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Of Mice and Men How Has Segregation Affected Crooks?

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‘Of Mice and Men’ by John Steinbeck was written during the Great Depression in America in the 1930’s. During the Great Depression there was a great job loss which resulted in men becoming migrant works. This was particularly hard for black Americans because back then discrimination against black people wasn’t abolished yet; they were segregated from the white people which meant they couldn’t find work. They were treated very poorly and were considered one level up from animals. Steinbeck had a good knowledge of the life people were living back then because he had the experience of living and working at a ranch in Salinas where his story is based. The story begins by describing the scenery in a lot of detail; he describes it in such a way …show more content…

The way that she dresses and the way she presents herself is another example of how lonely she is. In the book she is described as ‘full, rouged lips and wide-spaced eyes, heavily made up. Her fingernails 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’ Steinbeck has described her with a lot of the colour red. When people think of the colour red the feelings that they would usually associate it with are anger, love, and danger. You could link Curley’s wife to Lennie grabbing the woman’s dress in the beginning because the women’s dress that he grabbed was coincidentally the colour red as well. Also the colour of the traffic lights, red means stop. She is described as heavily made up the way she does her makeup. She may have done her makeup the way she has and wore a lot of red because she is desperate for attention from the workers or her husband. But when Lennie finds her ‘purty’ she takes an interest in him because someone has finally shown some sort of interest in her unlike the other men. She then attempts talking to Lennie several times which soon ended in tragedy. Crooks is the only black man on the ranch, this could link with Curley’s wife because she was the only woman on the ranch. Like Candy and Curley’s wife,

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