Isolation In Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

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When people become isolated, they often can lose their true self. They start doing things that in a normal situation they would not do. Both John Steinbeck and Susan Glaspell conveyed this through their pieces, “Of Mice and Men” and “Trifles” respectively. In ‘Of Mice and Men’ Curley’s wife, the wife of the ranch owner’s son, is the only woman on the ranch and is always left at her house without anyone to talk to or anything to do. In “Trifles”, Mrs. Wright is trapped in a discontent marriage with her unpersonable husband Mr. Wright. Using the confined lives of Curley’s wife and Mrs. Wright, Steinbeck and Glaspell convey that loneliness and isolation causes a loss of humanity.

Curley’s wife’s attention-deprived life on the farm as …show more content…
Wright freedomless marriage to the unpersonable Mr. Wright led to her murdering her own husband when he killed Mrs. Wright’s yellow canary, which was her last and only companion. Mrs. Hale empathizes about how Mrs. Wright must have felt when she found her yellow canary dead. “If there’d been years and years of nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful--still, after the bird was still.” The ladies find the canary dead and are appalled. They feel the eerie quietness that Mrs. Wright had to encounter on a daily basis so much that a lively bird that sang felt weird for them in such a cloistered environment. Mrs. Hale sympathizes that ‘it would be awful--still, after the bird was still’ implying that the stillness after the bird had died is much worse than the stillness before the bird had died, because it is often more painful to lose something than to never have had it at all. Mrs. Wright used to be happy and sang. At that time she was known as Minnie Foster, but after her marriage to Mr. Wright, she just became known as a very generic Mrs. Wright. The bird had been killed by its neck being wrung, which is a slow and a painful way of murder, just like Mr. Wright had slowly and painfully suffocated the happiness from Mrs. Wright’s or Minnie Foster’s life. The bird is Mrs. Wright’s single and only companion since Mr. Wright is very aloof and limits her freedom by forcing her to stay home. Mrs. Wright takes out her frustration on Mr. Wright for killing the bird by strangling him. Her seclusion from common social interactions and the ‘years and years of nothing’ suddenly overcome her when the bird dies, lead to her to
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