John Steinbeck did not need to depict displays of ostentatious wealth to contrast with abject poverty in which his protagonists in Of Mice and Men existed. Simple descriptions of setting sufficed to present the requisite imagery of that poverty, and of the hopelessness with which the itinerant ranch hands at the center of the story live. So poor are these men, personified by the two main characters, George and Lennie, that descriptions of setting, beginning with the novel’s opening passages, immediately draw the reader into an atmosphere of economic destitution—one in which the earth is parched from the dry heat of the West an in which “tramps who come wearily down from the highway” help establish trails through the brush. The endemic poverty of the Great Depression is all-around, and it establishes the milieu in which Steinbeck’s story takes place. Note, for instance, the following description of the bunk house in which the ranch hands who populate Of Mice and Men reside:
“The bunk house was a long, rectangular building. Inside, the walls were whitewashed and the floor unpainted. In three walls there were small, square windows, and in the fourth, a solid door with a wooden latch. Against the walls were eight bunks, five of them made up with blankets and the other three showing their burlap ticking. Over each bunk there was nailed an apple box with the opening forward so that it made two shelves for the personal belongings of the occupant of the bunk. . . Near one wall there was a black cast-iron stove, its stovepipe going straight up through the ceiling. In the middle of the room stood a big square table littered with playing cards, and around it were grouped boxes for the players to sit on.”
Throughout his novel, Steinbeck emphasizes the dire circumstances in which these men live and work. In so doing, he sets the stage for the tragedy that culminates in Lennie’s death in the book’s final passages. This is a novel about poor, lonely people who work back-breaking jobs for minimal money and without any form of security save their own wits and one pistol. Against this backdrop, Steinbeck presents glimmers of the slightly-more-affluent, specifically, the family that owns and operates the ranch where George and Lennie find temporary refuge. Bits of information suggesting, if not wealth, then, at least, some measure of financial security are presented in the person of Curley, the violent, borderline-psychotic son of the ranch’s owner. Curley is described in his introduction as “a thin young man with a brown face, with brown eyes and a head of tightly curled hair. He wore a work glove on his left hand, and, like the boss, he wore high-heeled boots.” This reference to “high-heeled boots” is intended to convey the sense of hierarchy that dominates the surroundings. Curley is privileged; he even has an attractive young wife to further emphasize his good fortune relative to the ranch hands. Another hint of his relative good fortune in the reference to Curley’s one-time participation in “the Golden Gloves,” the name given to well-known amateur boxing competition. While not necessarily suggestive of wealth—on the contrary, participation in Golden Gloves tournaments has nothing at all to do with wealth and everything with one’s prowess as a fighter—its mention here highlights not just Curley’s skills with his hands, but the opportunities that he has been afforded as well, opportunities almost certainly not available to the less-affluent.
The main contrast among socioeconomic conditions presented in Of Mice and Men involves not the wealthy, but those with merely just enough to live independent of the oppressive bosses who ran the farms and ranches. This is why certain characters reference past or present “wealth,” as with Candy’s mention of the $250 he received after losing his hand to a work-related accident, and Crook’s description of the chicken ranch owned by his father and on which he was raised. These are hints of what constituted wealth to the truly poor. Beyond that, Steinbeck had no reason, within the context of his plot, to provide examples of ostentatious wealth. This was the Depression. Many truly wealthy businessmen lost everything when the stock market crashed in 1929. Degrees of wealth during the period depicted, which coincides with the period during which this novel was written, were relative, and contrasts between haves and have-nots reflected minimal distinctions.
Beyond the socioeconomic conditions depicted, the main display of inequality in Of Mice and Men involves the bitter, crippled African American named Crooks. Forced to live a solitary existence among the ranch hands solely on the basis of his ethnicity, Crooks is an angry old man who keeps to himself despite his acknowledged need for human companionship. Asked by the simple-minded Lennie why he lives alone and doesn't join the others in card games, Crooks replies simply and truthfully, "Cause I'm black. . .I can't play because I'm black." This, then, is the most prominent display of inequality in a story in which poverty is the defining characteristic of the plot.
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