personality seems to have gotten worse lately. He then tells George,

[Curley] got married a couple of weeks ago. Wife lives over in the boss's house. Seems like Curley is cockier'n ever since he got married. (Steinbeck 13).

According to Candy, Curley and his wife have been married for two weeks. It is important to note that Candy and George are engaging in casual conversation. The accuracy of Candy's comment is questionable, and it's more than likely an estimation or a hyperbole. One can assume that the statement "couple of weeks" means anywhere from one month to exactly two weeks ago. Candy proceeds to inform George that Curley wears a glove full of vaseline to keep his hand soft for his wife and claims that she has already "got the eye." George is astonished by this comment and says,

Yeah? Married two weeks and got the eye? Maybe that's why Curley's pants is full of ants. (Steinbeck 14).

Once again, the length of Curley and his wife's marriage is mentioned. George is not familiar with Curley and his wife, so he is simply reiterating what the old swamper told him. What surprises George is that Curley's wife is already sick of their marriage and entertaining the possibility of hooking up another man. While the exact amount of time that Curley and his wife have been married is debatable, the audience can safely assume that it has been less than a month.

We learn, despite the moniker of "Curley's Wife", thus denoting that she is a mere possession of Curley's, that she is a human being with hopes, dreams and passions independent of her domineering and jealous husband.  We learn just how incredibly lonely she is, and how her seemingly flirtatious advances towards the men on the ranch is more of a quest to fill the void of loneliness that her position as "Curley's Wife" has put her in, rather than seeking a romantic relationship, as the men fear.  We also learn that she is very much to blame for her present position because of her impulsive decision to marry Curley as a means to escape from her mundane existence at home.  Finally, we get a glimpse into her fantasy of being an actress, which only serves to magnify the tragedy of her existence, because it is just that---a mere fantasy with little hope of ever being attained.

One of the things we learn about Curley's wife in John Steinbeck's novel 'Of Mice and Men' is that she is unrealistic about her potential. She has a dream that is now unrealistic as she taken another choice - to marry Curley. It would have been unusual in Great Depression times for a woman to break out of a marriage - especially for such a fleeting and glamorous role as a movie star. Sadly, she even thinks she is 'actress material' thinking (or choosing to believe) that she has been made real offers. Basically, it was probably just a line to get girls. Unfortunately too, the movies are now talkies and her accent/diction would let her down. She's so gullible she believes all the lines she is spun by these guys.She pins her lost chances on her mother's 'interference' from which we learn about her lack of maturity.

When Crooks and Lennie are talking to Candy about their dream of having land in Crooks’s room in the stable, Curley’s wife comes in.  We have already been introduced to her.  The men on the ranch avoid her because they think she is trouble.  They worry that she is a tease.  Her entrance seems to confirm this reputation.

"Any you boys seen Curley?"

They swung their heads toward the door. Looking in was Curley's wife. Her face was heavily made up. Her lips were slightly parted. She breathed strongly, as though she had been running. (Ch. 4) 

Curley’s wife, Candy, and Crooks all have one thing in common—they are lonely.  They were getting along well until Curley’s wife came in.  She tells them that all men are scared, so she can get along with one man, but not a group. 

Curley’s wife uses the advantage of her status to be rude to the other men. She is racist to Crooks.  He was opening up to the other men, disarmed by Lennie’s honesty and genuine nature, but she turned him into a shell again. 

Candy stands up to her, telling her to get out.  She turns on him too, telling him the only reason he is hanging out with Crooks (and Lennie) is because he has no money. 

Curley's wife laughed at him. "Baloney," she said. "I seen too many you guys. If you had two bits in the worl', why you'd be in gettin' two shots of corn with it and suckin' the bottom of the glass. I know you guys." (Ch. 4) 

When the conversation turns to how Curley got hurt, she gets angry.  The story is that he got his had caught in a machine.  She knows this is not true, and asks Lennie about the bruises on his face.  Curley’s wife is irritated that they are not telling her the truth.  She teases Lennie, calling him “Machine.”  Candy tells her to leave Lennie alone.  Curley's wife zigzags from wanting to include herself in the men's lives because she is also lonely to belittling and condemning them.

While the reader often feels sorry for Curley's wife, her treatment of Crooks engenders no sympathy.  She treats him terribly, looking down on him because of his race.  He tries to tell her to leave, and she tells him he has no right to because he is black.

In plotting his book, John Steinbeck had a complex and sensitive problem with the character of Curley's wife. It was inevitable that she would be killed by Lennie so that he would have to run away and later be killed by his friend George. That was the essence of the story. Naturally the reader would feel a certain amount of sympathy for a pretty girl whose life is snuffed out so abruptly and needlessly. But the author did not want to undercut the sympathy the reader would feel for Lennie when he gets killed in the last chapter by his trusted friend. Steinbeck uses the fourth chapter in part to show Curley's wife in a bad light, so that she will not seem to be nothing more than an innocent young victim of a brutal murder when it happens.

Curley's wife is trouble. She intrudes into Crooks's room and refuses to leave. She behaves flirtatiously, creating the impression that she is promiscuous and immoral and that she doesn't care about what trouble she causes for Lennie, Candy or Crooks.

Curley's wife is vicious. She attacks Crooks with abusive language. At one point she says:

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

The author's intention is obviously to make the girl look bad--but Lennie's crime has to look bad too; otherwise George would not seem justified in shooting him. So after Curley's wife is dead in the next chapter, Steinbeck softens her image with the following description:

Curley's wife lay with a half-covering of yellow hay. And the meanness and the plannings and the discontent and the ache for attention were all gone from her face. She was very pretty and simple, and her face was sweet and young.

As readers we end up feeling sorry for three characters--Curley's wife, Lennie, and George. What made Steinbeck an important writer was that he had more than just talent; he had a heart filled with sympathy for all humanity, and especially the humble and oppressed.

Curley’s wife’ loneliness is demonstrated by her dialogue.

Curley’s wife does not have a name, which demonstrates her isolation and lower status.  She is lonely, and spends a lot of time “looking” for Curley, because this is socially acceptable behavior.  She can interact with others if she is just looking for her husband. 

The farmhands feel threatened by her presence.  In fact, almost everyone on the farm is.  There seem to be no other females, and no one for her to befriend.  The men are standoffish or cautious when she is around, and accuse her of being a tart when she isn’t.

Curley’s wife’s reaction to Lennie and Candy demonstrates her loneliness.

"Well, I ain't giving you no trouble. Think I don't like to talk to somebody ever' once in a while? Think I like to stick in that house alla time?" (4)

Her words are both placating and accusatory.  She wants to diffuse the tension, but she also does not want to be there.  The ranch hands are her last resort in a search for companionship, and she resents them for that.

Curley's wife is aware that the men consider her trouble.  She is annoyed by that fact.  She fears that she will spend the rest of her life alone, ignored by them and her husband.

Curley's wife is depicted as one of the loneliest characters on the ranch, and she is unhappily married to the insecure, domineering Curley. Curley's wife despises her husband, who is controlling and oppressive. As the only woman on the farm, Curley's wife does not have anyone to confide in, and the men purposely avoid her because they do not want to lose their jobs.

Curley's wife reveals her dream of becoming a movie star at several different moments in the story. In chapter 4, Curley's wife walks into Crooks's small room attached to the barn and interrupts the men having a conversation. When they attempt to dismiss her, Curley's wife responds by saying:

Whatta ya think I am, a kid? I tell ya I could of went with shows. Not jus’ one, neither. An’ a guy tol’ me he could put me in pitchers (Steinbeck 38)

Curley's wife's comment suggests that she dreams of becoming a movie star. Apparently, she was told by someone in show business that she was talented enough to act in movies.

In chapter 5, Curley's wife walks into the barn and starts a conversation with Lennie, who is worried about George punishing him for accidentally killing the dog. Curley's wife once again reveals her dream by telling Lennie:

’Nother time I met a guy, an’ he was in pitchers. Went out to the Riverside Dance Palace with him. He says he was gonna put me in the movies. Says I was a natural. Soon’s he got back to Hollywood he was gonna write to me about it...I never got that letter...I always thought my ol’ lady stole it (Steinbeck 44)

Curley's wife resents her mother for possibly stealing her letters from Hollywood and holds onto the dream that she will one day be contacted to act in a movie.

In addition to becoming an actress, Curley's wife also dreams of leaving her pugnacious, domineering husband. She admits to Lennie that Curley is not a nice man and regrets marrying him. Similar to the other men on the farm, Curley's wife feels trapped and is unable to attain her dreams.

Curley's wife, who was angry because Crooks told her to leave his room, tells Crooks to shut up because she could have him lynched. "Of Mice and Men" was one of the few books of its time to deal with the plight of African Americans during the depression. Although Crooks is obviously good at his job and an asset to the ranch, he is still forced to live in a separate room and cannot associate with the other ranch hands, who are white. His main entertainment is reading books and so he is lonely. He tells Lennie and Curley's wife to leave him alone, not only because he feels his space has been violated, but because he is also afraid of having a white woman, especially Curley's wife, discovered in his room. Curley's wife sees this is one of the few places on the ranch where she can feel superior and let's Crooks know it.

In chapter 5, Curley's wife enters the barn and has a conversation with Lennie, who is upset that he accidentally killed his puppy. Curley's wife unburdens herself to Lennie, and the reader gains valuable insight into her background. According to Curley's wife, she hates her husband, who is aggressive and domineering. Curley's wife says that she met a guy in the "pitchers," and he told her that he could put her in the movies. Unfortunately, she never received a letter from him and still believes that her mother stole it. Curley's wife then says,

Well, I wasn't gonna stay no place where I couldn't get nowhere or make something of myself, an' where they stole your letters. I ast her if she stole it, too, an' she says no. So I married Curley. Met him out to the Riverside Dance Palace that same night (Steinbeck, 88).

