She's a jail bait all set on the trigger. That Curley got his work cut out for him. Ranch with a bunch of guys on it ain't no place for a girl, specially like her.
Chapter 3 · George Milton
Context
Whit has been describing Curley's wife to George, characterizing her as flirtatious and ubiquitous. George responds with his own assessment of the trouble she will cause on the ranch.
Analysis
The compound noun 'jail bait' (already a metaphor freezing female sexuality into legal hazard) is intensified by 'set on the trigger'—a firearm metaphor that converts the woman herself into a weapon awaiting discharge. The grammatical agency is striking: the trigger is set on her, not she on it, so that her body becomes the instrument of a violence she does not author but cannot prevent. Steinbeck is reproducing the misogynist logic of his speakers without endorsing it, and the gap between her actual victimhood (later revealed in Chapter 5) and this characterization is where the novella's gender critique lives.
How to Use in Essay
Argue that Steinbeck stages rather than shares his characters' misogyny—George's weaponizing metaphors here construct the version of Curley's wife the men require for their fraternal economy to function, a construction the narrator will systematically dismantle when we finally hear her own voice in Chapter 5.