Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Just as Havisham and Curley’s wife’s isolation is because of their gender, Crooks in “Of Mice and Men” is presented as the epitome of the frustration and loneliness caused by isolation. However, Crooks’s isolation is not due to his gender, but his colour and race. In “Of Mice and Men”, Steinbeck presents Crooks as an isolated character due to his race. He names Crooks as Crooks because he has a crooked back and he is called “Nigger” implying that he is unimportant. Steinbeck portrays Crooks’s loneliness through “this is just a nigger talking a bust-back nigger. So it don’t mean nothing” and “nobody’d listen to you”, these can be inferred as Crooks has a low status in the ranch, no one has ever listened to him. This can also be referred to the

Do opposites really attract? Can two people, with no similarities, share a close bond? It proves to be so in the novel Of Mice and Men , written by John Steinbeck. A novel which tells the story of two men, George and Lennie, and their journey of a new job working on a ranch. A novel with a different but interesting style of writing. A novel where John Steinbeck utilizes how powerful George is over Lennie, to signify how people believe they are dominant over others, because of their greater intelligence, social standards, or wealth.

John Steinbeck, the American author of 27 books wrote about the period of time during the Great Depression. In Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck created characters with the intention of them being an outcast. Many people in our society are outcasted or irrelevant to others because of distinctive characteristics that portray them as being “different”. Specifically, in this novel, Curleys wife is the biggest outcast and is discriminated against because of her gender. The relationship Curley's wife has with Curley, the dream for her future, and being the only women at the ranch shows readers that she is lonely and searching for a companion.

A social issue that Steinbeck desired to reveal in Of Mice and Men was the reality women were facing as they were regarded as property or objects and not as individual people in the 1930s. Women would often times not even have the chance to defend and explain themselves against this cynical perspective on them, “Well, I think Curley's married a tart... ‘Listen to me, you crazy bastard,’ he said fiercely ‘Don’t you even take a look at at that bitch’...You mean Curly's girl?” (Steinbeck 28, 32, 55). The first thing we hear George say about Curley’s wife is that she’s a tart and the second thing we hear about her that

While Crooks, a victim of racial prejudice, expresses his isolation openly, he also socializes with the other workers on the job and while playing horseshoes with them. Curley’s wife, on the other hand, cannot talk to anyone without suffering the consequences of a jealous husband: “I get lonely,’ she said. “You can talk to people, but I can’t talk to nobody but Curley. Else he gets mad. How’d you like not to talk to anybody?” (87) More specifically,after meeting him that same night, Curley’s wife ran away from home to marry Curley to spite her mother. She further confessed to Lennie she doesn’t even like Curley. As a result, she left one situation hoping to move closer to capturing her dreams, but her companion’s jealous and violent behavior prevents her from even socializing with others.(88) Therefore, she went from living with multiple people to living with only Curley, who is supposed to be her companion and someone she

During the 1930s, discrimination was present in many forms, from racial to sexual. Through Curley 's wife, John Steinbeck demonstrates the feelings of a typical woman during the Great Depression. Initially, Steinbeck provides a biased perception about Curley 's wife. She is described as a "‘jail bait '" (Steinbeck 32) and a "‘tart '" (28) by George in that she is very flirtatious and can get the men in trouble. She always appears in a red amorous dress and uses her excuse of looking for her husband to converse with the men. However, they do not sympathize with her at all. As stated in George 's quote, "‘ranch ain 't no place for a girl '" (51), she is forced to live in a male dominated society where her freedom and dreams are limited.

The character of Curley’s Wife is very hard to unravel, as throughout the book, Steinbeck’s representation of women through characters such as George and Candy, is very harsh. This is because the sociological opinion at that time was that they were either, mothers, sisters, or prostitutes,

Curley’s wife constantly complains how lonely she is as Curley is not around most of the time. This drives her to wander about the ranch talking to other men and questioning them about Curley's whereabouts. As most of the men are in town, Curley’s wife wanders to the barn where Candy, Crooks, and Lennie are currently located. The men question why she is there and see her as a nuisance. But, she stays and discusses her struggles with loneliness. “‘I get lonely,’ she said, ‘You can talk to people, but I can’t talk to nobody but Curley, else he gets mad. How’d you like not to talk to nobody’” (Steinbeck 87). In other words, Curley’s wife is left alone by Curley so much that she feels the need to talk to anybody that she finds. This is why she wanders about the ranch all day and talks to any men she can find. This demonstrates how women were treated during this time; they were thought to be unimportant and were often left alone by their spouses. Curley’s wife did not have a name, which shows how unimportant she really is. Women were thought to be of no use, leaving them to not have the ability to achieve the American dream.

In the novel “ Of mice and men” by John Steinbeck, many beliefs that have cause human suffering was showed. These beliefs were exposed throughout the story and impacted how the characters’ development and how the events came to place. These beliefs are dream, guilt, and loneliness.

Throughout most of the book Curley’s wife strikes us as a compelling and riveting character as we initially see her as a wicked character till those few seconds before she dies where you think, hey she might not be so bad after all. In the novel ‘of Of mice Mice and men’ Men’ Curley’s wife’s image is portrayed as a very sexual, flirtatious, cheeky and desperate. Steinbeck uses specific words, sentences and techniques to create the image of Curley’s wife as one that is very contrasting.

In the novella, Of Mice and Men, there is a character named Curley’s Wife. Curley’s Wife is first shown in the novella as a character who is provocative and represented as darkness. Throughout the story she is dehumanized, objectified, and sexualized. Therefore, Steinbeck crafts the character, Curley’s Wife, in order to convey how the american dream is unattainable through him showing sexism and discrimination towards women.

In a discussion John Steinbeck said, "I worked in the same country that the story is laid in. The characters are composites to a certain extent. Lennie was a real person. He's in an insane asylum in California right now. I worked alongside him for many weeks . . .” (Parini 27)

In the novel “Of Mice and Men”, the character of Crooks is used by John Steinbeck, the author, to symbolise the downgrading of the black community occurring at the time in which the novel was set. Crooks is also significant as he provides an insight into the reality of the American Dream and the feelings of the people in the ranch; their loneliness and need for company.

Ostracism and objectification are widely seen in our world today. People are ostracized because they of what they believe in, their lifestyle, and even over their heritage. Women and men are objectified in magazines, album records, and advertisements. Curley’s wife is a symbol of the objectification in women at that period in time, Lennie shows the stigma against people with a mental illness, and Crooks indicates the way African Americans were treated and ostracized. In Steinbeck’s historical novella Of Mice and Men many characters in the story, such as Lennie, Curley’s wife, and Crooks are ostracized and/or objectified at some point within the book. When these characters are objectified and/or ostracized, they tend to lose focus in their character

Has there ever been a time where you felt that you did not fit in? A time where you felt isolated from your friends for a specific circumstance? Oppression is still alive, and still occurs on a daily basis. The novella Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck deals with two migrant workers trying to get a hold of a stable farming job to pursue their life dream. Just as that dream is in their reach, George cannot stop Lennie from the active cycle of mistakes that take place. Oppression is the struggle for a human being not to be judged by their skin color, nationality, gender, or race. Two characters that show these evident qualities are Curley’s Wife and Crooks. In this novella, Curley’s Wife and Crooks is used by Steinbeck to symbolize the apparent theme of oppression through the characteristic of gender and race.