Charles is no stranger to prostitutes, but pure-hearted Adam immediately succumbs to this woman with no past, onto whom he can project his dreams and desires. Cathy would be his wife. They would move to California’s Salinas Valley and plant the land to create a modern Eden. They will have children – two sons, twins. Kathy then tells Adam that she doesn’t want to live in California or with him after the baby is born, and that she will suddenly take over authorship of their story, shoot him in the arm, and disappear into thin air.
East of Eden is a very strange novel, its high-toned allegorical plot interwoven with the intimacy of historical realism: dancing in a country schoolhouse, describing what it was like to fly in a primitive airplane. Part of the reason Steinbeck wrote this book was to explain his own origin story. The story of the Trask family is intertwined with that of the Hamilton family, Steinbeck’s maternal Irish family. But the novel’s larger project is to tell the origin story of all humanity. There is something anti-modern, indeed almost pre-modern, in its focus and approach, and Steinbeck was fully aware of this. “Writers today, even me, tend to celebrate the destruction of the spirit, God knows it is destroyed so often,” he wrote to the editor while drafting the book. “But the important thing is, sometimes that’s not the case.” He wants his story, like the inspiration in Genesis, to be “a story of good and evil, strength and weakness, love and hate”—ultimately a story of good triumphing over evil.
Cathy represents the darker half of these dichotomies. Her sons Adam, Caleb, and Aaron—note the not-so-subtle repetition of the initials of Cain and Abel across the generations—will have to contend with her legacy when they become men. The novel has a humanistic moral, which takes the form of the Hebrew text given by Steinbeck: Tim Schellthe name God used for Cain before he murdered his brother. The King James Bible translates this word as “thou shalt reign,” as in “thou shalt reign over sin,” but Steinbeck, through one of his characters, interprets it as “thou shalt,” a more empowering but ambiguous gloss. He said each of us has the ability to choose to reject sin; nothing is predestined. In this way, Steinbeck performed something of a reversal of John Milton’s dictum in Paradise Lost that God created man “enough to stand, though free to fall.” In Steinbeck’s post-fall world, fall is inevitable. The glory lies in the possibility of defeating it. Of course, this doesn’t apply to Cassie, who has been cursed from the beginning.
All of which would seem to make East of Eden an unusual candidate for a modern adaptation. However, Zoe Kazan, who adapted the book into a brilliant seven-part miniseries on Netflix, claims the novel is one of her favourites, and she’s placing the adult Cathy, played by Florence Pugh, at the center of the adaptation. Kazan doesn’t want us to think Casey is a monster, and you can understand why. Instead of a villain, we get an antihero with a painful backstory that justifies her descent into a life of murder and prostitution. The scene with the boys in the carriage house and the ingenious self-tying of the rope was omitted – a little too psychotic. A Latin teacher transforms from a delusional, manipulated fool into a predator who attempts to hook a fourteen-year-old girl and get his comeuppance. And, most crucially, when Kathy was whipped by her father, it was not to escape, but because she was a temptress and a slut. “You are my property!” he screamed, then punched her in the back. “You have defiled my property!” Steinbeck’s timid father has become a tyrant, less a fooled patriarch than a roaring representative of patriarchy itself. When a fire breaks out in a house, the message seems to be: burn the whole house down.