Discussing Curley's Wife

In this post, focusing on part 2 in Of Mice and Men, I will discuss Curley's wife. The first thing that I would like to mention is that she has no name. Steinbeck has already shown us how women were viewed back then. Because she has no name, she is viewed as unimportant to others. If she had a name, we would have known that people actually cared about who she was as a person, but no one even tries to give her name to call her by! She is also the only woman on the ranch, surrounded by men who are viewed as important, strong people who do hard labor all day long. Maybe she feels intimidated by them because of this, so she tries to make herself seem more important by showing off how pretty she is in attempts of getting the "important" men to like her. Here, it says that she, "...put her hands behind her back and leaned against the door frame so that her body was thrown forward" (31). This is proof that she knows she is pretty, and uses it to her advantage. We can tell her tricks work on Lennie when his, "...eyes moved down her body..." (31), and he, "...watched her, fascinated" (31). Something else I noticed about her is that after Slim told her he, "'...seen him goin' in your house'"(32), she, "...was suddenly apprehensive. ' 'Bye, boys,' she called into the bunkhouse, and she hurried away" (32). I'm thinking that she might be anxious because earlier, we saw how angry and fired up Curley was at Lennie, so maybe he gets that way with his wife. Even though this isn't apart of OMAM, I was thinking about how in Chains, Madam Lockton was beat by her husband, and how it might be similar to how Curley treats his wife in this story because this was a common problem back then and even today, especially when men are drunk. I think Curley's wife's role in the story is to give readers like us an idea of how women were viewed, and how they were compared to other people (stereotypes such as being weak, unimportant, and useless compared to men) in the 1930's.