“…Sat'iday night. Everybody out doing som'pin. Ever'body! An what am i doin? Standin' here talkin' to a bunch of bindle stiffs, a nigger an a dum- dum and a lousy ol' sheep, an' likin' it because they ain't nobody else.
For a young lady to be left home alone all day would send anyone in a deep state of depression. She is married to a man that gives her little attention and none of he’s time. This is why I think she degrades herself. She shows little or no sign of respect for herself. She flirts with other men to keep herself entertained.
“Swell guy ain’t he? Spends all his time saying what he’s gonna do to guys he don’t like and he don’t like no body”.
As a woman during the depression she has no choice but to marry someone who can support her. Society gives jobs and independence to men and women have no power. She is at the bottom of society. Her marriage to Curley is a disaster because he only cares about himself and he isn’t interested in her at all.
Curley’s wife understands that all men think of her as an object, she uses her beauty to attract men so they will talk to her.
“She put her hands behind her back and leaned against the door frame so that her body was thrown forward”.
She needs friends and people to talk to, but everyone turns her away. Curley is jealous and treats her like his possession to be guarded, she feels frustrated.
“What’s the matter with me?
“Ain’t I got the right to talk to nobody?”
Desperate to satisfy her need for belonging and love, she turns to strangers such as Lennie, the only person that she feels she can talk to. She hints at her loneliness when she says,
“Seems like they ain't none of them cares how i gotta live,"
Her aggravation and frustration about being lonely is being released, and she may be free from loneliness because she has finally released most of her feelings and emotions before her death. Loneliness is a large aspect of the novel. Different characters deal with it in different ways. When Curley’s wife opens up to Lennie the readers sympathise with her.
“Well I ain’t told this to nobody before…”
This shows her inner feelings of how desperate she is in wanting a friend. She is successful in getting a person like Lennie to talk to and trust in, but from all this she had been killed by the hands of the one she trusted.
Curley’s wife has a dream she wants something to call her own, she wants fame, fortune and admiration. When she is talking to Lennie, alone in the barn, she recounts her obviously well told stories of her offers of fame.
“Coulda been in the movies an had nice clothes”.
She is unhappy with her husband, and his constant stories of who he's going beat up next. This brings up a very important question in the readers minds. Why did she marry Curley?
“ I ast her if she stole it, too an’ she says no, so I married Curley”.
This shows that Curley’s wife is a very stubborn character she wants everything her own way, and doesn’t care what she has to sacrifice. She seems to have a deep regret that she didn't take up either of the men on their offers. This dream is important to her because it decides weather or not she's going to try again and go on in life and be a success and full fill her dream of being an actress or that she stay's where she is and becomes something else. She tells Lennie of her need for affection, and how she needs to be wanted.
Curley's wife does not seem at all likely to achieve her dreams. Even if she wasn't murdered, she was stuck in a rut with Curley, a rut that would have gone round and round in until he left her for a new woman, or she finally built up the courage to leave him.
The first description of Curley’s wife is described very differently from how Steinbeck describes her at the end of the novel. Steinbeck’s first description is very sharp and harsh.
“She had full roughed lips and wide spaced eyes, heavily made up…”
Steinbeck describes her to be a tart; he wants the readers to think that she looks like a prostitute. When Curley’s wife is murdered he’s description is changed.
“she was very pretty, simple and her face was sweet and young”.
This description was given after her death, there is a hidden meaning to why I think Steinbeck did this. He wants the readers to understand that the description that was given earlier in the novel was what everyone thought of her, it was like a mask she had on. Her real personality and her real self were only discovered before she died.