In Chapter Five, Curley's wife enters the barn and has a conversation with Lennie, who initially refuses to speak to her because George prohibits him. When Lennie tells Curley's wife that he is not allowed to speak to her, she laments about her lonely situation by saying, "Why can’t I talk to you? I never get to talk to nobody. I get awful lonely" (Steinbeck, 43). Curley's wife goes on to say,

"I get lonely...You can talk to people, but I can’t talk to nobody but Curley. Else he gets mad. How’d you like not to talk to anybody?" (Steinbeck, 43).

Curley's wife is married to an extremely domineering, possessive man, who refuses to allow her to mingle with the other men out of fear that she will cheat on him with one of the laborers. As a result of Curley's aggressive, vindictive personality, the workers on the ranch refuse to speak to Curley's wife out of fear that they will lose their jobs. Curley's wife is also the only female on the ranch, which makes her situation even more difficult and lonely. After lamenting about her lonely situation, Curley's wife continues to complain about her unhealthy marriage before she tells Lennie that she could have been in the movies. Overall, Curley's wife is one of the loneliest people on the farm and expresses her feelings of despair to Lennie in chapter five.

When we first hear about Curley's wife in the story we hear from Candy that she is "a tart." Whit then tells George that he should stick around to meet Curley's wife because when he does he will "see plenty" because "she ain't concealin' nothin'." Whit also says that she has "the eye goin' all the time on everybody." George then says that Curley's wife is "a jail bait all set on the trigger." These are all very negative descriptions. Our opinions of the character are formed before we even meet her. We are led to believe that she is flirtatious, promiscuous, and dangerous. This reflects how women of this era were often defined, from a male perspective, by their physicality and sexuality.

When we first see Curley's wife, she is described as having "full, rouged lips" and as being "heavily made up." Her fingernails are "red," and she wears "red mules on her feet," on the insteps of which she has "little bouquets of red ostrich feathers." The predominance of red in this description of Curley's Wife, in combination with the sustained description of her physical appearance, suggests once more that she is a character defined by her physicality. The color "red" even suggests that this physicality is dangerous, or at least is perceived to be by the men on the ranch. This impression i s compounded when Curley's Wife leans "against the doorframe so that her body [is] thrown forward."

Curley's wife uses her physicality throughout the story to flirt with the men on the ranch. At first, it might be easy to criticize her for this and to disregard her as meddlesome and deliberately provocative. However, this would be to miss the point. The point is that Curley's wife, as a woman brought up in the first decades of the twentieth century, has been conditioned to believe that the only way she can make an impression is by using her physicality and sexuality. This idea is put very well by Steinbeck in a letter he wrote to an actress who was playing the part of Curley's wife in a stage adaptation of the story.

In this letter (see the link below), Steinbeck writes of Curley's wife that "no man has ever considered her as anything except a girl to try to make." He also writes that she "knows instinctively that if she is to be noticed at all, it will be because some one finds her sexually desirable." This point (that women are diminished and conditioned by the sexist, misogynistic attitudes of a patriarchal society) is the point that Steinbeck tries to convey through the character of Curley's wife.

In the novel, Of Mice and Men, Curley’s wife represents many things.  She represents the role of women during the time period.  Women were considered to be property and trophies.  This idea is stressed in the fact that she was referred to as Curley’s wife, and did not even warrant a name throughout the novel.  Curley’s reaction to her death at the end of the novel also stresses the fact that women were property.  He was upset with her death, not because he loved her, but because it was a loss to his social status.  He avenged her death like a farmer would for a stolen piece of cattle.  Curley’s wife also represents the theme of loneliness.  She is the only female on the ranch and she is secluded.  She flirts with the other ranch hands because her beauty is all she has to attract attention from others.  Her marriage to Curley is a typical one in the fact that it was a financial decision versus one of love.  Steinbeck’s story takes place during The Great Depression and all of his characters represent a particular facet of life during that era.  Years can be spent discussing all the things represented by the character of Curley’s wife.

As a young woman who has supposedly aspired to be an actress, but failed, Curley's wife seduced him in the hopes of bettering her life by leaving her small town while hardly knowing Curley whom she has met at a dance in hopes of finding a better life somewhere else.  Knowing that Curley is the son of the boss of a large ranch leads her to believe that her life will be broader than it has been in her small hometown.  However, she is disappointed in both her marriage and in the environment in which she finds herself.  Seeking thrills elsewhere, Curley's wife loiters around the bunkhouse, and enters on the false pretext of trying to find her husband. For walking about a ranch, Curley's wife is certainly dressed inappropriately: 

She had full, rouged lips and wide-spaced eyes, heavily made up.  Her fingernails were red.  Her hair hung in little rolled clusters, like sausages.  She wore a cotton house dress and red mules, on the insteps of which were little bouquets of red ostrich feathers.

A tart is a woman of low character; in the 1930's, a woman who dressed as Curley's wife, and who approached men in a location where no other women go, would clearly be viewed as a tart.  In addition, she flirts with the men:  "She smiled archly and twitched her body."  She encourages Lennie to feel her brushed hair, tempting him as she is aware of his diminished mental capacity.

In John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, there is no place women, who are simply Eves, causing men to become aggressive toward other men, cheating them of their possibilities of friendship and fraternity, a world structured around brotherly bonds.

Representative of the temptress, the Eve who ruins the halcyon environment of the Eden-like pond and surrounding greenery, Curley's wife is pathetically lonely after having had to abandon her dreams of being a movie-star--"I tell ya I could of went with shows."

Out of this loneliness, much like the loneliness of the bindle stiffs themselves, Curley's wife comes around the bunkhouse.  However, she holds a power that the men do not:  she poses as the temptress with

full, rouged lips and wide-spaced eyes, heavily made up.  Her fingernails were red.  Her hair hung in little rolled clusters, like sausages.  She wore a cotton house dress and red mules, on the insteps of which were little bouquets of red ostrich feathers. 'I'm looking for Curley,' she said.  Her voice had a nasal, brittle quality.

...She put her hands behind her back and leaned against the door frame so that her body was thrown forward.

When George tells her that Curley has not been there, she flirts with him,

"If he ain't, I guess I better look some place else," she said playfully....She smiled archly and twitched her body.

After this, George expresses his assessment of her and tells Lennie,

"I seen 'em poison before, but I never seen no piece of jail bait worse than her.  You leave her be."

Curley's wife uses her power as the wife of the son of the boss to be cruel and to intimidate,

"I seen too many you guys.  If you had two bits in the worl', why you'd be in gettin' two shots of corn with it and suckin' the bottom of the glass.  I know you guys." 

When she asks Lennie about his bruises and Lennie just says that Curley had his hand caught in a machine, she laughs and says,

"O.K. Machine. I'll talk to you later. I like machines."

"I'm glad you bust up Curley a little bit.  He got it comin; to him.  Sometimes I'd like to bust him myself."

She later uses her sensuality to threaten Crooks,

"Listen, N--....You know what I could do to you if you open your trap?...I could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain't even funny."

and to control Lennie,

She looked up at Lennie, and she made a small grand gesture with her arm and hand to show that she could act.  The fingers trailed after her leading wrist, and her little finger stuck out grandly from the rest.

Lennie sighed deeply....

...she ran her fingers over the top of her head.  "Some people got kinda coarse hair," she said complacently...."Feel right aroun' there an' see how soft it is."

An attractive woman whom Candy says "has the eye" and George calls "jail-bait," Curley's wife is seductive, cruel, and intimidating. Her behavior, born of her terrible aloneness, acts as the Eve in Steinbeck's world of men.  For, it is she who spoils the dream of George and Lennie, a dream first expressed in the peace of the Eden-like clearing with the pool. 

A good example of indirect characterization for Curley's wife is found in the conversation between George and a minor character called Whit.

George dealt and Whit picked up his cards and examined them. "Seen the new kid yet?" he asked.

"What kid?" George asked.

"Why, Curley''s new wife."

"Yeah, I seen her."

'Well, ain't she a looloo?"

"I ain't seen that much of her," said George.

Whit laid down his cards impressively. "Well, stick around an' keep your eyes open. You'll see plenty. She ain't concealin' nothing. I never seen nobody like her. She got the eye goin' all the time on everybody. I bet she even gives the stable buck the eye. I don't know what the hell she wants."

Most of the men have the wrong impression of Curley's wife. They think she is promiscuous and unfaithful to her husband Curley. Whit's description shows she is very young. He calls her a kid. Although Whit may not give a true picture of Curley's wife's character, he does give a good impression of the way she behaves. She is always being flirtatious with the men. She dresses in ways that could be considered provocative. It is because she is an inexperienced "kid" that she is creating the wrong impression among the men, including George, who warns Lennie to stay away from her because she is "jailbait," because she is trouble.

Curley's wife also characterizes herself indirectly as having a cruel streak when she frightens Crooks in his room by suggesting that she could have him lynched just by telling the other men that Crooks molested her. She characterizes herself indirectly when she is revealing her dreams of Hollywood stardom to Lennie in the barn, shortly before he accidentally kills her. She is a dumb, totally inexperienced high-school dropout with her head full of illusions from watching movies and reading movie magazines. 

Steinbeck presents Curley's wife in a complex manner over the course of the novella, Of Mice and Men.

Curley’s wife is defined in the early part of the book as simply looking for Curley.  In Chapter 2,  her sexuality captures Lennie's attention. Steinbeck uses this as part of her character, especially evident in the way she seeks to hold the mens' attention on the ranch.  In chapters 4 and 5, Steinbeck develops depth to Curley's wife.  In the absence of any substantial happiness, she is driven by the need to be noticed. It is almost as if her desire to be noticed by someone, anyone, will make up for the gaping misery that is her life.  

Curley's wife acquires depth when we see how unhappy she really is.  Her life on the ranch is the source of her misery. In her last moments in chapter 5, it becomes clear that as a teenager, she hoped to be in “pitchers" and believes that she can still “make something” of herself.  In the hopes of feeling validated, she confides in Lennie and when she shows him how soft her hair is, offering it to his touch, her neck is broken.

