SOURCE: Spilka, Mark. “Sweet Violence in Steinbeck's Eden.” In Eight Lessons in Love: A Domestic Violence Reader, pp. 242-51. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Spilka views “The Murder” as “a splendidly sexist example of social attitudes in fiction that reflect and extend our sanctioned prejudices about domestic violence, and it deserves more attention on those demonstrable grounds.”

In 1974 I published an essay called “Of George and Lennie and Curley's Wife: Sweet Violence in Steinbeck's Eden,” from which my present title is drawn. About ten years later, when I became a volunteer worker for a Rhode Island agency engaged in the rehabilitation of male batterers, I learned some of the more practical approaches to the puzzling nature of “sweet violence” that I had touched on in the essay. Appropriately enough, I had also touched upon “the perplexities of sexual rage,” especially in Steinbeck's famous novella...