As we get ready to head back to school, Acculturated is reevaluating some of the “classic” books routinely assigned to children to read during the school year. Do they still deserve to be granted the label of “classics”? Are there better books kids could be reading? And what ideological and cultural messages are these books really sending our children?
Of all the books we force-feed bored teenagers in high school, is any as mawkish, inane, obtuse, and contrived as Of Mice and Men?
John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella, dubbed a “little masterpiece” by the Nobel committee when it awarded Steinbeck its highest honor a quarter of a century later, has nothing to recommend it except its brevity (at 29,000 words, it’s the same length as Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol), but it continues to be pressed into young hands in the hopes that Steinbeck’s tear-jerker tripe will grow into class-based resentment and moral relativism. Many great books are propaganda tools, but so are many terrible ones.
The dull-witted wordplay of the title is the first signal of the book’s vapidity: the ox-like, mentally disabled Lennie accidentally kills all the mice he likes to keep as pets in his pockets. It’s a hokey bit of foreshadowing that sets up Lennie’s eventual, accidental, taking of a human life. (With the sort of blundering irony you’d expect of a tyro writer, Steinbeck gives this huge man the surname “Small.”)
Meanwhile, Lennie’s companion and protector, the quick-witted George, guides Lennie to one menial job after another in the California of the Great Depression as the two pursue their goal of starting their own farm together. Steinbeck’s foreboding tone makes it clear from the outset that this is never going to happen, and that disaster can be the only outcome of society’s misunderstanding of this lovable lummox.
Lennie, whose cuddly childlike nature Steinbeck boringly declares by having him speak constantly of his fondness for rabbits, is not a tragic figure but a mere stock character. He has so little agency or self-awareness that he is essentially a brute, an animal. His fall isn’t the result of a character flaw or a poor choice, but nor does it really expose any hard truth about society. Looked at free of sentimentality, it’s hard to say what moral lesson the book might contain, except, “Don’t be a mentally disabled giant.” Steinbeck’s sentimentality is exactly the point, though: He is directing us to feel more understanding for society’s most marginal figures, using for his sole example an absurdly contrived ideal of an innocent and childlike man.
Steinbeck noted, around the time of the book’s publication, that Of Mice and Men was in a sense a true story: He told the New York Times that Lennie was “a real person” who had been committed to an insane asylum. There is a critical difference between Lennie and the man who inspired him, though: “He didn’t kill a girl,” Steinbeck said. “He killed a ranch foreman. Got sore because the boss had fired his pal and stuck a pitchfork right through his stomach. I hate to tell you how many times. I saw him do it. We couldn’t stop him until it was too late.” In other words, real-life Lennie didn’t kill someone by accident and not for the sweetly disarming reason that he simply loved to touch soft things, such as the hair of the woman he inadvertently kills in the book. Real-life Lennie was an angry man with a genuine, understandable motive. Whether he was habitually “misunderstood” or a “gentle giant” was entirely beside the point; the fellow was a murderer. Steinbeck changed the details because they were useless to his message.
The more mature Steinbeck, after having become the father of two sons, would make in his Cain-and-Abel adaptation East of Eden (1952) an eloquent case for choice, for man’s moral agency, summarized with the Hebrew word “timshel,” or “thou mayest.” The complexity and sweep of East of Eden effectively nullified the sophomoric narrowness of Of Mice and Men.
Edmund Wilson wrote of Of Mice and Men that it was “a parable which criticized humanity from a non-political point of view.” But Steinbeck was ardently political: he was a communist at the time he wrote the book. (By the time he published East of Eden he was volunteering his services to the CIA.) By leaving aside overtly political struggles such as the communist labor strike in of his previous book, 1936’s In Dubious Battle, Steinbeck was able to insinuate the broader, more philosophical but still resolutely leftist notion that criminals are victims of circumstance. Usually, the argument goes, that means economic or class circumstance, but in this case the mere accident of mental disability makes Lennie an outcast. It wouldn’t be a stretch to call Lennie a stand-in for the helpless proletarians who get exploited by capitalists such as Curley, the son of the ranch manager. Of Mice and Men, unlike In Dubious Battle, was written to be timeless. It has succeeded: sentimental foolishness never goes out of style.
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