The Victory of the Strong Over The Weak

In life people typically root for the underdog, but in reality, the stronger figure typically wins. In the book Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, the reader will notice that the stronger figure will have power over the underdog characters. The book takes place during the Great Depression when women didn’t have many rights and men had seen women as objects rather than human beings. In the book, Steinbeck uses the role of women and animals to symbolize the victory of the strong over the weak.

Therefore the women and animals were viewed as the underdogs of the book and stereotypically men kept the women in the house doing household chores or working in the fields. In the book Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck has shown how women and animals were viewed during the Great Depression.

Women were typically viewed as sexual objects and as weak individuals whose purpose in life is to serve the needs of men. For example, “We go in to old Susy’s place.

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Hell of a nice place. Old Susy’s a laugh-- always crackin’ jokes… she never talks dirty, neither. Got five girls there”. In the book the men had seen women as exchangeable objects in exchange for money. During the Great Depression men had hard intensive labor jobs while they gave women the easier jobs that were consisting of housework and raising the children. In the book Steinbeck portrays this by Curley’s wife. For example, Curley’s wife wears a “cotton house dress” and she wears her hair in “little rolled clusters, like sausages”.

This shows how women were confined to the house, and her hair portrays how she should be in the kitchen. However Curley’s wife constantly ignores her stereotypical role as a woman, and she is constantly found in the barn and the bunkhouse flirting with all the ranch hands.

In the book, Curley’s wife is described as beautiful and flirty. For example “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”. This quote shows how women are stereotypically viewed as not capable of doing hard labor, and therefore she should not be found in the bunkhouse or the barn. George was worried that since she was very flirty she was going to get one of the ranch hands fired if they were found with her. Jobs were hard to come across back then due to the financial issues. In the book, the men think that Curley’s wife is trying to get them in trouble, but she’s just lonely and Curley doesn’t treat her well. There’s many characters in the book that don’t have a name such as Curley’s wife, Lennie’s dog, and Candy’s dog. This symbolizes that they are owned by someone else and back then they were considered as weak.

If a person was a women, disabled, or an animal they’d be considered as not important and people would lose respect for them. This idea is portrayed during the Great Depression because the disabled were viewed as worthless and uneducated and this was because they would be put into a institution and they were unable to go to school. For example, Lennie had mental issues in the book and without George he would have a hard time surviving by himself. In the book, Lennie had struggled with learning from right and wrong and this affected the “weaker” characters. Lennie is treated like a child by the other characters in the book, so he acts as if he were clueless and doesn’t know better. Lennie doesn’t understand his strength and power because he doesn’t have others respect and trust. This causes Lennie to view himself as weak, and he doesn’t think that he would be able to hurt anyone.

Lennie has an obsession with soft objects and living things that can be easily controlled. For example, “Well, he seen this girl in a red dress. Dumb bastard like he is, he wants to touch ever’thing he likes… So he reaches out to feel this dress an’ the girl lets out a squawk, and that gets Lennie all mixed up, and he holds on ‘cause that’s the only thing he can think to do”. The women thought he was going to rape her, because Lennie doesn’t know better to understand that he can’t do whatever he wants to do. Lennie doesn’t understand the amount of his strength which causes a lot of death in this book. Lennie loves to pet mice because they are soft to him but the mice would bite him. This causes Lennie to pinch their heads which would end up breaking their necks.

In conclusion, in book the mice were considered as weak because they were easily defeated when Lennie the stronger character snapped their necks. This relates to how Steinbeck symbolizes the victory of the strong over the weak by using the roles of women and animals during the Great Depression. During the Great Depression men had hard intensive labor jobs while they gave women the easier jobs that were consisting of housework and raising the children. Characters in the book that didn’t have a name such as Curley’s wife, Lennie’s dog, and Candy’s dog symbolize that they are owned by someone else they were considered as weak. In life the underdog will be most likely defeated by the stronger figure.