Steinbeck's exploration of Curley's wife reaches its most powerful as he describes her dead body.  While the actual death takes place very quickly, Steinbeck strikes a distinct note of reflection in his writing style. He uses images of nature to communicate the passing of life. Details such as “The sun streaks were high on the wall by now, and the light was growing soft” are complemented with “the air was dusky.”  These details show how Curley’s wife, one who sought to stand out so much, has blended into the natural setting. This is enhanced with the description with the dead body.  Steinbeck talks about how her natural beauty was amplified because “all the meanness and all the plannings and the discontent and the ache for attention were all gone from her face.”  Death is shown to be the ultimate equalizer, a force that reduces all life’s clamoring.  In doing so, Steinbeck's exploration of Curley's wife transforms her in death to something more than she could have ever been in life.

In John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Curley's wife is a static or flat character: she does not change throughout the story. She drives the plot forward, but is not well-developed in this story of two drifters who dream of making enough money during the Great Depression to buy their own home.

Curley and his wife are newly married. Curley has brought his bride to his new home, situated on his father's ranch. He is very jealous and insists that his wife stay away from the men—and that the men stay away from her.

Curley's wife's character is not deeply developed: she is not even given a first name name. And she is not an example of someone disenfranchised by the devastated economy in the 1930s in the U.S. She has nice clothes and enough to eat. Her only problem is that she is bored. In her loneliness, she ultimately ends up talking with the ranch-hands.

George has been very clear that Lennie needs to stay away from Curley's wife because they have already had some problems with Lennie and girls. Lennie doesn't mean any harm, but he is mentally challenged and is sometimes too rough. They find themselves on the ranch after running away from the town of Weed because Lennie frightened a young girl trying to feel the soft fabric of her dress.

Curley's wife is described as having a "roving eye," meaning that she checks out the men, perhaps flirts:

"Purty?" [George] asked casually?

"Yeah. Purty...but—" George studied his cards. "But what?"

"Well—she got the eye."

"Yeah? Married two weeks and got the eye? Maybe that's why Curley's pants is full of ants."

The swamper goes on to tell George that she's a "tart." (This may mean she is a prostitute or promiscuous woman.) Later, Curley's wife comes "looking for her husband" in the bunk house and Lennie is enthralled by her.

"Gosh, she was purty." He smiled admiringly. George looked quickly down at him and then he took him by an ear and shook him.

"Listen to me, you crazy bastard," he said fiercely. "Don't you even take a look at that bitch. I don't care what she says and what she does. I seen 'em poison before, but I never see no piece of jail bait worse than her. You leave her be."

Towards the end of the story, Curley's wife's fate is sealed when she comes to the barn and sits down to talk with Lennie. Lennie tries to avoid speaking with the woman, but she will not leave him alone.

"No sir. I ain't gonna talk to you or nothing."

..."Why can't I talk to you? I never get to talk to nobody. I get awful lonely...I get lonely," [Curley's wife] said. "You can talk to people, but I can't talk to nobody by Curley. Else he gets mad. How'd you like not to talk to anybody?"

Lennie, again, is impulsive and too strong. She lets him stroke her hair, but when he won't let go, she is frightened of Lennie; he becomes afraid that she will get him in trouble with George. In an effort to quiet her, he kills her by mistake.

Curley's wife's presence in the story is not meaningful to the way the ranch works, but it does become a decisive element in costing Lennie his life, and George a place to settle for a while. The final tragedy that befalls the men comes because Curley's wife won't stay away from the men.

I think that the question might be more effective in discussing how Steinbeck presents different images of Curley's wife.  This helps to illuminate how human beings can represent different aspects to their being.  The first images we get of Curley's wife when Lennie and George first see her is one of a vamp, a woman who uses her own "sexing up" conception to her own benefit.  Another image seen of Curley's wife is one of outright cruelty.  The way in which she verbally abuses Candy and Crooks is one filled with venom and a sense of wrath.  The images of a cruel vamp would be offset with one of a painful denial of dreams when she talks to Lennie about the pain in her life and how she wishes she could have been in "pitchers."  This image, brought out in her conversation with Lennie, is a poignant one, an image that enables the reader to see another side to Curley's wife.  This is representative of the novel, in general.  George has to do things in the novel where different personas are revealed, while Lennie is shown to possess different aspects of his personality.  In much the same way, Steinbeck creates many different situations where multiple images of Curley's wife are revealed.

In Of Mice and Men, women are nameless and only seem to cause trouble.

Early in the book we learn that the reason George and Lennie are on the movie is that Lennie got into an altercation with a woman, and they had to run.  Lennie is child-like and has no inhibitions, and apparently he tried to touch her dress and she panicked.  People assume Lennie is dangerous and going to assault a woman.

When the boys reach the ranch, the only woman mentioned is Curley’s wife.  That’s it, that’s how she is labeled in the book.  She has no name.  She is described as a tart and a tease.

The first mention of Curley’s wife is that she is pretty, and when they first see her, she is sticking her head in.

Her face was heavily made up. Her lips were slightly parted. She breathed strongly, as though she had been running. (ch 4)

George is worried that Curley’s wife is only out to make trouble, but we later learn that she is also lonely.  She seems to have no friends and no one to talk to, and the men are suspicious of her.

"Wha's the matter with me?" she cried. "Ain't I got a right to talk to nobody? Whatta they think I am, anyways? (ch 5)

In the end, Curley’s wife is the catalyst for Lennie’s destruction.  He accidentally kills her, but it isn’t her fault.  She was lonely, and just wanted someone to talk to.

Curley's wife is presented as one of the "powerless" in the book, situated at the low end of the social heirarchy. She appears in the scene that takes place in Crooks' room in the stable, which signifies her status as being similar to the Lennie, Crooks, and Candy - figures who are disabled and disempowered in one way or another.

Candy is one-handed and old. Crooks has a crooked spine and is a minority. Lennie is mentally handicapped. Curley's wife is also a minority and has little physical strength. 

If there weren't so many of these characters, we might see them as outsiders. Since there are four of them, we almost have to say that these characters for a group of socially powerless and literally powerless people.

Here's the relevant part:

"Listen, Nigger," she said.  "You know what I can do if you open your trap?

Crooks stared hopelessly at her, and then he sat down on his bunk and drew into himself.

She closed on him.  "You know what I could do?"

Crooks seemed to grow smaller, and he pressed himself against the wall. "Yas, ma'am."

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

Steinbeck does not spell out for the reader how Curley's wife could get Crooks "strung up on a tree" -- that is, hanged.  However, if you consider who the two people are -- a white woman and a black man -- you can probably imagine what she could say that would get him lynched and killed.  What she says wouldn't need to be true; people would have believed her over him because she's white and he's black.

In Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, Curley's wife is a central character who is unaware and uncaring of the effect of her actions. She is very young, probably about 16, and attractive. She is also married to Curley, the son of the ranch owner, and has an inflated sense of importance; because of her connections, she feels she can do as she pleases and order the others around. Crooks is a black stable hand. He has back injuries from being kicked by a horse, is in pain, and is lonely. One evening Crooks is speaking with Lennie and Candy, and Curley's wife interrupts them. When she does not receive the kind of response she wants, she threatens to have Crooks lynched. This was a very real possibility in that time and place, and something she easily could have caused to happen. Despite the fact that Crooks had done nothing wrong, he knew that if she claimed he had done something to her, he would indeed have been lynched.

Curley’s wife is a tease.  Even though she and Curley have just been married, she seems to be looking for an affair.  Ranch gossip seems to be that Slim or Carlson might be the one she is having an affair with.  When George and Lennie join the ranch, the old man Candy is more than happy to share the juicy tidbits.

“I seen her give Slim the eye. Slim’s a jerkline skinner. Hell of a nice fella.  Slim don’t need to wear no high-heeled boots on a grain team. I seen her give Slim the eye. Curley never seen it. An’ I seen her give Carlson the eye.” (ch 2)

Curley’s wife is described as having “the eye” and looking at other men.  Slim is described as a “big tall skinner” and they do seem friendly.

Slim’s voice came through the door. “Hi, Good-lookin’.”

“I’m tryin’ to find Curley, Slim.”

“Well, you ain’t tryin’ very hard. I seen him goin’ in your house.” (ch 2)

She gets nervous and leaves when she finds out that Curley was headed for her house.  She doesn’t seem to be looking for him after all.  She uses looking for him as an excuse to talk to other men.

Curley's wife only explains her own thoughts and feelings in the fifth chapter when she is talking to Lennie, who hardly comprehends what she is talking about.

"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."

Her monologue shows, for one thing, that she must be very young. She is a high-school dropout who has picked up her fantasies from movies and movie magazines. She is probably only sixteen years old. She almost ran away from home with an "actor" when she was fifteen, and then she married Curley shortly thereafter, mainly to escape from her home and her mother. One of the men describes her as "the kid." Although she always presents herself as sexually alluring and provocative, this is all an act. She is probably not interested in sex at all and is practically a virgin in spite of being married. She is only practicing being seductive because of her one dominant motivation, which is to be a movie star and live a life of luxury. This is why she behaves like many adolescent girls who are trying to look older and sexier and more sophisticated: she over-dresses, wears too much makeup and perfume, and arranges her hair in an extravagant fashion. She is only trying to play the role of a glamorous movie queen--but she is too young by at least four or five years to fill such a role, even if she had the requisite talent and the connections. She is just a kid. Slim realizes that. He is kind and sympathetic, not really tempted by her but just playing a sort of game with her, pretending to believe she is really the irresistible temptress, the femme fatale, she would like to be. She is not really interested in having an extramarital affair with any of these farm hands, but only in seeing if she can attract their attention and in discovering what sort of effect she can have on men in general. Her whole aim is to become a movie star--and she realizes that she has to be seductive in order to achieve that goal.

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere. --V. S. Pritchett                               

In Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, one of the few characters who is not named is Curley's wife. Nevertheless, she has plenty of personality. The first time we hear of her is through Candy's description of her: "she got the eye"; a phrase which means that even though she is married, she is interested in other men. Candy also describes her as physically attractive, which immediately should set up the reader with the expectation that she is going to cause trouble in the story.

