Creating and Recreating Curley's Wife
http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/steinbec/abstract.html
By Mimi Gladstein, University of Texas at El Paso
 
Of Mice and Men is proving to be one of John Steinbeck's most enduring tales. It has inspired translations into a variety of media, the first being Steinbeck's own stage play. Three major film productions, two for the big screen and one for television plus a stage-misical, an opera, and the ballet of Curley's Wife have followed. The prize-winning Broadway production has inspired revivals, including one with a multi-racial cast, including James Earl Jones as Lennie. Now there is even a CD, complete with a narrator called Bindy, short interviews with Elaine Steinbeck, Jackson Benson and Robert Morsberger and a recording of the musical Curley's wife singing of her plaintive need for "Someone to Talk To."
 
Perhaps the character whose portrayal has aroused the most controversy over the years sincer her inception is Curley's Wife. Nameless, but pivotal, her role was a source of conflict even before she was embodied by the actresses who gave form to Steinbeck's word portrait. George S. Kaufman, whose wife was one of the first to see the dramatic possibilities of Steinbeck's text, made suggestions to Steinbeck about enlarging her part in the story as he wrote the playscript: "The girl, I think, should be drawn more fully: she is the motivating force of the whole thing and should loom larger." (SLL, 136)
 

Clare Luce, the first actress to play the role, received a detailed background explication from John Steinbeck himself. His letter explains that Curley's wife may appear hard and sexually predatory, but that it is mostly a defense. She is, he explains "a nice, kind girl and not a floozy" (SLL 154). We do not have a record of Luce's performance, so we cannot see for ourselves how she interpreted this woman who was called a "tart" and "jail-bait" by the men in the play, but "not a floozy" by her creator. We do, however, have records of her personification in three film productions and it is instructive to analyse them, not just for the amplification they provide for our interpretation of this problematic character, but also for what they tell us about the politics and psychology of the producers. Judith Crist once commented that when Hollywood makes a historical movie, it tells us more about Hollywood at the time of the making of the film than it does about the time period of the film plot.

See also sexism in Curley's wife
 
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