And the meanness and the plannings and the discontent and the ache for attention were all gone from her face. She was very pretty and simple, and her face was sweet and young.
Chapter 5 · Narrator
Context
After Lennie has fled the barn, the narrator pauses on the body of Curley's wife, describing her face in death. This is the first time in the novella she is given an extended physical description independent of being looked at by men.
Analysis
The catalog of negations—'meanness and the plannings and the discontent and the ache for attention'—uses polysyndeton to insist on the abundance of what she was, granting her in death the interior complexity the ranch men consistently denied her in life. The asyndetic adjectival closure 'pretty and simple...sweet and young' performs a posthumous redaction, returning her to the very objectifying vocabulary the previous clauses had relieved her of. Steinbeck thus enacts the cultural impulse to sentimentalize dead women even as he exposes it.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck's elegiac framing of Curley's wife's corpse constitutes a complex critique of how femininity becomes legible only in death—this passage performs the very aesthetic violence it asks us to recognize.