Later, Curley comes into the bunkhouse looking for his wife because he thinks that she is with another man, Slim.

After Steinbeck has created significant anticipation about Curley's wife, she eventually appears at the bunkhouse about two-thirds of the way through the novel:

"Her face was heavily made up. Her lips were slightly parted. She breathed strongly, as though she had been running." 

The men know that the mere presence of this sexually-charged woman will cause trouble for them and eventually they practically beg her to leave.

In the course of her appearance at the bunkhouse, Curley's wife hints that she has dreams of a life better than that on the barley farm. She expands upon these dreams during her fatal encounter with Lennie in the barn. She tells Lennie about a man she met once who told her that he could make her a movie star.

Thus, having revealed her dream to Lennie, Curley's wife dies, killed by the unwitting Lennie. Ultimately, Lennie too will die at the hands of George, who tells Lennie about the dream that they share.

Curley's wife, in John Steinbeck's novel Of Mice and Men, appears in three different scenes. In chapter two she comes to the bunkhouse door and meets George and Lennie. In chapter four she comes into Crooks's room in the barn where Crooks, Lennie and Candy have gathered and are talking about the dream of the farm. In both chapters she says she is looking for Curley, but the reader might assume she is simply lonely and wants to talk to somebody. She seems to take a particular liking to Lennie. She comments about the bruises on his face and asks how Curley got his hand broken. She makes a flirtatious remark to Lennie about the rabbits he is obsessed with. She says,

“Well, if that’s all you want, I might get a couple rabbits myself.” 

I am assuming that you are asking why did she go to basically butt in the barn where the men were staying. The answer to this is that she would always flirt with all the field hands because apparently Curly, her husband, is what we can infer to be a lesser type of man.

Knowing what we know about Curly, we know that he is arrogant, insecure, of a smaller size than Lennie (which drives him nuts), and loves to pick fights to feel better about himself. He also hangs from the fact that he is the farm owner's son, and so that makes him feel better than the others.

Curly's wife liked Lennie more than the other field hands because of his size and his simpleton ways. She tried to get him to flirt back with her but Lennie was not quite understanding her sleazy ways. In the end, as we know, Lennie accidentally broke her neck and killed her.

Curley's wife first appears in the bunkhouse in Chapter Two.

Both men glanced up, for the rectangle of sunshine in the doorway was cut off. A girl was standing there looking in. She had full, rouged lips and wide-spaced eyes, heavily made up. Her fingernails were red. Her hair hung in little rolled clusters, like sausages. She wore a cotton house dress and red mules, on the insteps of which were little bouquets of red ostrich feathers. "I'm lookin' for Curley," she said. Her voice had a nasal, brittle quality.

George looked away from her and then back. "He was in here a minute ago, but he went."

"Oh!" She put her hands behind her back and leaned against the door frame so that her body was thrown forward. "You're the new fellas that just come, ain't ya?"

Curley's wife is very young. She gives the false impression that she is flirtatious and probably promiscuous. The fact is that she has fantasies about becoming a movie star, as she reveals to Lennie in the barn shortly before he kills her. She is trying out her sex appeal on the only audience available to her--the men who work on the ranch. She has nothing to do with her time except to read movie magazines and experiment with her appearance and mannerisms. When she puts her hands behind her back and leans against the door frame so that her body is thrown forward, this is a pose she is evidently copying from a picture she saw in some fan magazine. She does this in order to make her breasts seem larger than they actually are. Her makeup and her shoes with ostrich feathers are out of place in this environment and betray the fact that she is very young and very ignorant. She started hanging around a dance hall in Salinas when she was only fifteen and has probably never been to high school. Curley has a big inferiority complex because of his small size. He probably married this young girl because he does not know whether he could relate to an older woman. Most of the men consider her a potential troublemaker. Lennie, however, is enchanted.

Lennie's eyes moved down over her body, and though she did not seem to be looking at Lennie she bridled a little.

The fact that she "bridled a little" seems to suggest that she is only a little girl playing at being a sexy movie star like Jean Harlow. She wants to be admired, but she doesn't really want anything more than that from any of these men. Her behavior causes her husband Curley to be jealous and suspicious of every man on the ranch. This foreshadows future trouble.

George looked around at Lennie. "Jesus, what a tramp," he said. "So that's what Curley picks for a wife."

"She purty," said Lennie defensively.

George is immediately apprehensive. Lennie is showing an interest in something besides mice and rabbits. 

"Listen to me, you crazy bastard," he said fiercely. "Don't you even take a look at that bitch. I don't care what she says and what she does. I seen 'em poison before, but I never seen no piece of jail bait worse than her. You leave her be."

Lennie will remember George's anger and George's orders when he is alone with Curley's wife in the barn. Lennie won't let go of the girl's soft hair and she won't stop struggling and screaming. Lennie realizes he is getting into just the sort of trouble that George warned him against, and he accidentally kills the frail girl in a desperate attempt to stop her from screaming. This tragic event is foreshadowed by the girl's first appearance in the doorway of the bunkhouse.

Curley met his wife at the Riverside Dance Palace.

Curley’s wife is a very lonely person.  Her character is not even given a name.  Sadly, Curley is very jealous and tries to keep her away from other people.  Most of the company she has on the ranch is farmhands, and he doesn’t want her socializing with them in case she might cheat on him.  They avoid her too, because they do not want trouble with Curley.

Curley is violent, crude, and grumpy.  He is always looking for his wife to make sure she is not doing something she should not be, and she is always wandering around the ranch pretending to look for him just so that she can come in contact with people. 

When Curley’s wife finds Lennie alone in the barn, with his dead puppy, she just really wants someone to talk to.  She tells Lennie most of her life story.

“’Nother time I met a guy, an’ he was in pitchers. Went out to the Riverside Dance Palace with him. He says he was gonna put me in the movies.…  I never got that letter. …. So I married Curley. Met him out to the Riverside Dance Palace that same night.” (Ch. 5) 

It does seem as if Curley’s wife wanted more out of life, but she found it difficult to get anywhere.  She thought that the man she met was going to get her into movies, and he never wrote to her like he promised.   She decided she might as well just get married, and she settled on Curley. 

Unfortunately, things do not end well for Curley’s wife.  She gets her neck broken because Lennie wanted to stroke her hair. He did not mean to kill her, but as with the puppy he just did not know his own strength.  It was a tragic accident.

When Steinbeck describes Curley's wife in Of Mice and Men, the language he uses communicates beauty.

In Chapter 2, George and Lennie get their first view of Curley's wife. These initial descriptions accentuate her physical beauty. Both men see her "standing there looking in" with "full rouged lips and widespread eyes."  Her external beauty is enhanced with a face that is "heavily made up." Steinbeck describes her the beauty of her hair as "little rolled clusters, like sausages." Finally, her dress is not subdued. Rather, it features red in the mules and "bouquets" of feathers that adorn it. When we see Curley's wife in this light, it is one that emphasizes her physical beauty.

After Lennie kills Curley's wife, the language that Steinbeck uses to describe her beauty is more emotional. It is almost as if death has given her a deeper beauty.  As her body lies on the ground of the barn in chapter 5, Steinbeck conveys her "pretty and simple" beauty.  She is no longer made up with cosmetics, but is rather "sweet and young."  She was "alive and sleeping very lightly" even though she had died. 

In both settings, Steinbeck uses language to communicate the beauty that is within Curley's wife.  The beauty evident in Chapter 2 is highly physical and conveyed through language that shows an appearance that has a direct impact upon men.  In chapter 5, the beauty of which Steinbeck writes is more internal and almost spiritual, giving Curley's wife a significant grace that she had sought throughout her life and could only achieve in death.

Curley's wife is presented in three ways in the novel. She is an object of fear, danger and apprehension. She is a powerless person, belonging with the others in this category. She is also a dreamer, incapable of grasping her dream.

Curley's wife is never given a name. She remains "Curley's wife" throughout the book. This fact helps to render her character as an object - a person to be feared from a distance. George repeatedly warns Lennie to keep away from Curley's wife and the other men talk about her in ways that are consistent with the idea that the "tart" poses a danger to the men of the ranch. 

Despite the threat that she represents (an aspect of which she articulates in the scene that takes place in Crooks' room), Curley's wife belongs to the powerless and dispossessed group that gathers in Crooks' room. Like Candy, Crooks and Lennie, Curley's wife has very little potency in her world. She is controlled by her husband, feared by the ranch hands, and isolated as the only woman on the ranch. 

Before being killed, Curley's wife admits to Lennie that she has always dreamed of getting into the movies. She dreams of a different life and laments her isolation. She is presented here, not as an object, but as a subject. Here, she speaks for herself (where earlier she is spoken about). She is a person with honest feelings and disappointments and a desperation of her own. 

Some sympathy is due to her in this final presentation, which was not true in her two earlier iterations.

In these three ways, we come to see Curley's wife as a full-fledged member of the powerless class of individuals that populate the ranch. She is more alike to Crooks, Candy and Lennie than she is different. 

Steinbeck essentially wanted to create a story about two humble working men who dreamt of owning their own farm, ending with one killing the other out of compassion and destroying the dream. The author created Curley's wife to serve as the catalyst. He gave her the character traits she needed to fill the role of both cause and victim. She is young, sexy, and flirtatious. Her self-revelation to Lennie in the barn suggests that she is young and slender for Lennie to kill her so easily by shaking her. She also has to be very young and naive not to sense that Lennie could be a dangerous person to flirt with.

Her youth is emphasized by the fact that several men refer to her as "jailbait," meaning an underage girl with loose morals who can get a man sent to prison for statutory rape.

One of the men asks George, "Seen the new kid yet?"

"What kid?" George asked

"Why, Curley's new wife."

The fact that he calls her a kid suggests that she must be quite young.

