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“I never got that letter,” she said. “I always thought my ol’ lady stole it. [...] I ast her if she stole it, too, an’ she says no. So I married Curley.”
Curley’s wife was told by multiple people that she might have a future as an actress, a glamorous profession that would have been extraordinarily life-changing for a young rural woman during the Great Depression. Curley’s wife’s hopes of stardom are increased when she meets a man who claims he works in Hollywood and will help her start her career there, promising to write to her once he arrives back in Los Angeles. He never does, but Curley’s wife believes her jealous mother stole the letter. She doesn’t realize – or can’t admit to herself – that she was taken advantage of, and that her Hollywood dreams were never going to come true, and will never come true, especially now that she’s married to a domineering, uncaring man.
George said softly, “I think I knowed from the very first. I think I know’d we’d never do her. He usta like to hear about it so much I got to thinking maybe we would.”
George admits that he always knew deep down that the farm was an unattainable dream. It’s really Lennie’s childlike joy at the prospect of the farm that keeps the two men, and later Candy, devoted to the prospect of actually achieving their goal. When George discovers Lennie’s crime, he immediately realizes that the joy Lennie brings to his life is about to be snuffed out – and with it, the dream of the farm. This passage outwardly states the truth that the entire novel has been foreshadowing and leading up to: the farm was a fantasy that was never going to be realized, but George couldn’t admit this to himself until Lennie, the source of his happiness and motivation, had been taken from him.
