Two PQEs on Curley's Wife

P. After we see CW feeling frustrated, she suddenly takes out this anger on Crooks. As a black man, he is socially the lowest person in the stable, lower even than her, due to his skin colour. Q. ‘Well, you keep your place then, Nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain’t even funny.’ E. Steinbeck allows CW a moment of fire and anger. The repetition of ‘you’ and ‘your’ personal pro-nouns emphasise how she doesn’t view Crooks in the collective of their gathering, but instead she sets him apart. She reinforces this with the pejorative slang ‘Nigger,’ which is shocking today, but would have been perfectly acceptable at the time – although not for Crooks. She says ‘it ain’t even funny’ as if to suggest she would gain some amusement from doing this, for kicks. This hints at a cruel streak from CW. Even though she has felt the isolation of the men on the farm, she ironically decides to divide even further and to reinforce the isolation by dividing with gender and colour. P. In the stable scene, CW is presented as being frustrated by her domestic situation. Q. “Sure I gotta husban’. You all seen him. Swell guy, ain’t he?” E. Steinbeck uses a rhetorical question to allow both the characters and the reader an opportunity to reflect on this. By using ‘swell’ she is being ironic and put next to the rhetorical question we get a sense of the sarcasm with which this would have been delivered. We do / do not feel sorry for her and are unsympathetic like the characters / we are sympathetic towards her unlike the characters.