Alternately titled, what could’ve happened if Curley’s wife had noticed. I really liked this book and how it played with morality, but one thing that really stuck with me about it was Curley’s wife and her death scene. To me, it seemed obvious that Lennie had been scared (of course it did, I was reading the scene), but to someone being held like that, I know it’s much harder to notice someone else in the midst of your own terror, but I couldn’t help but think that if Curley’s wife had taken just a few seconds to pause and look up at Lennie, everything would have been different. So, I wrote it.
Not only did I want to explore the idea of an ending where things don’t end badly for George and Lennie, but I also wanted to explore Curley’s wife’s character a little more. She is easily one of the most interesting characters in the book to me, and she is given such little representation, only to die at the end. She is an example of male jealousy, and how little power women had over their husbands at that time. She had no voice in the book, so in my creative writing project, I wanted to give her one. I tried to stay true to what little character we were given in the book and delve into her mind and what she may have been feeling while she was talking to Lennie and telling him her story. From what she told Lennie, she was very self-aware of what was happening with Curley and how he was treating her poorly but felt powerless to leave, and I wanted to expand on the idea of her past and what could have happened differently. While she was telling that story, she seemed almost obsessed with her past, like it is something that she thinks about and mulls over very often, and having no one to talk to, she would have a lot of time to think things over and obsess about what could have happened differently as well, so I took that idea and ran with it.
I wanted to highlight the power of decision in this piece. There are a few important decisions that I wanted to bring focus to, mainly Curley’s wife’s decision to listen to her mother when she said not to join the show, her decision to leave and marry Curley after not knowing him very well, her decision to stop struggling and notice Lennie’s fear aside from her own, and her decision not to tell anyone what had happened between her and Lennie. These decisions that she makes evolve as she moves through the piece, going from mainly self-serving to more empathetic towards Lennie the longer she talks to him, her last decision to not tell driven by both a self-serving motive, and one that takes Lennie’s feelings into account when she notes that not only would she not be able to talk to him again (which is all she really wants—someone to talk to), but if she told someone, Lennie could very easily be killed, and his dream of having a rabbit farm would die with him, just as her dream of being a showgirl died when she married Curley.
Here is a downloadable file of the alternate ending: it’s six pages and 2495 words.