Steinbeck wanted the reader to feel some sympathy for this girl but not so much sympathy that the reader would lose identification with Lennie and George, who are the main viewpoint characters. Therefore Steinbeck uses several strategies to keep the reader from becoming overly emotionally involved with the girl. For one thing, he never gives her a name but only refers to her as "Curley's wife." He also stages her death in such a way that she seems to be bringing it on herself. She seeks Lennie out in the barn. She flirts with him. She moves close to him and invites him to stroke her hair. Most significantly, she creates a very bad impression of her character when he intrudes into Crooks' room and, after refusing to leave, threatens to accuse Crooks of molesting her.

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

This exposure of the cruel side of her nature is pretty obviously intended to modulate whatever sympathy the reader might feel for her when she is killed. There is also Candy's angry outburst when he is left alone with her dead body:

"You God damn tramp," he said viciously. "You done it, di'n't you? I s'pose you're glad. Ever'body knowed you'd mess things up. You wasn't no good. You ain't no good now, you lousy tart."

Curley's wife is an interesting character. For one thing, she is never named; rather, she is known throughout the book as "Curley's wife." This clearly shows to what degree she is associated with her husband and has no persona of her own, as far as the other characters are concerned.

Steinbeck himself wrote that he intended Curley's wife to be a sympathetic character, a "nice girl," and not the tramp the other men assume her to be. She is undeniably lonely, making excuses to hang around the bunkhouse "looking for her husband." She desires companionship but gets nothing but scorn and derision from the men.

Like the other important characters in the story, Curley's wife is a victim of broken dreams. Her dream is to be a movie star, to earn some recognition for herself. Instead, she is reduced to dressing and acting inappropriately for her environs, and ultimately, dies at the hands of Lennie. Finally, in death, she is described as pure and beautiful.

In describing the dead girl, Steinbeck concludes with:

Now her rouged cheeks and her reddened lips made her seem alive and sleeping very lightly. The curls, tiny little sausages, were spread on the hay behind her head, and her lips were parted.

Curley's wife spent much of her time alone because there were no women for her to associate with and the men shunned her. She has no inner resources. She is probably only semi-literate. There was, of course, no television in those days and very little on the radio to interest a teenage girl. She must have spent many hours looking at herself in the mirror and experimenting with makeup and hair styles. The curls were certainly not natural but were the result of much time and patient effort with a curling iron. She was evidently copying young Shirley Temple, who was a super-star at the time and noted for her blonde curls, which were likewise artificial and had to be restored every night, although the public was not aware of this. 

Steinbeck takes great pains to make the reader aware that Curley's wife is a very young girl. She was hanging around the Riverside Dance Palace in Salinas when she was only fifteen, as she tells Lennie in the barn, and married Curley shortly after nearly leaving home with two other men. So she is only fifteen or sixteen. Steinbeck apparently wanted Lennie's victim to be extremely young because an older woman would know better than to get too close to Lennie or to invite him to feel her hair. Also, Lennie is attracted to small things and would be attracted to a young girl. Steinbeck even gives him the last name of Small. Steinbeck probably invented the little curls to suggest a visual comparison with Shirley Temple, who was only nine years old when Of Mice and Men was published, but had been making three or four movies a year for the past several years and was world-famous. 

Curley's wife is terribly naive. She wants Lennie to stop stroking her hair, not because she senses he is becoming sexually aroused, but because she doesn't want her curls to get undone after she had spent so much time perfecting them. 

"Don't you muss it up," she said.

"Look out, now, you'll muss it....You stop it now, you'll mess it all up."

There are other reasons why Steinbeck, in plotting his story, wanted to have Lennie to kill a girl who was very young. George feels compassion for her when he sees her lying there dead. He realizes the enormous wrongness in a pretty girl having her life snuffed out, along with her hopes and dreams, however unrealistic, by an imbecile who has no future and is becoming a menace to society. This is one of the reasons George decides to shoot Lennie.

Curley's wife, because she is the spouse of the son of the ranch owner, tries to lord it over the ranch hands, revealing her arrogance and a lack of sensitivity for their feelings. And although Candy and Crooks try to warn her that she shouldn't toy with Lennie, whose behavior can be unpredictable because of his mental disability, her arrogance causes her to disregard their advice, leading to her death. 

Curley's wife, though clearly unhappy, comes across in the novel as a petty person. For example, she abuses her power as a white woman over the black Crooks, threatening to say that he made a sexual overture towards her to reduce him to a state of humiliated servility, a petty gesture on her part. Instead of feeling sympathy for her husband's crushed hand, she is glad he got hurt, another instance of her pettiness.

Curley's wife is an angry and disappointed woman, who feels disregarded by her husband and isolated as the only female on the ranch. 

A feminist reading might fault Steinbeck for creating so relentlessly unpleasant a female character as Curley's wife, but a defense could be that Steinbeck sees her too as a victim of a social order that encourages some to feel superior to others merely on the basis of having a little more money. 

Curley’s wife is not a villain.  She is lonely and frustrated.

The guys consider Curley’s wife “a tart” because she seems flirtatious.  Curley is also jealous and always rearing for a fight.  George tells Lennie to keep away from Curley’s wife, because if they fight they are going to get fired.

Curley’s wife is always looking around, trying to find her husband.  This makes the men nervous.

"Oh!" She put her hands behind her back and leaned against the door frame so that her body was thrown forward. "You're the new fellas that just come, ain't ya?" (ch 2)

Curly’s wife does seem like a flirt.  Consider her situation though.  She is the only woman on the ranch.  Her husband is a jerk.  She was once a pretty young thing with dreams.  Once she married Curley she succumbed to a no-name existence.

"What kinda harm am I doin' to you? Seems like they ain't none of them cares how I gotta live. I tell you I ain't used to livin' like this. I coulda made somethin' of myself." (ch 5)

She is trying to find her way in the world, and come to terms with her new existence.  Sadly, she tries to talk with Crooks and Lennie, and this causes conflict.  She is not a villain, but she is the source of the conflict that leads to Curley's hand being broken and her own death.

Although Curley's wife's chief complaint appears to stem from dissatisfaction with her life on the farm, there is no doubt but that she is lonely as well.  Because of her flirtatious nature and Curley's insane jealousy, none of the ranch hands will associate with her, and so her only companionship comes from Curley, about whom she says,

"Sure I gotta husban'.  You all seen him.  Swell guy, ain't he?  Spends all his time sayin' what he's gonna do to guys he don't like, and he don't like nobody".

Curley treats his wife like a possession and does not give her the companionship and attention she craves.  She is isolated on the ranch, and she laments her loneliness and boredom, saying,

"...Sat'iday night.  Ever'body out doin' sum'pin'.  Ever'body!  An' what am I doin'?  Standing' here talkin' to a bunch of bindle stiffs - a nigger an' a dum-dum and a lousy ol' sheep - an' likin' it because they ain't nobody else" (Chapter 4).

Curley's wife is a static character. A static character is one who stays the same throughout a work of literature, while a rounded character changes and grows. A static character is a type—usually displaying just one or two traits—rather than a fully developed and real person.

A first clue that Curley's wife is static is that she has no name beyond "Curley's wife." She is not given an individual identity, and this suggests she is a type. She is only the generic dissatisfied, pretty, young wife of a well-to-do but obnoxious husband.

Second, we learn more about her outward appearance, from her banana curls to the feathers decorating her mules, than about her inward life. This suggests she is simply meant to be a one-dimensional temptress figure.

Third, what we discover of Curley's wife's interiority primarily is that she is bored on the ranch and wants to be a movie star. This is a stereotypical aspiration for a young woman of her type, showing her to be a more cardboard figure than a real person.

In the novel "Of Mice And Men" by John Steinbeck, the author show us in Curley's wife a character who is both slightly active and passive. She is passive in the sense that she has fixed static qualities and in the fact that she is mostly a character that things happen to—not a character that makes things happen. Curley marries her, and Lennie kills her. One exception is in the slightly provocative behavior she displays by hanging round the ranch, seeking attention, flirting, winding the men up, and insulting the weakest in covert and cowardly ways. Curley's wife has dreams like Lennie and George, but can't make them happen either. Another static quality is her lack of identity; she lacks even a name.

Curley's wife has a destablizing influence in the life of the men on the ranch. She is the only woman there, she is by herself in a man's world, and she is the wife of the boss's son. She is young, pretty, lonely and flirtatious. She lacks good judgment or a realistic picture of life. She flirts with the ranch hands, such as Lennie, without realizing how dangerous that is.

Because she is bored and dissatisfied, she throws her weight around. For example, she threatens the stable hand, Crooks, with the idea that she will say he made advances towards her, humiliating him and forcing him to kowtow to her in a servile way. The men know too that Curley has a bad temper and is spoiling for a fight, so they realize they need to steer clear of his wife--but, with little else to do, she doesn't steer clear of them. This, of course, has fatal consequences for her. 

She has no name other than "Curley's wife," showing that she is not entirely a real person to the men, but instead a role, the generic female they have to be wary of. She represents a sexual temptation that must be resisted by men who are living in too much poverty and uncertainty to marry and who tend to think of women as "tramps" because most of their encounters with them are through prostitutes. 

Loneliness is an important theme in Of Mice and Men. Two characters who are extremely lonely are Crooks and Curley's wife.

Curley's wife lives an isolated life. She is the only woman mentioned in the novel. She flirts with the ranch hands due to her loneliness. She only dreams of the time she could have been an actress:

But she is pathetically lonely and had once had dreams of being a movie star.

She is married to a possessive, jealous type man. She does not feel loved. She feels as if she is a possession:

Curley's wife (as the boss's son's flirtatious wife, she is not identified by any other name) wanders around the ranch searching for some human contact. She is stereotyped by the men as a "tart." Indeed, she plays the vamp, which enrages her jealous husband. George tells Lennie to avoid her, calling her "poison" and "jailbait."

She is so desperately lonely until she reaches out to Lennie. She is so all alone until she finds herself spending time with Lennie. She teases Lennie by asking him to feel of her hair. Lennie accidentally breaks her neck. Her loneliness costs her her life.

Crooks is a lonely character. He is ostracized by the the white ranch hands. He even has to sleep in separate quarters. He lives a lonely existence because he is black. He is not invited to spend time with the ranch hands. He is not invited to play games with the other ranch hands:

Crooks, the despairing old Negro stable worker, lives alone in the harness room, ostracized from the ranch hands.

