Steinbeck harvested the title of his 1937 novel, Of Mice and Men from a theme of the famous 1785 poem, “To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest With a Plough” by Robert Burns. Burns identifies the mouse with the foibles of humans with ambitious dreams, which are overturned by poor planning or fate. The mouse built his nest in the summer but had no way of knowing that the plow would come in December and destroy his dreams for the future, causing grief and disappointment. Burns writes:
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane
In proving foresight may be vain
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft’ agley
An lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain
For promised joy!
Burns, who was from a poor and struggling farm family, who dreamed of a better future, suggests in his poem, that both hoping and suffering are an essential part of all life – for humans and animals. Mice do not have the ability to predict future outcomes. Even though humans can make plans for the future, they often have little to control over whether they are ever achieved. Although the Steinbeck did not suffer from poverty or hunger like the Burns family, as a teenager, he worked in the fields of central California along with migrant farm workers. In the 1930’s, during the height of the Dust Bowl era, Steinbeck drew from those earlier experiences and wrote two of his most notable books based on his recollections: Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath.
Of Mice and Men tells the story of two migrant farm-workers George Milton and Lennie Small who, for various reasons that are out of their control, need to move from one migrant camp to another to find work. George is uneducated, but he is a principled man who feels compelled by a previous family association to take care of Lenny, who is a hard worker but is mentally and socially handicapped. Despite their struggles, both George and Lenny adhere to the American Dream of making plans to own their home and farm. As they lay out their schemes, readers are reminded of the title of the book and the Burns poem; although men and mice can get close to achieving their dreams, they cannot totally reach them. For that reason, this book reads like reads like a Greek Tragedy which taking place during the American Dust Bowl period.
It is ironic that Lennie’s dream involves him in charge of taking care of soft and furry animals like mice, puppies, and rabbits, which he cannot stop himself from crushing to death. He is a giant and a physically overpowering man, whose character is like a friendly Frankenstein. Lenny is based on a character Steinbeck observed as a young man when he was working in a mental asylum. The opening scenes foreshadow the idea that the men’s dreams will “Gang aft agley,” as Lennie over-pets and crushes the life out of a mouse he has hidden in his pocket. It is by chance that this unfortunate mouse landed up in that place. The same fate would later fall to a puppy entrusted to Lennie’s care.
It is also by chance that the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression forced these two men to become migrant farm workers. However, their need to flee from their previous work camp in “Deeds” was not as much caused by chance as it was by Lennie’s uncontrollable desire to touch and feel the softness of a young woman’s dress. Although he did not have mal-intentions, the woman got scared because of Lennie’s overwhelming presence and falsely accused him of rape. These dangerous types of deeds, which are repeated in various ways throughout the novel, suggests that Lennie is no better at predicting the outcomes of his actions than the mouse was in knowing that the plough would tear up his nest. No matter how many times George warns his sidekick that his actions could ruin their dreams, Lenny is not capable of stopping himself. George also feels trapped, as if by fate, to be required to be the guardian of Lennie, and to dream of a better future along with him. George spends much of his spare time in the bunk setting, playing the card game, Solitaire, hoping perhaps to be the odds of chance, one of the novel’s re-occurring themes.
Several of the supporting characters in the novel are also entangled in traps of chance and fate and support the “best-laid plans” theme of the novel. Candy’s blind old dog “stinks” and is “crippled”, and because of that, he is killed by Carlson, after Candy regretfully gives his consent. Candy is an aging worker who is concerned that he, like his old dog, will soon be considered both dispensable and disposable. Therefore, out of desperation, he offers his savings and latches on to George and Lennie’s dream.
Crooks, who is described as a “Negro stable manager” also feels both displaced and trapped in this setting. Crooks’ back hurts so much from his work, he constantly is rubbing it down with horse liniment. Readers might not expect to find a black man on a migrant farm. Historical documents have shown that the migrant farms of the 1930’s were almost exclusively segregated by race. Nevertheless, we find that Crooks is not only black but was college educated and not raised on a farm, but in a city in California. Steinbeck later revealed that, in his youth, he associated with an educated black person who felt like he was often stereotyped as an uneducated Southern Negro. In the novel, Crooks feels both the loneliness of being isolated on the farm from the other white men and a wish to protect the only space he had to call his own. However, he also points out to them that his “special space” is “next to a horse manure pile.” To Crooks’ credit, he is the only man in the novel smart enough to question Lennie’s dream, and to challenge Lennie’s faith that George would stay loyal to him. However, after building up this skeptical argument, he also asks Lennie if he could work with them on their farm. This concession reveals Steinbeck’s understanding that the dreams of black men in those times were very limited,
Curley, the boss’s son, once had some promise as a semi-professional boxer. But, it seems like he was not good enough to advance any further than being a migrant farm manager. He has had the unfortunate fate of marrying a beautiful, but lonely wife he cannot control. She feels trapped into being the only women living on a farm full of lonely and horny men, who refuse to associate with her. All of them know to stay away from her because she could get them in trouble with Curly or fired. Curly’s wife, who is not even given a name in the story, dreams of being a famous movie star but feels thwarted because she is trapped with a jealous husband and a bunch of farm hands she considers to be no more valuable than disposable dogs. She declares that “the nation is full of stray mutts.” Perhaps it is a matter of fate, that due to Curly’s feelings of inadequacy he challenges Lennie to a fight and gets his hand crushed by the giant. It is also perhaps a matter of a chance that Curly’s wife cannot find any other man in the camp, except for Lennie, to share her feelings of loneliness and disappointed dreams. As she relaxes with him, she invites him to stroke her hair, which is, as one might guess, is as soft as a mouse, a rabbit, or a puppy….The only thing that cannot be predicted by the author’s powerful foreshadowing, is how he ends the story. I am totally shocked by that ending every time I read Of Mice and Men!
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