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Similarities Between Of Mice And Men And Curley's Wife

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In this essay, I will be analysing the similarities and differences between John Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ and Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’. I will be focusing on Lady Macbeth and Curley’s wife. In Jacobean England women were seen as sex slaves and possessions to a man. Their role in society is to be a housewife and take care of children. Women weren’t powerful at all in Jacobean England, they weren’t allowed a job and if there husband didn’t want them he could sell her and keep the money.
Of Mice and Men was written in the 1930s women were thought of as a property of a man. They weren’t very powerful at all and couldn’t even wear their hair down if they were married. Lady Macbeth isn’t the typical 16th century woman. We know this because she likes violence; she said she would have ‘dashed [her child’s] brains out’ she is very manipulative and controlling. She is a victim with no identity and victim of her own ambitious the same as Curley’s Wife but in a less …show more content…

John Steinbeck describes her in a negative way by only telling us the bad things she does and only other people’s opinion of her which are negative. John Steinbeck also uses pathetic fallacy to describe Curley’s wife. He explains that ‘sunshine in the doorway was cut off by Curley’s wife’ then at the end of the novella when she dies the sunshine in on her dead body the quote that tells us this is ‘ and the sound stopped and movement stopped for much more than a moment’ Curley’s wife is also presented as sexually promiscuous we knew this by the quote ‘ she put her hand behind her back and leaned against the door frame so that her body was thrown forward’ Steinbeck encourages us to think that she is unhappy with her marriage also he puts comments off other characters in the story, for example Candy refers to their marriage by saying ‘They have only been married two weeks’ and also says I think Curley has married a tart’ which shows other characters don’t like

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Curley’s Wife is depicted as morally ambiguous because she uses her sexual appeal to lure men into her life, but in her point of view, she is trying to repel her loneliness. Curley’s Wife likes to use her physical appeal to get to know other men. To make her husband jealous, she is very seductive towards her husband's workers. This is

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When she met Curley she reluctantly married him, he was her ticket out of her desperate life. She never married him out of love and romance, just out of hopelessness. Their entire marriage has been distant. She is property in his eyes, he tries to control who she talks to and interacts with, he treats her with the slightest of respect, and is a disloyal husband. Only after weeks of their marriage he’s already going to “cat houses.”

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Curley’s wife is finds herself in an unlucky situation while attempting to befriend the “gentle” giant, Lennie, adding on to her already unfortunate past. She converses to Lennie of all her past plans, saying “‘I coulda made somethin’ of myself.’” Curley’s wife then reveals her backstory, how she nearly did make something of herself, with an actor or movie star husband, not some short-tempered, condescending control-freak. Following this, she dies because Lennie didn’t want her alerting the others to their location. What’s more, as readers follow the story, people see her as, states Candy, a “floozy,” which influences the opinion of how Curley’s wife is portrayed, a horrible, good-for-nothing whore.

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