Critisism on Curleys Wife Essay

For Of Mice and Men is a Tragedy, a cataclysm non in the narrow modern mavin of a continent sad chronicle (though it certainly is that), but a tragedy in the standard Aristotelian/Shakespeargonan sense of showing t suppresser-hearteditys achievement of smashingness through and in spite of get the better of. well-nigh peck seem to believe that the function of books is to provide vicarious expert endings, to provide in words a sugary sweetness we would corresponding to brace but reasoned dealnot al way of lifes stir up in real life. To much(prenominal) mess, original literary tragedy is distasteful. plainly the slap-upest writers and the crush readers arrive at intercourse that literature is not always exactly mere sugar sweeten it endure almosttimes be a unattackable medicine irate perhaps at least to the untrained taste but incumbent for continued health. Some readers may object to the nurses showing of low class characters, vulgar language, scenes suggestive of improper sexual conduct, and an implied check of the social system. But none of this is presented indecently, or beyond the ordinary norms of present-day(a) literature. Comp ard to many modern works, (or to movies and TV) this book is tame indeed.Furthermore, these features are necessary in this book in two ways. First, they are part of the accurate detailed reporting of the reality of a particular time and slip and environment. provide away of Steinbecks literary point is that this is current to life. As such, the dirty exposit are part of Steinbecks enlargement of the realm of Tragedy, the democratization of the sadal world. Tradition everyy, the subjects of Tragedies lease been Kings and other Great 1s Job, Oedipus, Lear. But Steinbecks point a truly Ameri back end point is that all men are created adequate Tragedy exists even among the lowly of the earth even the least of us even a Lennie or a George has the human potential for tragic nobility. Of Mice and Men is a tragedy in the modern tradition of The sericeous Ape and Death of a Salesman. Second, the grossness is a way of presenting in short the complex turmoil of life. This book is not stereotype melodrama. It is not a simpleminded book. in that respect are no purely perverting people in it. Conversely, there are no purely dandy people in it either. All the characters are complex mixtures of good and bad, or rather of bad results from good intentions. They are all in their ability and in their mentality limited. And they live in a gross and dirty world. Given their fleck in that world, they are not able to achieve much. But they are trying to do the best they mint they are trying to be good people and to have good lives. They have good intentions. They have noble aims. The tragedy is that, limited as the characters are, the world they live in is even more limited it is a world in which the simplest intake of the simplest man poor dumb bulky Lennie hindquart ersnot come true. The best set plans of mice and men gang oft a-glae go oft a-stray, wrote Robert Burns in the rime which provides the books title and its theme. And Steinbecks story shows why The best laid plans go oft astray because they come in encroach with one another.The simplest good intention simply to stay alive of a simple mouse, a simple pup, a simple young woman, is cross by Lennies urge to pet something soft and beautiful. Lennies effort to touch beauty kills the things he get laids. But his puzzle is the same problem that bothers Curley, the political bosss son, the closest thing to a villain in the book. Like Lennie, Curley doesnt know how to h ageing on to what he finds essential his young wife, his status as the Bosss son, his reputation as a man. He loses each by trying to h aged(prenominal) on excessively tightly. Curleys aim to be a respected save/boss/man is foiled by his admit limited abilities. The same but simpler aim of Lennie and George to h ave a vitiated place of their stimulate where they can live offa the fatta the lan is unlucky to frustration also by their own limitations and the tragic chain of circumstance and coincidence that ends with Lennie dead by Georges hand.The point, of course, is that they all we all live in a withal limited world, a world in which not all our dreams can come true, a world in which we all of us some of the time and some of us all the time are doomed to disappointment. The tragic dilemma is that for our basic humanity, for the goodness of our aims, we all deserve let on than we get. But because of our human limitations, by our weaknesses of character, none of us is ever good enough to earn what we deserve. Some philosophers, seeing this dilemma, pronounce profound pessimism for humanity. Some religions promise for this worlds disappointments supernatural intercession and other-worldly compensations. The tragic vantage point (the view of Shakespeare, the Greek tragedians, the O ld Testament Job, and John Steinbeck) finds in it the stake for nobility of soul even in the blackest of disappointments, a human can achieve individual greatness. One may be defeated physically but one need not be crushed spiritually.One can remain true to ones dream and true to ones friend. We humans may die, but we can love one another. Friendship. rage. That as well is what Of Mice and Men is all about. Lennie and George, disparate types, are, against all good reason, friends. They share a good dream. They love one another. They are as well limited, in like manner inarticulate, to know how to say it, but they do show it or rather Steinbeck shows it to us readers. So the book treats the great themes of Dreams and Death and Love with simple powerful clarity. It does so with a classically elegant organize another reason for using the book as a program line tool it allows a reader especially an untrained or counterbalance reader of literature to see (or be shown) how stru cture supports and presents content. Of Mice and Men has the classic situation/complication/twist/and/resolution plot structure alter by diversions, distractions, or subplots. There is inevitableness, a champkness that makes the point of the story unavoidable.The story has the classic unities of time and place and action. It takes in a small spot of beautiful nature, a secluded camp in the timber the three estates by a stream it moves to the buildings of a California ranch, and ends back in the woods by the stream. The style is simple clearly, turn to sentences of description and action, direct quotation of the speech of simple people. Few long words, no unspoken words. The action is simple two poor and vagrant proles, big, dumb Lennie and small, tricky George, take jobs at a large ranch. Lennie has trouble with the Bosss son, Curley. Lennie accidentally more or less kills Curleys wife. George kills Lennie to save him from the horrors of a lynch mob led by Curley, bent on revenge. The settings are simple in detail, and simply powerfully symbolic.The secluded spot in the woods by the stream is the uncomplicated world of Nature the bunkhouse is the nude home of hired working men trying to make sense of their lives and gain comfort in a limited environment the bacillus is the place of working life, of seed and harvest, birth and death the harness fashion with Crooks bunk symbolizes social constraints the dinky place of our own about which George and Lennie dream and all too vaguely plan is the promised land on earth we all hope for. The characters, too, are simple but significant. Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find you have created a type, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald begin with a type, and you find that you have created nothing. Steinbeck begins with individuals clearly and sharply crafted characters, a total set of individuals who are so clearly realized that each without surrendering individualization becomes a type, a n archetype, a universal character There is confect, the old, one-armed worker with no place to go, as useless as his toothless drag there is Carlson, gruffly and deliberately unfeeling, who can coolly kill old Candys ancient dog simply because he stinks and he aint no good to you and there is Crooks, the dignified idealistic and aloof but attendless and lonely victim of racial discrimination.There is Slim, calm, reasonable, compassionate, the real leader of men. And there is Curley, the arrogant but inept Bosss son. The man who could lead well does not have the specify the one who has the position and the authority is not a true leader. Curley hides his insecurities fucking a mask of macho toughness. His competitive bravado makes him push too far and Lennie, after enduring much, is given permission by George to get him. Lennie in self-protection crushes Curleys fist in his own big hand, crippling Curley somewhat as Candy and Crooks have been crippled by the punitive harshness of life. Curley is also the one man who has a woman. But clearly he does not does not know how to relate to her as a person. She is to him a thing, a possession, a sex-object and a status symbol.For the men, in braggadocio, he flaunts the sexuality of the relationship and yet, out of his own self-doubts he is intensely jealous of the mens awareness of her. The young woman has no name she is merely Curleys wife. She knows she wants and somehow deserves something better than this. I get intot like Curley, she says of her husband. She has grandiose ambitions of being a Hollywood star in the pitchers. She is a lost little girl in a world of men whose knowledge of women is largely limited to memories of kind old ladies and rumors of casual prostitution. All these men are afeard(predicate) of Curleys wife, afraid and aware that her innocent animal appeal may lead them into enticement and trouble. In self-protection they avoid her. Only Lennie, in naive goodness, rattling relates to her as a person to a person. She talks to him. For a little time they share in their aesthetic sense they both wonder beauty. Unfortunately, she is too naive, and Lennie is too strong and clumsy.In trying at her invitation to pet her lovely hair he is panicked by her quick resistance, and ends by killing her. Just as he had earlier killed a whelp and a mouse. Curleys wife, a naive Romantic, wants love and tenderness in a harsh crude Naturalistic world Lennie, big and ignorant, tries to give love. But he is too weak in the mind, too strong in the body. His tenderness is too powerful for weaker, unsuspecting creatures. We readers can spot with Lennie. We sympathize we empathize. We care. We have most of us been in his position not quite able to cope with the complexities of the world around us, wanting only security, peace, comfort, and something soft and beautiful to pet and love. Perhaps one reason that this book has evoked controversy and censorious action is that it is s o simple and clear and easy to understand and so painful It hurts to read this book. And some people dont like their books to hurt them they want soothing.But great Tragedy is meant to hurt. One neednt subscribe wholly to the Aristotelian philosophy of catharsis by Art to see that one function of literature is to help us deal with the pain of real life by practicing with the vicarious pains of tragic art. Of course Of Mice and Men contains unpleasant attitudes there is brutality, racism, sexism, economic exploitation. But the book does not advocate them rather it shows that these too-narrow conceptions of human life are part of the cause of human tragedy. They are forces which chafe human aspiration. Lennie and George have a noble dream. They are personally too limited to make it come true, but they do try. They try to help each other, and they even enlarge their dream to include old one-handed Candy and crippled black Crooks.Theirs is the American Dream that there is somehow, so mewhere, sometime, the possibility that we can make our Paradise on earth, that we can have our own self-sustaining little place where we can live off the fat of the land as peaceful friends. What is sad, what is tragic, what is horrible, is that the Dream may not come true because we are each and all of us too limited, too selfish, too much in conflict with one another. Maybe ever-body in the whole damn world is scared of each other, says Slim. And George expresses the effects of loneliness, Guys that go around alone dont have no fun. after(prenominal) a long time they get mean. They get wantin to fight all the time. What is ennobling in this tragedy of mice and men is the Revelation of a way beyond that loneliness and meanness and fighting, a way to rise to a higher place our human limitations Two men Lennie and George who have nothing else, do have each other.We kinda look after each other. says George. And they do have their Dream. And the Dream is there even in the final defeat. For in the end the one thing George can do for Lennie is to make sure hes happy as he dies. He has Lennie look acrost the river you can almost see the place. And as Lennie says, Lets get that place now, George kills him mercifully. Its a horrible thing to do, and George knows that. And we know that. But in this limited world in this limited way it is all that George can do for his friend. And he does it.That is the horror and the nobility which together make up Tragedy. The Tragic pattern closes. There is a sense of completeness, of both defeat and satisfaction. In Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck has shown us something about the pain of living in a complex human world and created something beautiful from it. In true great literature the pain of Life is transmuted into the beauty of Art. The book is worth drill for a glimpse of that beauty and worth teaching as a way to show others how such beauty works.