Let Cathy Ames Be a Monster
Cathy Ames, the villain of John Steinbeck’s novel “East of Eden,” is not what E. M. Forster, or anyone else, would call a round character, the kind who grows and changes over the course of a story. She is crafty, cunning, manipulative, murderous—evil through and through. What made her that way? Nothing. Her badness, Steinbeck tells us, was baked in from the start. “It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life,” he writes. Cathy observes other people much as Steinbeck observes her: coldly, analytically, with the fascination of the scientist for the specimen squirming under a microscope. She has no empathy; she has no guilt. If she had been born in the distant past, Steinbeck writes, “a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil” and burned as a witch. Today, we’d call her a sociopath. That term appeared in the DSM-I in 1952, the same year that “East of Eden” was published. As it was, Steinbeck simply called her “a monster,” produced by “a malformed soul.”
When we meet Cathy, it is late in the nineteenth century, and she is a little girl, the only child of a well-enough-to-do family in a Massachusetts town. Her father, who runs a tannery, suspects that his daughter is different from other children, and this makes him uneasy, but he can’t say exactly what the difference is. Cathy is beautiful, with a heart-shaped face and golden hair. She has the features of a doll: tiny lobeless ears; tiny rosebud mouth; tiny hands and breasts; tiny feet “with fat insteps almost like little hoofs.” Girls copy her; boys follow her around. Cathy lies, but she is good at it and is never caught. She wants power, and she learns, very early, that the surest way to get it is to exploit other people’s interest in sex. One spring morning when Cathy is ten, her mother is hanging the washing on the line when she hears giggles coming from the family’s carriage house. It can’t be Cathy, because Cathy never giggles:
This extraordinary scene is like something from a vampire movie: the blast of sanitizing light that stops the predators as they descend, terribly, on their innocent victim. Cathy can’t move; her hands are bound with rope. Later, she can’t speak; the doctor says that she’s in shock. Yet the boys proclaim their innocence. Cathy came up with the plan, they say. She made them pay her five cents each. She tied her own hands. The town is outraged by their lies. The boys are whipped by their horrified fathers and sent to a house of correction.
And they are the lucky ones. Before long, Cathy has racked up a nice little body count. When she is fourteen, the Latin teacher at her high school shows up to the Ames’ house late at night, banging desperately on the door, lovesick and demanding to speak to Cathy’s father. Mr. Ames turns him away, and the next day the teacher is found dead in a church, having shot himself in the head. A couple of years later, Cathy declares that she is leaving school, absconds for Boston, and is retrieved by her father, who gives her a reluctant whipping. After that, she is the model of a dutiful daughter. She helps her mother in the kitchen; she attaches herself to her father, who proudly teaches her all about his tanning business. He gives her the combination to the company safe and is proud when she remembers it on the first try. One night, she opens the safe, takes everything in it, and burns down the family home, with her parents locked inside. In the carriage house, she stages a scene of an apparent struggle between herself and some nameless aggressor, complete with a hair ribbon splashed with the blood of a slaughtered chicken.
“East of Eden” is not a book about women. It is a book about men and their troubled bonds to one another. In it, Steinbeck set out to retell the Biblical story of Cain and Abel—what he called, in a letter to his editor, “perhaps the greatest story of all.” At the center of his version is Adam Trask, the son of a Connecticut farmer and Civil War veteran, who survives a motherless childhood, ten years of queasy service in the cavalry massacring Indians, and a period of train-hopping, vagrancy, and work as part of a Southern chain gang. By the time he returns home, his father is dead; his half brother, Charles, tends the farm now. Love runs between the men. So does an undercurrent of rage. In their youth, Charles, jealous of their father’s love for Adam, nearly killed his brother. Now they have established a truce, but Adam is restless. He talks about getting out, going West. His chance arrives when a woman shows up at their door, bloody and battered. This is Cathy. She has been living as a kept woman, the mistress to a pimp who operates a local circuit of brothels. That man fell hopelessly in love with the fantasy of her; when she drunkenly showed her true self, he beat her within an inch of her life.
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.
