Charles is no stranger to prostitutes, but the pure-hearted Adam immediately surrenders to the woman who has no past on which to project his own dreams and wishes. Cathy will be his wife. They will move to California, to the Salinas Valley, and cultivate the land to create a modern Garden of Eden. They will have children; two sons, twins. Cathy, who later tells Adam that she does not want to live in California or stay with him after their baby is born, will suddenly take over as author of the story, shoot him in the arm, and disappear.
“East of Eden” is an extremely strange novel; Its towering, allegorical melodrama intersects with lovely bits of historical realism: dances in the country schoolhouse, descriptions of what it’s like to board a primitive airplane. Steinbeck wrote the book in part to explain his own origin story; The story of the Trasks is interwoven with that of the Hamiltons, an Irish clan who were Steinbeck’s maternal relatives. But the larger project of the novel is to give the origin story of all humanity. There is something anti-, almost pre-modern, about his preoccupations and methods, of which Steinbeck was fully aware. “Writers today, even myself,” he wrote to his editor while drafting the book, “tend to celebrate the destruction of the soul, and God knows it is destroyed often enough.” “But the instructive thing is that sometimes it isn’t.” He wanted his story to be, like his inspiration in the Book of Genesis, “a story of good and evil, strength and weakness, love and hate” and ultimately a story of good triumphing over evil.
Cathy represents the dark half of these dilemmas. 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 grapple with her inheritance when they become men. The novel has a humanist ethos, manifested in the form of the Hebrew word that Steinbeck gives: timshelIt is used by God to address Cain before he kills his brother. The King James Bible translates this word as “thou shalt rule,” as in “thou shalt rule over sin,” but Steinbeck, through one of his characters, interprets it as “thou canst,” a stronger, if vaguer, statement. He says that each of us has the ability to choose to reject sin; nothing is predetermined. In this way, Steinbeck performs a kind of reversal by emphasizing John Milton’s famous dictum in “Paradise Lost” that God makes humanity “sufficient to stand, but free to fall.” In Steinbeck’s postlapsarian world, decline is inevitable; victory lies in the possibility of overcoming him. Naturally, this doesn’t apply to Cathy, who is cursed by the jump.
All of this seems to make “East of Eden” an unlikely candidate for a modern adaptation. However, Zoe Kazan, who turned the book into a lavish seven-episode mini-series on Netflix, says the novel is one of her favorite books and puts Cathy, played by Florence Pugh as an adult, at the center of her adaptation. Kazan doesn’t want us to think Cathy is a monster, and you can see why. Instead of a villain, we encounter an anti-hero with the kind of traumatic past that justifies his descent into a life of murder and prostitution. The scene with the boys in the car and the rope cleverly knotting itself was abandoned; A very psychotic touch. The Latin teacher went from a delusional, manipulated fool to a predator who tried to sink his hooks into a fourteen-year-old girl and received the punishment he deserved. And more importantly, the reason Cathy was whipped by her father was not to escape, but because she was seductive and slutty. “You are my property!” she screams before attacking his back. “You polluted my property!” Steinbeck’s timid father became a tyrant, a snarling representative of the patriarchy rather than a confused patriarch. When a house fire breaks out, the message seems to be: Burn everything.