Let Cathy Ames Be a Monster

Charles is no stranger to whores, but pure-hearted Adam immediately succumbs to the woman without a past upon whom he can project his own dreams and wishes. Cathy will be his wife. They will move to California, to the Salinas Valley, and plant the land to make a modern Eden. They will have children—two sons, twins. And then Cathy, who has told Adam that she has no desire to live in California or to stay with him once her babies are born, will abruptly take over the authorship of their story, shooting him in the arm and vanishing into thin air.

“East of Eden” is a powerfully strange novel, its high, allegorical melodrama intercut with amiable episodes of historical realism: dances at the country schoolhouse, descriptions of what it was like to ride in a primitive airplane. Steinbeck wrote the book in part to account for his own origin story; the tale of the Trasks is braided with that of the Hamiltons, the Irish clan who were Steinbeck’s kin on his mother’s side. But the novel’s bigger project is to give the origin story of all mankind. There is something anti-, indeed almost pre-modern about its preoccupations and methods, a quality of which Steinbeck was fully aware. “The writers of today, even I, have a tendency to celebrate the destruction of the spirit and god knows it is destroyed often enough,” he wrote to his editor as he was drafting the book. “But the beacon thing is that sometimes it is not.” He wanted his tale, like its inspiration in the Book of Genesis, to be “the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate”—and, ultimately, of the good triumphing over the bad.

Cathy represents the dark half of those dichotomies. Her sons by Adam, Caleb and Aron—note the not so subtle repetition of Cain and Abel’s initials across the generations—will have to wrestle with her legacy as they become men. The novel has a humanist moral, which appears in the form of the Hebrew word that Steinbeck gives as timshel, used by God to address Cain before he murders his brother. The King James Bible translates the word as “thou shalt rule,” as in “thou shalt rule over sin,” but Steinbeck, through one of his characters, interprets it instead as “thou mayest,” a more empowered, if more ambiguous, gloss. Each of us, he says, has the ability to choose to reject sin; nothing is preordained. In this way, Steinbeck performs a kind of reversal in emphasis of John Milton’s famous line, in “Paradise Lost,” that God made mankind “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.” In Steinbeck’s postlapsarian world, the fall is the given; the glory is in the possibility of prevailing over it. Naturally, this doesn’t apply to Cathy, who is singularly damned from the jump.

All of this would seem to make “East of Eden” an unusual candidate for a modern adaptation. Yet Zoe Kazan, who has turned the book into a sumptuous seven-episode miniseries on Netflix, professes the novel to be one of her favorites, and she has put Cathy, played, as an adult, by Florence Pugh, at the center of her adaptation. Kazan does not want us to think that Cathy is a monster, and you can understand why. Instead of a villain, we get an antihero with the kind of traumatic backstory that justifies her descent into a life of murder and prostitution. The scene with the boys in the carriage house and the cleverly self-knotted rope is dispensed with—a touch too psychotic. The Latin teacher is turned from a delusional, manipulated sap into a predator who tries to sink his hooks into a fourteen-year-old girl and gets his rightful comeuppance. And, crucially, when Cathy is whipped by her father, it is not for running away, but for being a temptress and a slut. “You’re my property!” he screams before he lashes into her back. “You’ve defiled my property!” Steinbeck’s timid father has become a tyrant, less a bamboozled patriarch than a snarling representative of the patriarchy itself. When the fire at the house goes up, the message seems to be: burn the whole thing down.