How is the culture and society ‘Of mice and men’ different from our own? Essay

The culture and society is extremely different from our own because the people in the book are less social, but nowadays people seem to socialize a lot more. The book is set in a time known as manual labour where there is very little machinery. This required a lot of strength. The machinery had to be worked by man and was less sophisticated than the machinery we have now. It was a society of which people had to travel to get work and were paid very little for the amount of hard labour they had to do. They only had a few possessions so that they could carry them around wherever they went to work. If they were to carry a lot of things with them they would not have been able to carry them. One similarity is that the people’s ambitions, dreams and hopes are very much the same to modern times. Most people wanted to settle down at a ranch, have pets and live life easily. In the time the book was set it did not matter what background you came from as long as you worked hard you would be able to make something of your life. This is very much the same as modern times in America. In England this was very different because what background you came from entirely depended on what sort of job you were going to have when you grow up. This is still kind of the same because if you come from a poor background you will not be able to have a good education to get a good job. The men in the book are trapped in the society they are in because they are not going to be able to get a good job. They are going to buck barley for the rest of their lives. Steinbeck makes a very strong racial element throughout the story. Crooks the stable buck is classed as less than human because he is physically disabled by getting kicked on the back by a horse. Also he is black so people class him as a lower being. He lives in a barn away from everyone else. Occasionally they let him join in, in some of the games they play. Curley’s wife is also part of the racial element because she is classed as an object and maybe a sex object to Curley. In the book Steinbeck does not give her a name which also means that she is an object. Curley restricts her from doing anything because she is not allowed out of the house or out of the ranch. She has to stay in the house else Curley will get annoyed and beat her. Candy is also discriminated because he is old and unable to do hard labour so they make him wash the floors for very little money. Lennie is discriminated against because he is mentally disabled rather than anyone else. Most of the people in the story are nomadic which means that they don not have a permanent base. They people on the ranch have a poor standard of living because they have shared accommodation and have absolutely no privacy. It is also quite sexist because the ranch is almost exclusively male. They have an abbreviated speech dialect which sounds very weird from a modern perspective. Also being nomadic means that they have a tendency to fight and have very aggressive attitudes to people that they dislike. In general the society in the book is very similar to our own. This is because they socialize and play games with each other.