Curley’s Wife Essay

“Both men glance up, for the rectangle of light in the door way had been cut off. A girl was standing there looking in.” The girl was a representative of 1930′s women, she was Curley’s Wife. By a representative of 1930′s women I mean “held back” or “belongs in the kitchen” which ever you prefer and considering that during the depression men had to travel a lot leaving the women at home… alone, they were often thought of as prostitutes. She also has no name making her appear as a “lesser being.”
Before we even meet Curley’s Wife we get a prejudiced view of her. On page 29 Candy says “Well, I think Curley’s married… a tart.” Unfortunately he doesn’t mean pudding, it’s the other kind. This shows that A) it’s before we meet Curley’s Wife as she doesn’t appear until page 32, and B) we get a prejudiced view as now she has been called a sponge we can only see the spongy things about her (like what happens at school).
When Curley’s Wife dramatically appears clad in red and looking like a raspberry cheesecake, she has a slight degree of innocence about her. On page 32 it says “Her hair hung in little rolled clusters, like sausages.” Which means that Curley has married… a dichotomy. The red apparel gives her a dangerous RAWR appearance (and yes RAWR is spelt like that), yet the hair style gives her more of a childlike helping-mum-bake-bread-for-her-fathers-sandwiches-the-next-day appearance.
In chapter 4 three of the “lesser beings” are in the barn talking about there dreams, that is until the spotted dick mystically appears in the doorway. She says on page 76 “’they left all the weak ones here.’” Which refers to all of them as she is weak simply for being female, Crooks is weak because he is black, Candy because he is crippled and Lennie because he has learning difficulties. But, when crooks asks her to leave she uses Curley to give her POWER even though she hates his very existence. On page 80 she says “listen nigger , you know what I can do to you if you so much as open your trap?” Directly she can’t do nothing but she can grass him up and get results.
Chapter 5 is where she shows her true colours to Lennie. She claims that in reality she isn’t a lemon drizzle cake, but really a sweet and sour with chicken balls and fried rice, sweet for the childlike helping-mum-bake-bread-for-her-fathers-sandwiches-the-next-day side, sour for the dangerous RAWR side and the chicken balls and fried rice aren’t relevant in anyway other than the make a good sweet and sour. She says she wants to be in the pictures (films), she wants respect, fame, nice clothes and various other things she won’t achieve on account of her being a fictional character, but mostly she wants not to be held back. An anticlimax as she marries Curley hoping to release the chains of misery only to get bound tighter. So she’s trapped in a matchbox-sized house with nothing but a pebble to talk to (well that is all Curley is intelligence wise).
She dies. I guess someone decided to finally eat that last bit of chocolate cake with the cherries and the fish shaped crackers, he must have been disappointed as it was a lie after all. The adjectives used when describing her death include “flopped like a fish, battered, writhed, muffled.” Flopped like a fish was used when Curley “caught his hand in a machine.” The other words just describe her life “she was battered, she writhed to be free and her voices and opinions were muffled” all because men are “superior.” The rest of the animal kingdom agrees with that. But as Lennie killed her, he too must be silenced, leaving poor George with no friend.
Curley’s Wife (I’m fed up of typing that so I shall refer to her as Jane (doe) if I need to mention her name again) doesn’t appear in chapter 1 and 6 in 6 she is dead so that doesn’t matter and she is just too small of a character to put in the introductory chapter, even though she is important to the plot.
Jane’s entrances are structured around Curley if he ain’t there she is and she’s always searching for him (not looking very hard either sorry love your covers blown we all know you just want attention).
Moral of the story; be nice to the extras even though you hate their guts.

Sore eyes.
They can’t get girl friends.

my answer: one is lower case and the other is capitalized