In a sense, Curley’s anger and mistrust in his wife is understandable because she flirts with the ranch hands and wears “inappropriate” clothing. She is usually wearing red and has a lot of make-up on, even the first time that we meet her - “She had full, rouged lips and wide-spaced eyes, heavily made up. Her finger-nails were red. Her hair hung in little rolled clusters, like sausages. She wore a cotton house dress and red mules, on the insteps of which were little bouquets of red ostrich feathers.” From a psychological point of view the colour red symbolises heat, fire, blood, passion and lust. It is a colour which traditionally shows impurity and seductiveness, and this is not very appropriate for someone who is married. She is also said to give “the eye” to many of the workers, which is, again, not appropriate for someone who is in her position. Her constant flirtatiousness shows us that she is very lonely and wants attention from the ranch hands – attention which she does not receive from Curley. Curley should try to see what’s wrong with their relationship before blaming the other ranch-hands whenever he feels that she is being unfaithful to him.
Curley’s Wife is cruel and rude to Crooks when he, Candy and Lennie are in his room and this is shown when she says, “Listen, Nigger. You know what I could do to you if you open your trap?” She threatens the ranch hands into talking to her and listening to what she has to say. She abuses her social status as a means of befriending the ranch hands, however, she does not realise that all she is doing is alienating herself from them even more. No one appreciates being threatened and seeing as how she seems to get a lot of that from Curley, she should have understood what it meant to be in their position. She was being utterly offensive to them all, while they had done nothing but to tell her to leave them alone, which I think was not unreasonable at all. In this way, she seems to be a vindictive and cruel person and it is clear why the ranch hands want nothing to do with her.
I think that her death was partly her own fault because she is the one who tells Lennie that he can stroke her hair. Although she hadn’t known Lennie for a long time, she did know that he was the one who had hurt Curley, so she should have been more cautious. She should have realised that Lennie was very powerful and strong but was unable control his power. She understood Lennie’s character perfectly and she even says that he’s “jus’ like a big baby”. She saw what he had done to the puppy, and he already admitted to her that he ends up killing things that he tries to pet, so she really should have known that if she allowed him to stroke her hair, she would get hurt in the process, the same as all of the other things which Lennie tries to “pet”.
Curley’s Wife is a misfit in a ranch full of men and she is hated by nearly everyone. When Carlson comments to Curley, “Why’n’t you tell her to stay the hell home where she belongs?” it shows us what the ranch hands really think of Curley’s Wife. They believe her to be a threat in the way of getting their wages and so do not talk to her and when they do, they insult her and are extremely rude towards her. When she asks if Curley’s in the bunk house, on the day of George and Lennie’s arrival, George speaks to her coldly, whereas he was nice and friendly towards everyone else who came to see him. After meeting her for the first time, George says, “Bet she’d clear out for twenty bucks.” I think that what George is trying to say here is that she’s a cheap prostitute and that she would do anything for a small sum of money. George has only met her once, he hardly knows her and except for what the other ranch hands tell him, he has nothing to judge her by, yet still he is rude and cruel to her. He calls her “tramp” after meeting her for the first time and then says, “So that’s what Curley picks for a wife.” This shows that George thinks Curley’s wife is an object – “that” is a very strong word in this sentence because you don’t use “that” to refer to a person, unless you despise them or think very low of them. This gives me a powerful image of exactly what George thinks of Curley’s wife – an object just like something you could buy in a shop. The other ranch hands refer to her as a “tart”, “bitch”, “jail bait” and “tramp” several times which again shows us that they think very low of her and that she is disliked by them. This makes me feel sympathetic for her because they all judge her, even though they do not know her all that well – they are unwilling to listen to her, they just judge her by the way she looks.
Even when she is dead, Candy dislikes her and blames her for all the trouble that was caused by saying “Ever’body knowed you’d mess things up. You wasn’t no good”. This quote shows that Candy blamed her for the fact that he, George and Lennie could no longer have a piece of land together despite knowing that it was Lennie who killed her. I think that the only time she is seen to be in peace is when she is dead. It is only once she is dead that she is described in a different light – “And the meanness and the plannings and the discontent and the ache for attention were all gone from her face. She was very pretty and simple, and her face was sweet and young. Now her rouged cheeks and reddened lips made her seem alive and sleeping very lightly.” It is here that she is described as actually being pretty and beautiful. All the pain, loneliness and suffering which she felt while she was alive have gone and her face is trouble-free and lovely. She no longer needs to worry about anything or anyone and she is finally at rest.
