There was something off about Cathy Ames.
She was one of those women, who appeared benign, polite and soft-spoken and you still knew that there was something off, and you wouldn’t know what it was.
And then the trail of crimes would slowly fade to blood.
By then, it would be too late.
Cathy was one of the most demonic characters John Steinbeck ever created; perhaps it is safe to say one of the most diabolic characters in literary history.
On the surface, Steinbeck had crafted a woman so pitiless, merciless and cold, a siren on land, luring men to their deaths after metaphorically reaching into their throats and dragging out the absolute worst in them. But then, were they really pure of heart to begin with?
The pieces fit. Steinbeck’s novel begins with primal, raw and human representations of the devil, one being Cyrus Trask, the violent father of two sons, Adam and Charles. No one is quite free of their darkest thoughts; blood always lurks in the recesses of their minds. Perhaps that’s why Charles, who has nearly murdered his brother more than once, can recognise darkness when he sees it. And he recognises it in Cathy the moment he sets eyes on her.
This is Steinbeck rewriting the oldest story there is, the story of two brothers, and he tells it twice. Charles and Adam are its first telling: One son whose gift the father refuses, one whose gift the father cherishes for no reason he can understand.
A generation later, Cal and Aron, Adam’s twin sons by Cathy, act out the same story almost beat for beat. The novel’s real subject is whether that story has to repeat itself. Steinbeck answers through Lee, Adam’s brilliant, watchful servant and as he tries to understand: Sin is not destiny and goodness is not guaranteed; both are choices. Perhaps, that's what adds to the tenderness beneath the brutality. Every one of these men is capable of murder, and every one of them is capable of choosing not to commit it.
Yet for all their freedom to choose, the men of the novel are remarkably quick to hand that freedom over. When they fall, they look for someone to blame, and the easiest place to lay the blame is at a woman’s feet. A
After all, women are the reason men do terrible things. There is a schoolmaster who trails a 14-year-old, which leads to his death. There is a 'respectable' man with a home and family who carries on with a beautiful woman on the side, then beats her and leaves her to die in a field. Cathy is the one who pushed them to the brink with lies, manipulation and stealing, of course.
There’s no shred of humanity in the literal Cathy. She is a cold-blooded murderer and a liar, and has been from a young age, able to manufacture a lie and plant it in people’s heads until they believe it actually happened. Yet there could be several interpretations of Cathy Ames if you read the invisible subtext of Steinbeck’s epic. She may be a woman weaponising her charms because that is the only form of survival in a world of men who are prey to their own needs.
Steinbeck wrote this about men, but it seems to apply to the women too: “He learned how men can consider other men as beasts, and that the easiest way to get along with such men, was to be a beast.”
Cathy is a beast, just like the men.
And here lies the contradiction at the heart of the novel. If Steinbeck’s freedom to choose is meant to belong to everyone, so why not to Cathy?Yet Steinbeck calls her a monster, born without the conscience the rest of us carry, as if she alone were never offered the choice.
Read that way, she is the book’s dark experiment, the proof of what a human being looks like when the capacity to choose goodness is missing. But Steinbeck doesn’t let her remain a theory. In her final chapters she is ageing, arthritic and paranoid, haunted by the sense that others can see something she cannot. She leaves everything to Aron, the son who never knew her. It is not redemption, but it is a crack, and it is the closest she ever comes to wondering whether she could have been otherwise.
Netflix’s series, however, rewrites the literary Cathy. It rubs off her demonic edges a tad without completely sanitising her, and chooses to recontextualise her history. Here she is a child born of tragedy, with a secretly abusive father, rather than the ordinary, naive parents of the book.
Played by an absolutely magnificent Florence Pugh, this Cathy burns down her family home out of sheer desperation and a desire to start her life again, scraping through if she must. She is no longer simply monstrous. She is now a layered anti-hero, with varying shades of humanity. She is still diabolic, but did she make these decisions by choice, or was she simply born with an innate cruelty? Zoe Kazan’s Cathy does not want to be forgiven; she just needs her agency.
In a strange way, this is the series answering Steinbeck with his own philosophy. Where the novel left Cathy outside the reach of redemption, Kazan pulls her back inside it.
Once she has a wound, she has a choice, and once she has a choice, she can be judged like everyone else. There is a family irony here too. Kazan’s grandfather, Elia Kazan, directed the 1955 film with James Dean, which left out the Trask–Ames saga almost entirely and kept only the last stretch of the book. Seventy years later, his granddaughter places the woman he left out at the centre.
The series is told from Cathy’s perspective, as Netflix attempts to answer the long-standing literary criticism of a woman cast as a man’s downfall. It is a truly admirable ambition, played out on exquisitely shot sets. However, as the writing of Cathy becomes half-hearted as the series progresses, and the bite is lost.
Pugh does the best she can, and her best is truly remarkable, but her character grows into a mere spectacle. It’s the men who win again. Once the series has explained Cathy, it seems unsure what to do with her. A backstory accounts for where she came from, but not for who she chooses to become, and that is the very question Steinbeck’s novel was built to ask.
The brothers’ relationship is riveting to watch, as are the bonds that Adam’s neighbour Samuel Hamilton (Ciarán Hinds) forms with Adam and with Lee. Another to watch is Martha Plimpton as the loving, gentle, maternal Faye, who becomes one of Cathy’s victims.
Netflix’s East of Eden is a far cry from Steinbeck’s sprawling, animalistic novel. It wrestles with the book’s philosophical themes and rarely pins them down, and it loses much of the novel’s warmth, the Hamilton family above all. And yet it stands well above most adaptations of great novels, which are content to illustrate the book politely and add nothing of their own. This one argues with its source. It is uneven, and it loses its nerve in the second half, but it takes the novel’s most troubling character and asks the question Steinbeck never quite dared to: what if the monster was made, not born? The series never fully answers it.
Yet, it is the right question to ask of this book, and very few adaptations bother to ask anything at all.