Curley's wife plays an important role in the novel and yet is never given a name. Perhaps Steinbeck was trying to not encourage the audience to develop a personal connection to her? I'd like to see various other points of view, supported by textual evidence.
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Wonderful question! We need more like it on this site! I'll try to write an answer when I have time.– user111Jan 25, 2017 at 21:59
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@Hamlet Did you ever get around to answering this one? If you did, I'd love to hear it.– fi12Jan 26, 2017 at 22:41
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it's going to take me a while, because I have a lot of real life work. But I'll get to this, I promise, even if it takes me 6-8 weeks. (For the record, I think this is easily the best question asked on this site so far. You absolutely deserve an answer.)– user111Jan 27, 2017 at 5:06
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@Hamlet throwing you a ping in case you forgot about answering this :-) It's been more than 6-8 weeks, and the current answer isn't really very satisfying.– Rand al'Thor ♦Aug 7, 2017 at 9:52
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@Randal'Thor I don't have the bandwidth for this particular question at the moment unfortunately, even though it's one of the better ones. It appears that I'll have to break my promise, but I hope I've written enough answers on the site to make up for that :) But I agree that the current answer is not at all satisfying... I'm wondering why more people haven't downvoted it tbh.– user111Aug 7, 2017 at 17:24
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1 Answer
According to this NYT Article, Steinbeck's wife Elaine asked him this very question.
His answer was:
"For one good reason. She's not a person, she's a symbol. She has no function, except to be a foil – and a danger to Lennie."
The article was written by Jay Parini, who also wrote a biography about Steinbeck. Since there are no references in the article, I emailed Parini to see if he could remember where he got the quote from, but he could not.
