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Left alone with the body, Candy redirects his grief at the loss of the dream farm into rage at the dead woman. He had earlier been told the farm plan could include him.

The misogynist invective ('tramp,' 'tart') is the chapter's most undisguised display of the gendered scapegoating that has surrounded Curley's wife throughout—but Steinbeck makes us hear it from the character we have been encouraged to sympathize with, complicating any easy reader alignment. The repeated possessive 'You done it' transfers agency from Lennie's hands to her transgressive presence, performing in real time the cultural operation by which female victims are converted into the cause of their own deaths.

Support a thesis that Steinbeck weaponizes reader sympathy with Candy to expose how easily marginalized men reproduce the misogyny of those who oppress them—Candy's invective is morally indefensible yet structurally inevitable within his economic position.