It has become somewhat de rigueur in contemporary adaptations of older material to underline the fact that women in the nineteenth century had even fewer rights than do women today. Greta Gerwig, in her 2019 take on Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” had Amy March, also played by Pugh, deliver a speech to Timothée Chalamet’s Laurie to helpfully inform him that, when she married, her money and children would become her husband’s. Here, a similar strategy is used to explain why Cathy, after shooting Adam and leaving his ranch, moves to Salinas, changes her name to Kate, and goes to work as a whore in the employ of a certain Madam Faye (played, fabulously, by Martha Plimpton). “The only true freedom in this world is economic freedom,” Pugh says, in voice-over, as we see Cathy assessing herself in the mirror of her new room, mingling with the other girls in the parlor, and performing her bedroom duties. “She could marry into wealth, of course, but those assets would belong to her husband as surely as she does. No, there are only two ways for a woman to acquire her money. She can be fortunate enough to have a rich relative die. Or she can own and run her own brothel.”
Kazan’s “East of Eden” is a rich, captivating work, a judicious, intelligent refashioning of its material (the Trask half, that is—the Hamiltons have mostly been cut, which is fine), and well worth watching. But this girl-boss-of-the-brothel speech rings false. Cathy is already well-versed in murder by the time she crosses paths with the Trask brothers; would it really be so hard for her to imagine killing the besotted Adam, whose father has left him a very wealthy man, and taking his money? (As it is, she never even bothers to divorce him, and, despite their estrangement, her marriage makes her far richer than any brothel ever could.) More than money, what Cathy wants is power and control, and to get it she returns to the lessons of the carriage house. At Madame Faye’s, Cathy becomes a kind of sui-generis dominatrix, skilled in the exquisite torture of her clients. When Cathy connives to turn Madame Faye’s brothel into her own—you can guess the method that she uses to take over the poor woman’s role—the house becomes known as a sordid place. As madam, Cathy can rule over men and women alike. She takes to collecting photographs of her esteemed clientele in various poses of bondage and humiliation, for potential blackmail; it is the having of the pictures, rather than their use, that you feel satisfies her. She feeds off the ugliness in others.
Still, for all the pat speeches and the tedious foundational-trauma business, you can understand why Kazan wanted to soften her interpretation of Cathy just a bit. In some ways, her reading is more Steinbeckian than Steinbeck’s; she seems to want to extend the promise of timshel to the one character he excluded from it. And, in spite of some other questionable choices (a kind of sentimentalized lost-love story between Cathy and Charles, who is played by a strangely cast Mike Faist, too delicate and sensitive for the role of the lug), we do still get her exhilarating, egotistical wickedness, that tantalizing mix of Tom Ripley and Undine Spragg. All of this is good news for admirers of Pugh, especially those who cannot forget her turn as Charlie—the headstrong young actress turned Mossad spy in “The Little Drummer Girl,” Park Chan-wook’s 2018 miniseries adaptation of John le Carré’s thriller—and have longed to see her at the center of a work outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Cathy is a sort of actress, too—an impersonator, like Ripley, who takes on the form that will make her hardest to truly see. When you glimpse her next to Christopher Abbott’s sad-eyed Adam, the apparent picture of a damsel in distress, you can’t wait to watch her eat him alive.
When she does, Adam is nursed back to health not by some other woman, but by the unexpected figure of his Chinese American servant, Lee, played in Kazan’s series by Hoon Lee. One of the shocks of Steinbeck’s novel, which is not exactly unmarked by the biases of its day, is his surprising and sympathetic portrait of this marginalized man, who begins the novel speaking a stereotypical pidgin English that turns out to be merely a form of disguise. The unconventional household that Lee comes to run for Adam, in which he serves as a sort of non-romantic domestic partner and primary parent—a mother, really—is sustained by his grit and wisdom. It is Lee who raises the twins when Adam, incapacitated by his grief at the loss of Cathy, falls into a lengthy depressive stupor, and Lee who articulates for him, and for us, the redeeming concept of timshel. Kazan, along with the writer Alexander Chee, has fleshed out Lee’s dislocation from the Chinese world to which he doesn’t entirely belong and can’t really return, and given him some justified flashes of anger at the obliviousness of the well-meaning, morally upright, yet astonishingly blinkered white man in whose life he finds himself permanently implicated. Like Cathy, his foil, Lee has learned to impersonate the character others expect him to be, and, like her, he decides that it is finally worth the risk to expose himself to the world. What is revealed is a very different kind of soul. ♦