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Prejudice in Of Mice and Men — theme analysis

Of Mice and Men · John Steinbeck · Set text on Pearson Edexcel International GCSE English Literature (4ET1) — Modern Prose option · Grade 9 Notes

In one sentence. Four characters are judged by category rather than conduct: Crooks by race, Curley's wife by gender, Candy by age, Lennie by mind. Steinbeck's design is to gather all four in one room in Chapter 4 and let them illuminate — and injure — each other, so that prejudice reads as a system of ranking rather than a set of individual nastinesses.

This study ends with John Steinbeck. Build your reading of Prejudice in Of Mice and Men, teach it, then defend it against John Steinbeck.

How Prejudice — race, gender, age and disability works in Of Mice and Men

The novella's prejudices are notable for having no enforcer. Nobody on the ranch is presented as a bigot with a philosophy; the exclusions run on habit. Crooks is barred by custom, Candy is written off by actuarial logic, Curley's wife is filed by a shorthand every man on the property already shares, and Lennie is priced by his back and feared for his hands. Steinbeck is arguing that the ordinary is where the damage lives, which is a harder indictment than a villain would allow — and a genuinely strong AO4 line, since it names the period's habits rather than blaming a character.

“S'pose you didn't have nobody. S'pose you couldn't go into the bunkhouse and play rummy 'cause you was black.” — Crooks, Chapter 4

Prejudice described from inside, in the second person, to the one listener incapable of enforcing it. Steinbeck's choice of the smallest possible example — a card game — is deliberate: the machinery of exclusion is made of trivia, repeated nightly, until a man's life is shaped by rummy. Note also that Crooks must construct a hypothesis to be heard; direct testimony has never worked.

Methods: second-person hypothetical · exclusion by trivia

The language of the period. The men use racial slurs about Crooks as routine speech, and the novella records that speech rather than endorsing it. Handle this in an essay by naming the practice, never the word: ‘Crooks is referred to by a racial slur so habitually that it functions as a job title.' The book's language is one reason it has been repeatedly challenged in American schools since the 1970s — a reception fact worth two clauses in an essay about how contexts of reading change.

Grade 9 insight. Grade 9 insight: prejudice in this novella is transitive. She threatens Crooks; Candy curses her corpse; the men label her; Crooks torments Lennie. Each act is committed by someone who has just been humiliated. Argue that Steinbeck's point is not that some people are cruel but that a hierarchy manufactures cruelty and then distributes it downward — and the bottom of the chain, where nobody is left to pass it to, is where the deaths happen.

Another reading. Some modern readers argue the novella participates in what it depicts: Crooks gets one chapter, Curley's wife gets one scene and no name, and both are returned to silence. Others answer that the confinement is the portrait — a book that gave them the run of the narrative would misrepresent a world that gave them nothing. Naming this debate, rather than picking a side too quickly, is exactly the reception-aware move the specification credits.

Use this in an essay. Deployable frame: ‘Steinbeck's four outsiders are excluded by four different categories and by the same mechanism — routine — which is why the novella can indict 1930s America without ever supplying a bigot to blame.'

The characters who carry Prejudice — race, gender, age and disability

An essay on Prejudice — race, gender, age and disability is built from the characters. Each line below is from that character's own study — follow it for the full analysis.

  • Curley's wife — she is judged by category (‘tart') exactly as Crooks is judged by colour and Lennie by mind — the novella's three label-victims illuminate each other.
  • Crooks — the novella's central exhibit — racism as daily custom, recorded without softening and analysed without a villain.

Think you understand it?

Reading is the start. On Incandio a topic counts as mastered only once you have taught it and defended it — the two things a revision guide cannot ask of you.

Incandio this topic → Prove it. Teach it. Defend it. What does “Incandio it” mean?

  1. Teach it — Explain your reading of Prejudice in Of Mice and Men to Ember, an AI pupil who has not made one, and answer the awkward question. Understanding is credited; wording is not required.
  2. Defend it — Hold your reading of Prejudice in Of Mice and Men against John Steinbeck in a short, structured debate marked against descriptors you can read first.
  3. Then the exam — 4 authored exam-style questions on Prejudice in Of Mice and Men, marked on Incandio with the mistake you actually made named.

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Carry on through Of Mice and Men

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