t’s been a good 6 years since I was in Freshman English class. Thank God, though. I remember that room would always reek so bad, because all the Drama Club students would marinate in there during lunchtime, and apparently they think arm deodorant is optional, which was pretty nasty. Anyways, It’s been over 2,190 days since we first cracked open Of Mice and Men, and I still think about Curley’s Wife all of the time.
Like, while everyone else thought she was some huge whore, I was busy feeling sympathetic for the poor girl. Like, I even expressed my sadness for her, to the ridicule of the entire class, including my teacher! Like, what the hell? Here I am, in the beginnings of adolescence, my self-esteem’s fragile like an eggshell, and my own teacher basically takes a sh*t on my opinion.
But, before I get too ahead of myself, I should get you caught up on Curley’s Wife: She wasn’t given a name, because she’s supposed to be more of symbol for something, I guess. But, that’s not important. What’s important is how I feel about her. And, I feel like she was given the sh*t-end of the stick, and that she’s super misjudged by everyone around her, even outside the book itself.
All she wanted was some attention, people to talk to. Which is completely part of human nature, so you can’t really blame her. I mean, she’s trapped on some boring dusty ranch all day, and her nutcase husband won’t allow anybody to speak to her. And, since everyone knows Curley is the boss’s son, they try to avoid her like hellfire in order to keep their jobs. Pretty crappy, huh?
All of the ranch hands think she’s a “Tart”, which is an olde tyme word for skankbag. Just because she wears makeup, and flirts with all the men on the ranch. Which sounds pretty skanky, but she only wanders around flirting with people because she’s lonely. She knows she’s pretty, so she tries to use it as a hook, trying to catch someone to give her the attention that she’s desperate for.
I think the reason she seems so mean at the beginning of the novel, is because she’s f*cking annoyed. Wouldn’t you be? Imagine being confined to a ranch, stuck in a loveless marriage with a mentally abusive husband who tries to ensure that you wouldn’t have contact with anyone besides him. I’m sure it’d be like you were constantly PMSing, too.
On top of all that, she also feels like her dreams were crushed. She wanted to become a big movie star one day, and even had some dude give her an offer to head over to Hollywood. She was supposed to just wait for his letter, and then she could come. She didn’t realize that the dude was probably just hitting on her with a phony story. Well, the letter never came, and that’s why she had to marry Curley.
She was just like a caged bird. She wanted to fly, but was never allowed to. She only acted the way she did due to the predicament she was caught in. Her behavior was all normal human responses to what she was forced to experience. Hopefully, this helps you realize that Curley’s Wife wasn’t a terrible person, or a skeezeball. She was just another victim in the story, and she gets her neck snapped for it.
