Naturalism In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

The definition of naturalism is “a philosophical viewpoint according to which everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted.” In other words, John Steinbeck’s beliefs. He expresses this belief throughout the book. He expresses his naturalistic beliefs through characters like Curley, Crooks and Curley’s wife. Everything John Steinbeck makes the characters in this novel do is based on their physical features, or “natural properties”. Steinbeck plays on the physical traits of characters in Of Mice in Men in order develop relationships to foreshadow each of the characters futures.
The first character Steinbeck uses to display his naturalistic views is Curley. From the second we met Curley we knew that he was going to be a very cocky man. Steinbeck made him cocky because his biggest physical feature is that he is very short. Steinbeck uses Curley’s small stature to give him a very short temper and a

cocky attitude. A prime example of this is the scene in chapter 3 when Curley’s cocky attitude gets the best of him and he begins to pick on Lennie… again. Eventually Lennie gets fed it with Curley bullying him and he catches Curley’s fist in the air and crushes it. A couple minutes later while Curley is blubbering over his surely broken hand, Slim tells him not to tell anybody about what had just happened and they will do the same, and Curley happily accepted that offer. Why you ask? He accepted it because of his insecurities that were caused by, you guessed it, his height.
Another character Steineck uses in Of Mice and Men is Crooks.

Crooks is segregated from the rest of the men because he is black. Because of his race, Crooks is always in kind of a teasing mood, he takes advantage of all the time he has with the other workers because he has to sleep in a different bunk than them. An example of him taking advantage of that time is when he teases Lennie about how George isn’t coming back for him until, “Suddenly Lennie's eyes centered and grew quiet, and mad. He stood up and walked dangerously toward Crooks. "Who hurt George?" he demanded.” Then Crooks kind of backed off of Lennie, but not until he was satisfied with screwing with Lennie until he bursted. I think that if Crooks was white he wouldn’t of acted this way. If he was white he wouldn’t have been segregated. If Crooks wasn’t segregated he wouldn’t feel the need to take all of this “teasing attitude” out all at once, he would do this all the time with less intensity than he did with Lennie in that

quote.
I think that the character that displays the most naturalism is Curley’s nameless wife. Since she is a very attractive woman surrounded by a farm full of men, she causes a lot of distractions and disruption throughout the novel. The last chapter is a very clear example of this. When she’s talking to Lennie and lets that not so gentle giant “pet” her hair because he likes to pet soft things, and especially her because Lennie clearly was attracted to her, he pets her too hard like he did with the mice. We knew something like this was going to happen because Steinbeck foreshadowed it when he wrote about Lennie petting things too hard and when he described how attracted Lennie was to Curley’s wife.
Steinbeck uses Physical features of characters to show that it is very hard for people that has different physical features to get along, and eventually it becomes impossible like what happened in the novel. This occurs in the novel when George eventually shoots Lennie in the back of the head because he could no longer stand Lennie because of all of the trouble he got them into.