Curley’s wife Part (a) What methods does Steinbeck use to present Curley’s wife and the attitudes of others to her? Steinbeck uses Curley’s wife and the physical description of her to portray how lonely she is on the ranch and how this need for company is considered an annoyance by the ranch workers. Steinbeck’s description of Curley’s wife itself suggests she has a lot of spare time on the ranch and spends most of it alone working on her looks. Her “heavily made up” features and “hair hung in little rolled clusters” imply she is perhaps insecure of her looks. This further suggests her need to overcompensate in her image as an attempt to impress the ranch workers and her husband.
Almost everyone on the ranch is lonely and she symbolizes this. The audience would come to believe she is a weak isolated character however, the men are fearful of her. She is the wife of their boss. She has power and this power creates fear among the ranch workers. She is both in charge and screaming for attention.
She, “did not like him as much as a bride should like her bridegroom,” (Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm). This alone breaks the rules of the fairy tales we all know because there is a mention of whether the girl likes her suitor or not. In most fairy tales marriage is a prize, not something that has to do with actually liking someone. The girl then goes to her fiancé’s house and hears a bird screeching that she should turn back because she is in a murderer’s house. After exploring the dark home, the girl discovers and old woman.
However, as the story progresses, we learn that this is only one of many sides to a very lonely woman. The readers sympathy for this character also changes throughout the novel, as her secrets are revealed and the real Curley's Wife is found. Curley's Wife is a very complex character. The reader's first impression of her is created before she actually appears in the book. We find out what the workers think of Curley's Wife through Candy when George and Lennie first arrive at the ranch.
Curly's wife is so lost, lonely and insignificant that Steinbeck does not even give her a name. She spends the novel trying to find company under the guise of looking for her husband. Curly is in fact an intensely abusive person with a major case of small-guy complex. The irony is that while she pretends to be looking for Curly, she is actually trying to avoid him. The men on the ranch fear Curly's wife.
Her life on a ranch in the 1930s, during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl is even worse because she is the only woman. Her life is surrounded my men who give her no respect. Throughout the story she is disrespected by them and after a series of events unfold, she ends up caught in a situation that she cannot escape. Curley’s wife is introduced into the book by the men as petty, cruel, and conceited. The men make her seem like she was a bad person, but in reality she was just lonely.
I believe that when they first got married there was some kind of love in their relationship, but when they realized they could not conceive a child Don Elias blamed his wife. Even though it was most likely he was the infertile one, he treated her as if all she was good for was to take care of him like a maid. This is what made her a hard, bitter old woman. Dona Matilida believes it was her fault, and feels guilty about not being able to provide him with a child he so greatly desired. This caused her to turn a blind eye to what he was doing around town with other women.
Curley’s wife essay Curley’s wife is a character of wide complex and diversity. Her role slowly unwinds and develops throughout the course of the novel, constantly changing the reader’s opinion of her due to her ambiguous characteristics. We see through the novel that in 1930’s America women were generally treated with contempt through the course of the novel and as a general theme. Steinbeck depicts females as ‘trouble makers’ who bring ruin on men; Curley’s wife who walks the ranch as a temptress, seems to be a prime example of this destructive tendency. Women were looked upon as inferior; and incapable of the skills men were, so a woman’s role was mainly housework and nothing with manual requirement.
After giving up her dream of being an actress, she settles down with a man she doesn’t even like and begins to wallow in her dissatisfaction with the choices she has made. “’I ain’t used to livin’ like this. I coulda made somethin’ of myself’” (88), she says. Curley’s attitude toward his wife and the other men on the ranch worsens as time goes by, driving the woman away. She wanders from building to building claiming that she’s looking for Curley, when she actually just wants to have a conversation with anyone.
Curley’s Wife’s loneliness is caused by her husband. Curley’s Wife is lonely because she did not follow her dream, Curley treats her as a possession, and the guys on the ranch avoid her because she is Curley’s Wife. “Coulda been in the movies, an’