Intellectual Disability in Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men

Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

During the 1920s and 1930s, both John Steinbeck and William Faulkner wrote groundbreaking intellectually disabled characters, but only Steinbeck’s became an operatic tenor. Taking their cue from the socioeconomic upheaval of the Great Depression, both authors contribute to a history of American perceptions of intellectually disabled individuals as unpredictable and potentially harmful people. Faulkner’s 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury, represents one of the first works of American literature to be presented in part from the point of view of an intellectually disabled character. While Faulkner’s title alludes directly to Shakespeare’s conception of a “tale told by an idiot,” Steinbeck’s Lennie, who does not narrate his own story, is only a few figurative miles down the road from Faulkner’s Benjy.¹ Although composed decades after the novel, Carlisle Floyd’s 1970 opera Of Mice and Men reinforces the same tropes of disability, yet fundamentally changes the nature of Steinbeck’s narrative.

Steinbeck was arguably the most famous U.S. migrant worker, or “bindle-stiff,” of this era and he documents his work experiences in his controversial 1937 novel. The plot leads up to the killing of a foreman’s wife by a cognitively disabled migrant farmhand, Lennie Small, and ends with the crude euthanasia of Small at the hands of his friend and companion, George Milton. Steinbeck details each event that leads up to this pair of catastrophes without any attempts to create sympathy or bias. When set as an opera, however, the attempt at an objectively journalistic tone in the novel dissolves as music directs perceptions about characters and plot events. This shift in the temporality of the narrative opens up a space for direct emotional judgment of and social meaning pertaining to the characters’ actions, two factors absent in the novel but present in the opera.

Writers from the fields of literature and music have only sparsely explored Of Mice and Men in terms of its cognitively disabled main character, Lennie, whether in regard to the novel, the play, or the opera.² Here, musical analyses and exploration of newly published philosophical work on cognitive disability illuminate the ways in which Floyd’s musical language of contrasts—bright versus dim, feeble-minded versus able-minded, strong versus weak, and stable versus unstable—reflects U.S. society’s ongoing difficulty dealing with its cognitively disabled members, including the real person on whom Lennie’s character was based.³ While Steinbeck’s work emanates from an era when intellectually disabled individuals were primarily regarded as burdens on society and were often institutionalized, Floyd wrote his opera and libretto just as the disability rights movement was gaining strength.⁴ Thus, through their different media, Steinbeck and Floyd each reinforce traditional viewpoints with regard to the cultural logic of euthanasia—known also as the “kill or cure” trope—and represent two distinct phases in the history of the United States’ understanding and treatment of intellectual disability.

As imagined by John Steinbeck, the character Lennie Small generally reflects the predominant thought about intellectually disabled individuals in the United States before World War II.⁵ From the beginning of the novel, the author builds a solid case against Lennie, implying not only that he would not be able to survive were he to live on his own without George, but also that George enacts the somewhat contradictory roles of both caregiver and warden. Steinbeck’s understanding of the treatment of the intellectually disabled would necessarily have been influenced by his geographical location. California’s eugenics laws allowed for the sterilization of more than 21,000 people between 1907 and 1939 in order to prevent the passing of “feeble-mindedness” from generation to generation.⁶ Many of these sterilizations took place in institutions, where most intellectually disabled people were housed during this era, and indeed, until the early 1970s...