Are you dreaming of university or college, but faced with the grinding hurdles of DEMANDING examinations?
Q: What can you do to boost your grades and confidence in your English studies right now?
A: Well, you can look for the ‘strange‘ as I have discussed HERE, AND you can look for CONNECTIONS…
Connections in your texts can take many forms. They ‘TIE’ texts together and are important to MEANING.
They can be connections involving:
- similar images,
- similar sounds,
- similar ideas,
- repetitions
ALL ‘tied’ together to form MESSAGE AND MEANING
Let’s look at an example of CONNECTION..
This is Steinbeck’ description of the dead Curley’s wife after she has been accidentally killed by Lennie.
‘‘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. 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.
As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.’
It is worth remembering that shortly before the narrative settles on Curley’s wife in this way, she has been fighting for her life ‘wild with terror’ as Lennie struggles to keep her quiet. Lennie ‘shook her then’ so that ‘her body flopped like a fish. And then she was still, for Lennie had broken her neck.”
Think about why Steinbeck describes Curley’s wife in such a peaceful manner( like a tableau of the Sleeping Beauty awaiting her Prince) after her violent death and before the ‘execution’ of Lennie by his best friend , George.
Look at the repetition of the word AND.
Why does Steinbeck seem to OVERUSE this WORD as a CONNECTION between one aspect of Curley’s wife’s appearance and another characteristic?
Q) WHAT message are we receiving here in this extract as we read on ACCUMULATING all these descriptive terms?
A) Maybe these ideas come into our minds?
REDEMPTION
RECONCILATION
HEALING
FORGIVENESS
REPENTANCE
CLEANSING
Now let’s look out for strangeness and connections!
But first, let’s remind ourselves about our first meeting and then notice what has changed in the extract above once she is dead.
”She had full, rouged lips and wide-spaced eyes, heavily made up. Her finger nails 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.”
- The original description is quite terse in its rhythm, suggesting the derisory glance of George whose observations are also fuelled by Candy’s derogatory pronouncement about her trashiness previous to this scene.
- The artificiality of her ‘constructed’ appearance emphasizes her falsity and vulgarity. Curley’s wife is unnaturally put together and looks very strange and inappropriate on this ranch where she is the only female.
- The abundance of red advertises her dream of being a film star, yet her delusional reading of this dream has made her into a tarty looking female who is ill equipped for her role as a wife.
- So red in this instance is UNNATURAL as opposed to the STRANGE IRONY of her natural, peaceful looking appearance later where she is actually dead.
- In the later description the crucial word just might be the ADVERB of time, NOW!! This suggests pivotal CHANGE and REDEMPTION.
- This early description has become TRANSFORMED into an Elegy in the later version…!
In such a short novel, such repetition is important as it encourages us to recognize similarity and then reevaluate what we feel about her character and significance within the novel. with this ‘added’ on scene.
So let’s look at some strangeness and some connection…remember the last glimpse again..I have underlined some strange connections..
- You read this description and may feel an immediate sense of ‘deja vu’.
- We have read this before, well almost!
- We have read something similar to this description, yet this description is far more positive and flattering than the first encounter with Curley’s wife.
”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. 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.
As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.’
- There is an ironic strangeness here between the violence of her death and the peacefulness and even ‘healing’ quality of her final ‘rest’.
- It is as if death has strangely healed the problem that blighted her life as far as we knew ‘her’ She gains a beauty and even innocence in death that she lacked in her short life.Each scene connects with another, giving us a fuller version of Curley’s Wife and her tragedy.
- Curley”s Wife is dressed strangely and inappropriately for the ranch setting, because she held onto a fanciful dream of being a film star. This delusion sustained her(unhelpfully)through her short, lonely life on the ranch, married to Curley whose capacity/predilection for violence surely spilled into her relationship with his young wife?
- We are made to see the ironic change between the original’vulgar’ glimpse of her when George judges her harshly in an attempt to halt Lennie’s fatal fascination with her, and this final glimpse when she seems at peace, and our gaze is reconciled to her innocence and prettiness.
- Without this echo, we would still have the horrible image of her death imprinted in our minds and the death of Lennie as he imagines the proximity of his dream would thus seem more deserved than a tragic necessity.
- This scene is therefore an imaginative ‘bridge‘ between the reader’s uneasy relationship with Curley’s wife and the moving resolution to the novel, namely the death of Lennie.
- The rhythmic sound of this passage is trance like and respectful, as it is like an elegy, summarizing the character now of Curley’s Wife(through the repetition of the accumulative use of AND) before she is released from our gaze and attention, and into a now peaceful death.
Here’s an extra for your Steinbeck essays. This is a video looking at ways we can read the ending….
Good Luck!
