"... I coulda made somethin' of myself." She said darkly, "Maybe I will yet."
Chapter 5 · Curley's Wife
Context
Curley's wife begins to narrate her history of thwarted ambition to Lennie, whom she has identified as a non-threatening audience because of his cognitive limitations.
Analysis
The modal 'coulda' is the chapter's grammatical signature for the dispossessed—a counterfactual past that admits the dream was never realized while refusing to surrender its grammatical possibility. The narrator's tag 'darkly' juxtaposed against the future-tense reassertion 'Maybe I will yet' captures the precise pathos of delusion sustained by despair: she knows the past tense has closed, and she refuses to know it. This is the diction of someone using grammar itself as a survival mechanism.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that the conditional and modal verbs throughout the novella constitute a kind of class-specific grammar of unfulfillment—this line's 'coulda...maybe...will' charts the temporal collapse of working-class American aspiration.