Crooks becomes bitter because of his loneliness. He has no dreams of his own; therefore, he discourages George's and Lennie's dream:

On the one occasion when he briefly talks to Lennie and Candy, the bunkhouse worker who wants to be part of the dream farm Lennie and George are planning to buy, Crooks tells them they will never attain their dream.

No doubt, Curley's wife and Crooks are trapped in an isolated life. Both feel that there is no one there for them. They crave company. They just desire someone with which to communicate. Life doesn't get any lonelier than what the two experience:

Both she and Crooks crave company and "someone to talk to."

Curley's wife is alone and isolated on the ranch. She is one of several characters associated with the idea of social isolation and social powerlessness in the novel. 

When speaking with Lennie in the barn in the book's penultimate chapter, Curley's wife explains her feelings and clings to the moment of stolen compaionship with Lennie.

When she finally gets Lennie still, “her words tumbled out in a passion of communication, as though she hurried before her listener could be taken away.”

She says that she does not like Curley and that the only company she gets is during meals. She is unhappily lonesome and appreciates Lennie's company, however briefly, as a rare bit of human contact. 

Deciding aloud that he is “nuts” but “like a big baby,” she takes Lennie’s hand and lets him stroke her soft hair.

Curley's wife is seen as a "tart" because she insinuates herself into situations where she does not belong, according to social standards of the time. She also apparently has little intellectual guile and so has difficulty breaking away from the stereotypical means of getting attention as a young woman among a group of men. For this reason, perhaps, she seems to flirt when she really simply wants someone to talk to. This flirtation is a direct result of her loneliness and desire for companionship, but it is seen only as flirting and therefore as a dangerous temptation for the men. 

Curley's wife looks to hang out with any of the farm hands in the bunkhouse and then with the men in the stables where Crooks lives. She does this under the guise of looking for her husband, but in reality is a lonely girl who has no one to talk to.

Before ever meeting Curley's wife, Candy tells George and Lennie what type of girl she is. He says he saw her give Slim and Carlson "the eye" and then goes on to say, "Well, I think Curley's married . . . a tart." This idea is confirmed, at least to George, when she visits them in the bunkhouse asking about Curley. She looks around the bunkhouse before turning her attention to George and Lennie. After admitting that Curley isn't there, Curley's wife "smiled archly and twitched her body" before adding the multi-layered statement, "Nobody can't blame a person for lookin'." 

Later on, she shows up in Crooks's stables looking for Curley. This time, Crooks has none of her flirtatiousness and tells her to leave and that "We don't want no trouble." However, Curley's wife reveals a bit about her loneliness she suffers from on the ranch. She says,"Think I'm gonna stay in that two-by-four house and listen how Curley's gonna lead with his left twict, and then bring in the ol' right cross?" 

The next time the reader sees Curley's wife, she goes into the stables to sit with Lennie. It's here where she completely reveals how lonely her life has become. She talks about all the other opportunities she had to move up in the world before finally admitting, "I don' like Curley. He ain't a nice fella." 

Unfortunately for Curley's wife, she comes off as the reason why George has to kill Lennie. But she's just as lonely as the rest. As the only female character in the book, she, like Crooks (the only black character), experiences a loneliness no other character knows.

Before her marriage, Curley’s wife had not anticipated how boring life would be on the ranch. As the only woman on the ranch, she is lonely because she has no friends and Curley is often busy with ranch duties. It angers her that she thinks he neglects her. She generally feels frustrated because she feels trapped. The men try to be polite but not pay her too much attention because of the risk of making Curley jealous; his threats to beat the workers are humiliating to her. Lennie does not fully understand the warnings to steer clear of her, and she feels comfortable in his presence. Her relief does not last long, however, because Lennie’s inability to modulate his great strength ends her life.

In the novella Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck refuses to give Curley's Wife a name; she is, by default, simply "Curley's Wife."  This shows that she is his possession, a trophy wife, without any vocation, rights, or any real identity, trapped on the ranch as a play toy.  Curley says he's keeping his hand in a glove of vaseline, soft for his wife--which is to say that she is something to be petted and touched at night after the work is done.  As the only female on the ranch, Curley's Wife is very much much like Lennie, Candy, and Crooks, one of the "weak ones," low on the social ladder.  Unlike them, she cannot so much as work.  All this is to say that Steinbeck, characterizing her the way a typical male would, is implicitly calling attention to the way women are victimized in the 1930s American agrarian culture.  Truly, it was a "man's world."

Steinbeck does not so much describe her himself; rather, he lets his characters describe her before we meet her.  The men in the bunkhouse describe Curley's Wife using sexist and demeaning remarks:

"Purty"...""Well- she got the eye."..."Married two weeks and got the eye?"..."I seen her give Slim the eye. ...An' I seen her give Carlson the eye."..."Well, I think Curley's married... a tart."

This shows that the men think she is not to be trusted, a flirt.  Especially in marriage, women were held to impossible double-standards.  They could not so much as talk to other men.

Later, Steinbeck does say that her face was "heavily made up," which means she was wearing a lot of make-up.  This serves as a kind of mask, a way to project what men expect her to look like.  Really, she is a lonely and unhappy prisoner who once had dreams of starring in the movies.

Steinbeck had difficulties with the character of Curley's wife. As a nautralistic writer, he wanted to make her seem realistic and natural, the kind of girl who would be married to a man like Curley and living on a ranch in the Salinas Valley. He wanted her to be pretty, but not too pretty because that would not be quite natural. She has a youthful prettiness, but she thinks her looks are far above average. This is not necessarily un-natural. She is like a lot of girls of her time who were fascinated by the movies, who devoured the movie magazines, and had glittering, Hollywood-size dreams about becoming stars. A lot of these simple girls from small-town America went to Hollywood not realizing the astronomical odds against their being discovered. Curley's wife was easily taken in by the traveling man who called himself an actor and told her he could help her become a star.

Steinbeck's basic idea when he started the story was to have a man kill his best friend to save him from being lynched. The victim had to be somewhat sympathetic, but she couldn't be too sympathetic or the reader would lose any sympathy for Lennie or George. Steinbeck at first presents Curley's wife's unattractive characteristics. She is wantonly flirtatious and makes trouble for the men. She is terribly cruel to poor Crooks, even making herself look mean and ugly when she threatens to have him lynched. But by the time Steinbeck was ready to write the scene in which she is killed in the barn, he decided to ameliorate his picture of the girl, because she is, after all, a pretty girl, a high school dropout, who never had much of a chance and who gets killed in her early youth before she has experiences any of the pleasures life can offer.

The reader can feel sorry for the girl without losing sympathy for Lennie. Steinbeck achieves this mainly by having her confide in Lennie about her hopes and dreams. For example:

'Nother time I met a guy, an' he was in pitchers. Went out to the Riverside Dance Palace with him. He says he was gonna put me in the movies. Say I was a natural. Soon's he got back to Hollywood he was gonna write to me about it."

There is a great deal of this kind of dialogue in the barn scene because Steinbeck wanted to use it in the stage adaptation of the story he was already planning to write. Then after the poor girl is accidentally killed, Steinbeck uses his own powerful prose to describe her.

Curley's wife lay with a half-covering of yellow hay. And the meanness and the planning and the discontent and the ache for attention were all gone from her face. She was very pretty and simple, and her face was sweet and young. Now her rouged cheeks and her reddened lips made her seem alive and sleeping very lightly. The curls, tiny little sausages, were spread on the hay behind her head, and her lips were parted.

The men didn't like her. George didn't like or trust her. But the reader can understand why they all decide to kill Lennie. She was just a pretty and simple country girl with a sweet, young face, and she deserved a better fate than what happened to her in the barn. The reader accepts the fact that Lennie has to die but still feels sympathy for him and for George at the tragic ending by the riverbank. Steinbeck has managed to maintain an emotional balance by giving the victim faults and redeeming qualities.

The first thing to note is that, throughout Of Mice and Men, Curley's wife's name is never given. She is treated by everyone, most notably Curley, as Curley's possession. She is described as a flirt, a mere sexual object. And although she does flirt, this is partially her attempt to seek out companionship. She is similar to Crooks in this way. They both are relatively isolated; he, the only African-American on the ranch and she, the only woman.

Curley's wife is stuck in a bad situation. This is clearly not the life she had envisioned for herself. The same could be said for many of the characters. Life as an itinerant ranch hand is hardly desirable. The novel is set during the Great Depression, so her decision to marry Curley might have been based on the fact that his father owned a business and therefore, Curley came with the near certainty of financial independence.

In Chapter 4, Curley's wife tries to talk with Lennie and Crooks. Curley is at the whorehouse with the others. Here is another reason to sympathize with Curley's wife. She threatens Crooks when he tells her to leave. Crooks knows that she, being the wife of the owner's son, can get him fired so he backs down.

In Chapter 5, when Curley's wife approaches Lennie, she divulges some of her regrets.

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.

In the end, whether she was seducing Lennie or just making trouble, her death is still tragic. She was an innocent victim of Lennie's innocent but destructive psychological makeup.

Curley's wife in many ways illustrates the death of hope and dreams whereas George and Lenny represent the hope that dreams give them.

In chapter 5, she tells Lenny that she "coulda made somethin' of myself" when she was younger. She had had two opportunities to escape Salinas. Firstly, when she was fifteen "a show come through an' I met one of the actors". However, her mother would not let her leave with him because of her age.

On another occasion, she met a man "in pitchers" (movies). They went to "the Riverside Dance Palace" together and "He says he was gonna put me in the movies. Said I was a natural. Soon's he got back to Hollywood, he was gonna write to me about it." However, she never got the letter and "always thought my ol' lady stole it". She confronted her mother about stealing the letter and, when she denied it, married Curley the next day.

The irony is that neither of these actors seem honest and both probably took advantage of her. Marrying Curley, however, represented an end to her dream of being "in the movies an' had nice clothes". All that is left from her dreams are the "mules with red ostrich feathers" which she wears on the farm and make her seem out of place.

