She had full, rouged lips and wide–spaced eyes, heavily made up. Her fingernails were red. Her hair hung in little rolled clusters, like sausages.
Chapter 2 · Narrator
Context
Curley's wife appears in the bunk house doorway for the first time, ostensibly looking for her husband. The narrator describes her through George and Lennie's perspective.
Analysis
The catalogue of cosmetic intensifiers—'rouged,' 'heavily made up,' 'red'—repeatedly registers her face as surface rather than expression, while the bathetic simile of hair like 'sausages' deflates the glamour the makeup attempts. Steinbeck's diction enacts the contradiction her character will embody: the elaborate self-fashioning of a woman trying to be seen on a ranch that will only see her as 'tart,' a labor of presentation the simile mocks even as the catalogue records it.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck's free indirect description colludes with the male gaze it ostensibly observes—the 'sausages' simile lets the prose participate in the men's contempt while preserving narrative deniability, a complicity the later chapters' deepening of her character partially rebukes.