I first read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, as a junior in high school and it ended up being one of my favorites. This time around I tried to focus mainly on our course topic, disability. George voices his annoyances with Lennie multiple times throughout the novel, however, even with all the trouble Lennie has caused, George still chooses to stick around. I had always seen George as a big brother or father figure to Lennie, as his major goal throughout the novel was to keep Lennie safe and out of trouble. With disability studies in mind, I made connections between George and family members of a disabled person; and I connected all the other characters in the novel with possible societal conflicts a disabled person might encounter.
When we first meet George and Lennie, they are running from their previous place of employment because Lennie is being accused of attempted rape. However, the novel makes note time and time again on Lennie’s pure childlike innocence. It is to be understood that any bad thing Lennie might do, is in no way on purpose or with mal intentions. He is driven to be well-behaved thanks to the help of George who constantly reminds Lennie of what they are working for and what will happen if Lennie messes up. Since Lennie has the mindset of a child, the fear of making his only “family member” upset or disappointed in him is all he needs to incentivize good behavior.
I connected the characters Crooks and Curly’s wife with social conflicts as they took advantage of and manipulated Lennie throughout the novel. Crooks riles up Lennie by planting the idea that George has left him for good. He causes Lennie to get so upset that he ends up threatening Crooks with violence to get him to stop. I concluded that the only reason Crooks was torturing Lennie with this thought was because Crooks himself is a very lonely man. As a black man, presumably in the 1930s, Crooks is the low man on the totem pole. He saw Lennie’s childlike mentality and chose to manipulate Lennie to make himself feel better about his own personal situation. Curly’s wife is unhappy with her marriage so she suppresses her unhappiness and vulnerable feelings by seeking out other’s vulnerabilities and feeding into those vulnerabilities. This causes Lennie to become overwhelmed and startled resulting in Curly’s wife’s death.
Like all children, mistakes are bound to happen. Lennie, as described, is a reasonably large man so while he has the mentality of a child the mistakes he makes are far from your average childlike mistake. It is these mistakes that lead to Lennie’s death. Today we are fortunate enough to have a plethora of teaching strategies to help grow, prepare, and integrate mentally disabled children into society and the workplace. However, Of Mice and Men takes place long before these strategies were implemented. In the 1930s if you could not see the disability, the disability was not there. Since these invisible disabilities were not cared for or viewed as they should have been, it caused people to outcast, prey on, and weaponize people’s mental disabilities.
I pledge…
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