Quote Detail

Aunt Clara dismisses Lennie's promise to run away and live in a cave, predicting that he will instead remain and continue to plague George.

The verb 'stew' carries kitchen-domestic connotations that align with Aunt Clara's apron-clad persona, but its idiomatic application here ('stew the b'Jesus outa') yields a low-register vehemence that punctures the maternal veneer. The line accomplishes a small theological compression too: 'b'Jesus' (a euphemistic 'by Jesus') treats George's soul as something that can be cooked out of him, an irreverence that locates this conscience-figure firmly within working-class vernacular rather than any pulpit morality.

Support a thesis that Steinbeck's hallucinated authority figures speak the same dialect as their subjects—this line shows that even Lennie's internalized morality is bounded by class, never offering him access to a moral vocabulary beyond the bunkhouse.