She "ain't never told this to nobody before" and this seems her only truly honest moment, mere moments before Lennie kills her

In Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, Curley's wife is a misunderstood character. She is a flirt and is characterized by the male characters as a "tart", but she does have dreams and goals.

She wanted to surpass the humble life that she had. She dreamed of being a star. She wants to be an actress.

In Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, we first hear about Curley's wife from one of the ranch hands. She is never given a name, which may show that Steinbeck includes her mostly to move the plot along. The man says:

"Wait'll you see Curley's wife."

..."Purty?" [George] asked.

"Yeah...Well—she got the eye."

"Yeah? Married two weeks and got the eye?..."

..."I've seen her give Slim the eye...Curley never seen it. An' I seen her give Carlson the eye."

...The swamper stood up from his box. "Know what I think?...I think Curley's married...a tart."

The swamper is saying that Curley's wife is always eyeing up the other men, and she's only been married two weeks. He believes she may be a "tart" or a prostitute. The reader's initial sense is that Curley's wife is one to stay away from if George doesn't want trouble with the boss's son.

When Lennie and George first see Curley's wife, she shows up at the bunk house.

She had full, rouged lips and wide-spaced eyes, heavily made up. Her fingernails were red. Her hair hung in little rolled clusters, like sausages. She wore a cotton house dress and red mules, on the insteps of which were little bouquets of red ostrich feathers.

She is not dressed as a woman living on a ranch should dress, especially when she is around men—especially as there are no other women living on the ranch. She looks like she wants attention from the way she is made-up. And though her husband has told her to stay away from the men, she does not listen.

Curley's wife is obviously a little frightened of her husband. At one point when she says she is looking for him and is told he just went into the house, she leaves quickly.

George is aware early on that she is dangerous.

She's gonna make a mess. She's a jail bait all set on the trigger. That Curley got his work cut out for him. Ranch with a bunch of guys on it ain't no place for a girl, specially like her.

At one point after Curley tries to beat Lennie up, Curley's wife shows up at the bunk house again, "looking for Curley," who is obviously not there.

...I ain't giving you no trouble. Think I don't like to talk to somebody ever' once in a while? Think I like to sick in that house alla time?

Curley's wife may be lonely, but the men know enough to stay away from her. She won't leave, but announces that she doesn't care much for her husband and is sure his hand was broken because he picked a fight. She can also be nasty. When Crooks (who is black and works on the ranch) tells her to go, she gets mean and infers that he should shut up, or she can make an accusation that will get him lynched.

By the end of the story, Curley's wife finds her away to Lennie, trying to talk with him. He tells her to go away because he isn't allowed to talk to her. She dismisses George's warning:

He's scared Curley'll get mad...

She uses these words to convince poor Lennie that there is no reason he cannot speak to her. And though he tries repeatedly to resist, she will not go away. She takes Lennie's hand and puts it on her hair because he likes soft things, but when he won't let go, she gets frantic. To keep her quiet, Lennie puts his hand on her mouth and accidentally kills her.

Had she stayed away from the men like Curley had told her, she would have been safe.

Curley's wife is deeply unhappy with her lot in life, and she does not try to hide her dissatisfaction from the men on the ranch. They discuss her behavior behind her back, worrying that her behavior will inspire her hot-headed husband to violence, and she herself reveals to some of the men that she doesn't actually respect nor like her husband. The quotes below are only a few from the novel that can be used to evidence Curley's wife's negative and unhappy state of mind.

In chapter 3 of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, several of the men sit together and play cards in the bunkhouse. Whit discusses Curley's wife, insinuating that she is unsatisfied by her life with Curley. He uses her curiosity about other men and her attention-seeking behavior as proof of his opinion:

Whit laid down his cards impressively. "Well, stick around an' keep your eyes open. You'll see plenty. She ain't concealin'
nothing. I never seen nobody like her. She got the eye goin' all the time on everybody. I bet she even gives the stable buck the eye. I don't know what the hell she wants."

In chapter 4, Lennie talks with Candy and Crooks as Curley's wife interrupts them. She tries to have a conversation with them, and her loneliness is on display for the men. She makes the men uncomfortable and nervous with her attention and her obvious desire to engage them in a chat. When Crooks suggests she go back home, she responds with a petulant comment that reveals her unhappiness and boredom:

Well, I ain't giving you no trouble. Think I don't like to talk to somebody ever' once in a while? Think I like to stick in that house alla time?

Candy echoes Crooks's words in response to Curley's wife, reminding her that she has a husband and that she shouldn't be trying to cause problems for the other men. His words anger Curley's wife, and she vents about her husband in sarcastic frustration and bitterness, confirming her marital dissatisfaction in no uncertain terms:

Sure I gotta husban'. You all seen him. Swell guy, ain't he? Spends all his time sayin' what he's gonna do to guys he don't like, and he don't like nobody. Think I'm gonna stay in that two-by-four house and listen how Curley's gonna lead with his
left twicet, and then bring in the ol' right cross? "One-two," he says. "Jus' the ol' one-two an' he'll go down."

Though Curley's wife is simply reacting to a lonely situation, her quest for company and conversation puts the other men in harm's way. Her mannerisms feel dangerous to the men; perhaps if she were less glamorous and less flirtatious in her attempts to talk with the men, they would be more gentle with her when setting boundaries. No matter her manner, Curley's wife is most certainly a desperate and unhappy person, trapped in a marriage to an unpleasant man on a ranch with no one to talk to about her problems.

Lennie is in the barn, holding his dead puppy. Like the mouse he had at the beginning of the novel, the puppy had been killed by Lennie’s petting it and smacking it when it tried to bite him. He tries to hide it in the straw, but he takes it out again, asking it why it had done that, basically blaming the puppy for being killed. Curley’s wife comes in and finds Lennie with the puppy. Learning that Lennie liked to pet soft things, she told him that she knows how he feels, because she likes to feel her hair when it is clean. She has Lennie feel her hair to see, but Lennie strokes to hard. She becomes frighten and tells him to stop, but Lennie, whenever he is confronted like this, panics, and grabs hold and won’t let go. She tries to escape, and Lennie tries to stop her. Holding her roughly, Lennie breaks her neck, killing her instantly. He does not know what to do when Candy comes in and finds them. He retrieves George, who tells Lennie to run away to the spot they had agreed on should Lennie cause any trouble. George makes a plan with Candy that will prevent people from thinking that he was in on this with Lennie. The others come in, including Curley, and take off in search of Lennie in order to lynch him.

Curley and his wife are two of the important characters in John Steinbeck's novella Of Mice and Men. They act as antagonists to the main characters of George and Lennie. George and Lennie come to work on the ranch owned by Curley's father. Through the first few chapters, the reader learns very little about the two, except that Curley is often belligerent and ready to fight, and that his wife is derisively described by the working men on the ranch as a "tramp" or a "tart." It is not until Chapter Five that more is revealed about Curley's wife when she is alone with Lennie in the barn. She confesses to Lennie that she is terribly lonely and that she doesn't even like Curley ("He ain't a nice fella."). She also claims that she could have been in the movies and that a man had approached her at the "Riverside Dance Palace" telling her that he could make her into an actress. He offers to send her a letter with details, but she never receives the letter and tells Lennie that she thought her mother withheld it from her. It is then that she meets Curley at the dance palace and marries him not long after their first meeting:

“I never got that letter,” she said. “I always thought my ol’ lady stole it. Well, I wasn’t gonna stay no place where I couldn’t get nowhere or make something of myself, an’ where they stole your letters, I ast her if she stole it, too, an’ she says no. So I married Curley. Met him out to the Riverside Dance Palace that same night.” 

Curley's wife can be read as a predatory character in her use of her sexual allure to get what she wants. She clearly feels trapped and confined by her small life after her marriage to Curley, and so she uses her looks and sensuality to flirt with the ranch hands in order to make Curley jealous. This also allows her to exert some control over other people, as Curley tends to beat up anyone who looks too long at his wife. She is also not afraid to verbally prey on the weaker members of the ranch, saying cringe-worthy things to them, like when she tells Crooks, "I could get you strung up on a tree so easily it ain't even funny." Clearly, she makes herself feel better by putting others down.

Still, a critique of this analysis is that, for a predatory character, Curley's wife has no real power in the novel. Like most of the other characters, she is a beaten-down person, clinging to old dreams. In Curley's wife's case, the old dream is to be a Hollywood star, something that she may have accomplished with her good looks but which is now way out of her reach. She has no power over her circumstances and no control over her life; she doesn't even have her own name, as she is simply referred to as Curley's possession. So, even though she is a temptress, she is also preyed on by the cruel social circumstances that keep the other characters down.

It makes sense that Curley's wife can be seen as a trigger for the conflict in the novel.

Curley's wife is very unhappy with her life at the ranch. In chapter 2, when Slim notifies her that Curley is looking for her, Steinbeck writes that she adopted a "suddenly apprehensive" demeanor.  She is clearly uncomfortable with her husband.  As a result, she is constantly in the bunkhouse, talking to the other men. Her restlessness has the tendency to lead to trouble, something that George points out in chapter 3: 

She’s gonna make a mess. They’s gonna be a bad mess about her. She’s a jail bait all set on the trigger. That Curley got his work cut out for him. Ranch with a bunch of guys on it ain’t no place for a girl, specially like her.

Later on in chapter 3, Carlson affirms this when he tells Curley that if she continues to "hang around bunkhouses," he will have "som'pin on your hands."  

These textual examples foreshadow how Curley's wife is going to be involved in some conflict.  In some capacity, she will act as the trigger or ignition switch for what is going to happen.  It is clear that Curley's wife is not going to remain separate from the men because of the dissatisfaction she feels about her own life.  Steinbeck sets up Curley's wife on a crash course with the men in the bunkhouse.  The results of this will not be good.  Like so many in the novella, the hopes of Curley's wife will come into conflict with reality.

