Curley's Wife: Feminist Flattening

Reality is messier than theory

Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is one of the better books set for examinations in schools. It can’t be termed a ‘classic’ yet: to achieve that status, Dr. Johnson wisely remarked that books must still be being read 150 years after being published. Short in length but big in ideas, however, this novella (published in 1937) looks set to pass the test in 2087.

Yet one of the characters who’s suffered most from ideology-infested teaching is Curley’s wife. E. M. Forster distinguished between flat and round characters. The former lack depth, don’t change and fail to surprise us - pantomime villains and heroes - whereas the latter are multi-faceted, internally conflicted. Although Steinbeck created Curley’s wife round, feminist theory flattens her out.

Steinbeck, like Shakespeare, captures the beauty of human complexity. And Curley’s wife, contrary to feminist theory, is not merely a victim but also a coy manipulator and, in her way, villain. Reducing her to either extreme is simplistic. She exploits the sexual impulse to get things her way because her physical beauty makes her both vulnerable and powerful.

Teaching students to blame ‘discrimination’ for this is intellectually lazy. In 1931, the president of The League of Women Voters, for example, went so far as to claim, in response to the 19th Amendment, that "nearly all discriminations have been removed." But that doesn’t mean Curley’s wife isn’t in a vulnerable position as the only woman on the ranch. Remember: this isn’t flat world.

She is called a ‘tart’ before she even makes her first appearance, but this preconception of her weakens as the narrative unfolds because Steinbeck shows the reader how lonely and frustrated she is. And yet Steinbeck complicates things by showing, in a scene of great profundity, how she relishes bullying Candy (disabled) and Crooks (black).

But nowhere is her complexity clearer than in her association with the colour red. She has rouged lips and cheeks, red mules with red ostrich feathers, and red fingernails. Red associates her with the girl in Weed, who wore a red dress, and therefore suggests the trouble she could get Lennie into: as George says, she’s ‘jail bait’, and red signals this danger.

Red is also significant because it was made fashionable by the female movie stars of the time. This reminds the reader that Curley’s wife believes she came close to having ‘been in the movies’. We might sympathise with her for having missed that opportunity, or we might pity her for being so naïve to have believed it in the first place.

But saying she simply likes red because movie stars have made it fashionable misses its deepest significance. Red signals fertility among primates, and a woman’s lips thicken at the peak of fertility and redden in response to sexual excitement. They thin with age, and Ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman women, recognising the increased sexual attractiveness to be gained by highlighting their lips, used wine and dyes to redden them. Now not only lipstick but also plumpers and fillers are commonplace.

This is why red was the typical pinup colour, and Curley’s wife’s ‘full, rouged lips’, representing what biologists call a ‘genital echo’, remind the reader of the temptation her being so ‘purty’ presents to Lennie.

When Lennie and George get dropped off too far from the ranch on their arrival and have to sleep on its outskirts, George tells Lennie off for carrying a dead mouse around to pet it. Lennie threatens to run away and live in cave, to which George responds,

You can jus’ as well go to hell," said George. "Shut up now."

The red light dimmed on the coals.

And that is precisely where he does go — the inferno of sexual impulse inflamed by isolation that awaits him on the ranch. "Darker'n hell in here," says Carlson as he walks in to the bunk house. “You look like' hell,” George tells Lennie after Curley smashes his face in. The guys “raised hell” in the whore house, and the giant rabbit Lennie hallucinates at the end tells him, "You ain't worth a greased jack-pin to ram you into hell.”

Curley’s wife, too, has her demonic side, as shown when she turns on Crooks for objecting to her coming into his room to find out how Curley’s hand got damaged:

"Well, you keep your place then, Nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain't even funny."

Crooks had reduced himself to nothing. There was no personality, no ego — nothing to arouse either like or dislike. He said, "Yes, ma'am," and his voice was toneless.

For a moment she stood over him, as though waiting for him to move so that she could whip at him again; but Crooks sat perfectly still, his eyes averted, everything that might be hurt drawn in.

This is a masterly portrayal of verbal aggression and the relishing of minor differences in power at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Not how she couldn’t string him up herself but could ‘get’ it done: her status as Curley’s wife, too, is round rather than flat.

Even her Heaven - her dream of being in the movies - has its hellish component. Students are usually taught missing out on it was where it all went wrong for her. But this misses Steinbeck’s deepest criticism of male attitudes to women:

"Coulda been in the movies, an' had nice clothes-all them nice clothes like they wear. An' I coulda sat in them big hotels, an' had pitchers took of me. When they had them previews I coulda went to them, an' spoke in the radio, an' it wouldn'ta cost me a cent because I was in the pitcher. An' all them nice clothes like they wear. Because this guy says I was a natural."

Ironically, even if - especially if - she’d been an ostensible success, been in the movies, had beautiful clothes, spoken on the radio, she would have become even more of a surface object, merely looked at rather than truly known or loved. But the deepest irony is that what she needed from Curley, who keeps his hand soft for her at night by wearing a glove full of vaseline all day while ignoring her, was a firmer hand and a softer heart.