Most of the women who we hear about in the novella either work in whore houses or have a very low social status. At the beginning of the novella, George and Lennie are running away from their job because of a woman (Lennie wanted to “feel” her dress, but she mistook this as rape) and so, I believe, that George blames women as the sole reason why anything goes wrong when he is with Lennie. George is a main character and so we hear what he has to say about everything. On the subject of Curley’s Wife, we only hear bad remarks from him as he obviously despises most women. I think that what George says is very important as he gives the main descriptions about her, so obviously she is not going to be seen as a very commendable person. The only thing that we have to judge her by is what the ranch hands say and we get rude comments about her from nearly everyone. This makes me feel sympathy for her because she is trapped in a place where no one likes her and this results in her unhappiness, as she cannot escape it. When Whit starts to talk about Curley’s Wife, George asks if there’s been any trouble since she had moved in with Curley – obviously wanting to find out if she would be someone who could tempt Lennie into doing something that he normally wouldn’t or just someone to be generally careful of. This is very rude, in my opinion, because he has only met her once but he is already enquiring about whether she had done anything wrong or not. This makes me feel sympathy for Curley’s wife, as she is thought of as a trouble-maker, nothing more. The fact that the ranch hands are not willing to even try and understand her makes me sympathise with her because their image of her will never change.
Curley’s wife is very lonely, because she is stuck in a place where she has no real communication with the people around her, and is in an unhappy relationship with Curley. She actually admits to this while talking to Lennie when she says, “I don’ like Curley. He ain’t a nice fella.” These are obviously not the words of a happy and content wife. She thought that marriage would make her life better than it was before, but she got “stuck” in a far worse situation. While talking to Candy, Crooks and Lennie, she says, “Think I don’t like to talk to somebody ever’ once in a while? Think I like to stick in that house alla time?” She tries to talk to the ranch hands but they neither listen nor care about what she has to say because they don’t like her as they think that she is trying to flirt with them. They know that only bad can come of it. There is another instance in which she talks about her loneliness - this is when she was talking to Lennie – she says, “I can’t talk to nobody but Curley. Else he gets mad. How’d you like not to talk to anybody?” This goes to show how miserable and lonely she must be feeling. She probably also feels extremely degraded as she has to listen to everything that Curley says. I think that she was much happier when she was not married. She could go out and have fun whenever she wanted to, and there were people who she could talk to – she wasn’t as lonely as she is when with Curley. She moved from one unpleasant situation to an even worse one, leaving her lonely and disappointed with her life.
Another reason why I feel sympathy towards for Curley’s Wife is because she, like a couple of the other characters, has a dream. She wants to be an actress, and however unlikely it may have been that she was actually asked to go on screen, she had a dream and was planning to have a good career but it doesn’t all work out the way she wanted it to. She says, “…He says he was gonna put me in the movies. Says I was a natural.” This shows us that she would have had a nice, enjoyable and long career if she had received a letter from him, but as she didn’t – she says that her mother took it. She decided to take an easy way out of the situation that she was in and so she got married to Curley, whom she had met on the same day that she had met the actor. It was probably a hasty decision and she probably thought that things could not get any worse, but they did, because Curley turned out to be a paranoid, obsessive and aggressive husband. No one deserves this type of life which is full of hatred and loneliness and so I feel very sorry for her.
The “American Dream” is one of the major themes throughout the novella. It states that everyone can achieve success, wealth and security through hard work and effort and most of the characters in the novella admit to dreaming of a better lifestyle. Curley’s Wife confesses her desire to be an actor whilst talking to Lennie. She says, “Coulda been in the movies, an’ had nice clothes like they wear. An’ I coulda sat in them big hotels, an’ had pitchers took of me.” This makes me feel very sympathetic for her because she, like many of the other characters, she dreams of a better life in which she can progress and improve herself. Tragically she never reaches this dream because she marries Curley and then dies moments after talking to Lennie about her dreams. Her death also brings about the destruction of George and Lennie’s dream of having their own ranch where they can do whatever they like.
Overall, I think that Curley’s Wife is a misunderstood character, but instead of trying to make people understand her so that she, Curley and the rest of the ranch hands can be more comfortable, she reinforces the image that they have of her, making herself an object to nearly everyone. She is sad and lonely with no one to talk to – she thought that marriage would solve all of her problems, however it just left her in a far worse situation that she and many other characters in the novella are not happy with at all.