It is in chapter 5 that Curley's wife is seen more than a "vamp" or a sex object, or even as manipulative.  It is Steinbeck's own genius to give her a moment of humanity and of empathy right before Lennie kills her.  Curley's wife lived her own life of dreams before marrying Curley.  Her life involved believing in promises of agents and others who said that she could be in the film industry, or "pitchers."  She believed that her life could be much more than what it is now.  She confesses to Lennie that her marriage to Curley is a loveless one, and that she yearned for so much more.  In the silence of her shattered dreams, she lives a lonely life, devoid of any real human contact or connection.  This is a condition that she believes could have been avoided had the expectations and realizations of Curley's wife's life been realized.  Her discussion with Lennie brings out her own condition, one that is shrouded in sadness like so many characters in the novella.  Her need to divulge all of this to Lennie is one that is reflective of how sad her life is, if only because of the profound level of hope she had before marrying Curley.

John Steinbeck evidently wanted to write a novel about a man who is forced to kill his best friend out of compassion. The plot of his short novel Of Mice and Men was carefully worked out. It had to be established that Lennie would do something that would bring the wrath of a mob upon him. He doesn't know his own strength, and he kills little animals without intending to because he handles them too roughly. But he couldn't be hunted by a lynch mob for killing a puppy or a kitten. He had to kill a human, albeit accidentally. Steinbeck revealed that he had been in some kind of trouble involving a young woman just recently up in the town of Weed and that he and George had barely escaped from a mob who thought he had tried to rape her. This foreshadows what will happen when Lennie tries to fondle Curley's wife in the barn. (This may have been innocent enough at first but could have led to rape and even murder.) Curley's wife is portrayed as very young and probably frail, not yet fully developed. This makes it easier to accept that he could kill her accidentally by shaking her. Since she is so young she is flirtatious and reckless; she has never encountered a retarded man like Lennie and doesn't understand that she could be in grave danger. Her main role is to serve as a victim. She is the one doomed to be killed, so that the mob will be aroused against Lennie, so that George will kill him at their river-bank hideaway in order to save him from worse treatment by the mob led by Curley.

When George and Lennie are getting to know the crew, they are told that Curley's wife is a flirt. In Chapter 2, the swamper informs them, "Well, I think Curley's married . . . a tart." About two pages later, George recognizes this as a danger and warns Lennie to stay away from her.

Don't you even look at that bitch. I don't care what she says and what she does. I seen 'em poison before, but I never seen no piece of jail bait worse than her. You leave her be.

Curley's wife is similar to the workers because she is, like them, stuck in a bad situation (being married to Curley). She'd had dreams as well. And, flirt or not, she refuses to be stuck in a house all day. The only people to talk to are the other workers. In Chapter Four, she speaks with Crooks and Lennie. "Think I don't like to talk to somebody ever' once in a while? Think I like to stick in that house all time?"

Curley's wife is an instigator but this results from her miserable loneliness. She loathes and appreciates the opportunity to talk to Lennie and Crooks.

Ever'body out doin' som'pin'. Ever'body! An' what am I doin'? Standin' here talkin' to a bunch of bindle stiffs--a nigger an' a dum-dum and a lousy ol' sheep--an' likin' it because they ain't nobody else."

She is lonely but ignorant enough to insult the only people she has to talk to. She is too flirtatious, bound to cause a problem, especially with such a jealous husband. But despite this and her ignorance, she elicits some sympathy simply because her situation is as deplorable as those of the itinerant workers.

I think that the powerlessness of Curley's wife is reflected when she speaks to Lennie about her own state of being in the world.  Right before she dies, she speaks of how she wished for some other form of life than the one she is living.  She speaks of her desire to be in "pitchers" and she articulates a condition whereby she wishes to be someone else, and to live a life of something else.  She also speaks of how she wanted something more than what she had.  Her articulation of this makes her a sad figure, one who is weak and powerless to control her own being.  It is through this scene where we understand that her image of being a vamp or someone who uses sexuality as a weapon is a front.  She is lonely, and broken over how her dreams have not been materialized and how her condition of her life is so very different from what lies in front of her right now.  It is a condition whereby she is alone and desperate for something more than what she lives.  For this, there is pain and there is a powerlessness inherent within her character.

Curley’s wife is lonely.

There are many lonely characters in this story, but Curley’s wife is one of the saddest cases.  She wanders around looking for her husband, unable to make any friends on the ranch.  Steinbeck does not even give her a name, to accentuate her loneliness. 

Curley would not allow his wife to be friendly with any of the men on the ranch, because he is extremely jealous.  By the same token, the men on the ranch do not want to have anything to do with her because they are worried about how Curley would take it.

Slim said, "Well, you been askin' me too often. I'm gettin' God damn sick of it. If you can't look after your own God damn wife, what you expect me to do about it? You lay offa me." (Ch. 3)

Because she is still quite young, Curley’s wife desperately wants company.  She even tries to talk to Lennie, who is clearly slow, because she wants to talk to someone.  She tells Lennie about how a man told her she could be in movies.

"'Nother time I met a guy, an' he was in pitchers. Went out to the Riverside Dance Palace with him. He says he was gonna put me in the movies. Says I was a natural. Soon's he got back to Hollywood he was gonna write to me about it." (Ch. 5)

This sad scene tells us that Curley’s wife had dreams.  She wanted to make more of her life.  Unfortunately, she was condemned to a life of isolation and loneliness when she married Curley.  She became just a tramp that everyone was afraid to come into contact with.

Curley’s wife (who is never given a name) is constantly searching for her husband. They are never in the same place until she is dead. The fact that Curley is always looking for her too is an indication that they have little companionship as husband and wife. Not being able to find Curley, she tries to strike up conversations with the men, but they push her away, fearing what her intentions to them are and what Curley’s reaction would be. In her younger days, Curley’s wife had been told that she could go to Hollywood and be in the movies. Whether this is accurate or no, her mother forbade her because of her young age. Deprived of what she saw as her dream, she marries Curley very quickly, perhaps to leave a home where she is dominated. Unfortunately, Curley has little interest in a friendship based on mutual interest and understanding; it is all about sex. This leaves Curley’s wife feeling unappreciated, if all she is in her life is a sex object. She tries to reveal her dreams to Lennie, even though he cannot fully understand her. As the only woman on the ranch, shunned by the men, and unappreciated by her husband, there is no hope for anything but loneliness.

The only woman in Steinbeck's novella, Curley's wife in Of Mice and Men is but a genitive of her husband. As such, she is less of an individual; in fact, some critics view her as an archetypal Eve

GOOD CHARACTERISTICS

• pretty, shapely
• sociable
• young

NEGATIVE CHARACTERISTICS

• flirtatious, seductive
• apparently naïve about consequences of her presence as the only woman on the ranch, but probably aware of this
• cruel to Crooks by her racial threats
• shallow in thoughts and desires
• "jail-bait" for the workers
• a temptress
• shallow, self-absorbed
• uneducated
• selfish, self-centered; she does not love Curley
• unhappy with her life and marriage
• lonely
• without real talent
• unrealistic
• conflict creator

Starting with her introduction into the narrative, Curley's wife seems a disruptive force to the fraternity of the men. George remarks that she is "jail-bait" because she is so young. Her youth causes her to push limitations by speaking playfully and imitating movie stars with her hair in "little rolled clusters" and her red fingernails, rouged lips and heavily made up eyes. In addition, she imitates the movements of the seductress: "She smiled archly and twitched her body." 
When she does not get attention, her demeanor changes. When Crooks prohibits her from entering, saying she has no right to enter "a colored man's room," for example, Curley's wife turns on him with racial slurs and threats:

"Listen, N****r....You know what I can do to you if you open your trap?"

Because she is uneducated and without any job or hobby, Curley's wife has nothing to occupy her time and mind. Therefore, she seeks attention outside herself. Her naïveté causes her to toy with Lennie as she does not understand that although Lennie is mentally-challenged and childlike in his enjoyment of puppies and keeping mice in his pocket, he can become aroused as easily as any man. 

The role of Curley's wife is basically to steer the plot towards the real, inner problem of the story: That it is virtually impossible for George and Lennie to achieve their American Dream. Their obstacles far out number their dreams. Moreover, the biggest of all obstacles may be Lennie, himself.

We know that Curley's wife is problematic: She is a flirt that overdresses and tries to make herself look sensual just for the sake of getting attention. When she sees Lennie, she is immediately attracted to his size and looks, considering that her own husband is quite puny in comparison. Lennie's size is also a point of jealousy in Curley, himself.

However, that is not the biggest of Lennie's problems. His strength is uncontrollable,as well as his anger. He is a good man with a terrible inability to control his body and his amazing strength. He kills animals accidentally trying to pet them. Equally, when he is trying to caress Curley's wife, he ends up accidentally killing her. This is the last straw. There is no way that the men can now achieve the dream of going away and building their own farm.

When Lennie is chased by the lynch mob that assembles after the discovery of Curley's wife's body, George prefers to shoot and kill Lennie so that his death is instant. Otherwise, he would have been tortured and humiliated, prior to being killed, by Curley's men. Everything is over for the two men at this point. Therefore, the role of Curley's wife is simply to accelerate what seems to be an inevitable tragedy that would end the dreams of George and Lennie.

Curley's wife is the final step in the acceleration of Lennie's struggle with himself.  He starts out killing small mice because he is petting them to hard and both he and George feel that a puppy, being a little larger, might be a better fit for Lennie.  We then find that that is too much for him when he kills the dog as well.  Curley's wife is the final step and we see him killing her during the conflict with the petting of the hair.  It seems here that Lennie is unable to control himself no matter how large or strong a character might be.  If George did not kill him, Curley's wife would probably not be the last murder that Lennie would have committed.

Yes, she is! If she hadn't been there, Lennie wouldn't have accidentally strangled her. (This is the first crisis point of the story where an action can't be "undone.") He would not have had to "run for it," and George would not have been put into the difficult predicament of having to choose what to do before Curley's gang caught up with Lennie. If things had taken their natural course without these "domino" events, George and Lennie would have managed to buy their farm (along with Candy's participation) and fulfill their dream.