that she can be imposing when he writes "The rectangle of light was cut off". He describes her as having "full rouged lips and wide spaced eyes, heavily made up" as well as "Her fingernails were red. Her hair hung in little rolled clusters, like sausages." This builds on our preconceptions of her being villainous and portrays a negative image of her. This makes readers perceive her as a seductive temptress who all the men at the ranch appear to avoid and see as trouble.
As we dwell further into the novel, it appears she is dissatisfied with her marriage to a brutish man and is constantly looking for excitement or trouble and she wanders around the ranch with the excuse that "she is looking for Curley".
One aspect that makes us more sympathetic to her and draws us closer to her is the loneliness that consumes her life and her inhibition in finding companionship. When she barges in on Candy, Crook's and Lennie's conversation she expresses dissatisfaction for life and her
