Similarities Between Of Mice And Men And Curley's Wife

In this essay, I will be analysing the similarities and differences between John Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ and Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’. I will be focusing on Lady Macbeth and Curley’s wife. In Jacobean England women were seen as sex slaves and possessions to a man. Their role in society is to be a housewife and take care of children. Women weren’t powerful at all in Jacobean England, they weren’t allowed a job and if there husband didn’t want them he could sell her and keep the money.

Of Mice and Men was written in the 1930s women were thought of as a property of a man. They weren’t very powerful at all and couldn’t even wear their hair down if they were married. Lady Macbeth isn’t the typical 16th century woman. We know this because she likes violence; she said she would have ‘dashed [her child’s] brains out’ she is very manipulative and controlling. She is a victim with no identity and victim of her own ambitious the same as Curley’s Wife but in a less

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