This story contains extensive spoilers for East of Eden. Netflix’s East of Eden miniseries opens with a striking proclamation from Florence Pugh’s Cathy Ames: “I believe there are monsters born in this world to human parents.”
Readers will recognize this from John Steinbeck’s novel as the line that introduces Cathy, one of American literature’s most notorious antagonists. The book’s narrator, a fictionalized version of Steinbeck, doesn’t hide his derision of Cathy, going so far as to remark that “there was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been said to be possessed by the devil.” Steinbeck’s frontier-era epic retells the Bible’s Book of Genesis, making Cathy function as a living embodiment of original sin.
Yet from the beginning of Zoe Kazan’s new adaptation, it’s clear that this Cathy won’t be depicted only as monstrous, an alluring snake lurking at the edges of this familial epic’s version of Eden. This time, she is its focal driving force. Kazan places Steinbeck’s words in Cathy’s own mouth, spoken in voiceover as she drags her beaten, bloodied body to the Trask family’s doorstep. Her arrival further divides brothers Adam (Christopher Abbott) and Charles (Mike Faist), whose ongoing family turmoil forms the backbone of the novel’s sweeping explorations of generational inheritance and self-determination. Ironically, the backlash to Kazan expanding Cathy’s character says more about the black-and-white moralization audiences have come to expect of modern storytelling than East of Eden itself.
Actress/filmmaker Zoe Kazan adapted East of Eden into a seven-part miniseries—following in the footsteps of her grandfather Elia Kazan, who directed the 1955 movie.
For all Netflix’s attempts to market Cathy as an “indelible antihero,” her actions thankfully aren’t watered down or justified. She still murders her own parents (Simon Maiden and Elizabeth Ames), shoots her husband, and kills brothel owner Faye (Martha Plimpton) to run it ruthlessly in her place. Cathy rejects and downright sneers at the novel’s central theme, “timshel”: the idea that everyone has the capacity to be good to themselves and to others, regardless of the circumstances they’re born into.
Kazan and co. devote multiple episodes to her character, dwelling on moments that shaped her own relationship to “timshel.” That’s not to say all of these moments are elegantly done; a flashback in which Cathy’s father proclaims she’s his property and a later monologue in which she lays out the financial freedom she attains through sex work are overly on the nose and clash with the series’ naturalistic, period-accurate dialogue. But even if Cathy is a sociopathic character with no sense of morality, as Steinbeck considers, her worldview is nonetheless one informed by the misogynistic violence that came with being a woman at the turn of the 20th century.
“I think [Cathy’s] viewpoint that the world is bad, that the world is fully evil and folly makes her isolate herself more and more,” Kazan recently told WWD. “She never gains trust in any other person. I think that, for me, was the key to unlocking how an insistence on self-determination can become toxic to herself.”
Cathy (Florence Pugh) tells Adam (Christopher Abbott) that she will leave him and their sons, though he does not believe her until it's too late.
Cathy’s disinterest in motherhood, too, is framed through a distinctly modern perspective. Sure, her rejection of her sons ultimately unleashes another instance of Cain-and-Abel-like strife within the next generation of Trask brothers. Wisely, though, Netflix’s East of Eden doesn’t cast her lack of desire for motherhood in a positive or negative light. Unlike in 1952, when Steinbeck’s novel was published, being an unfit or ambivalent mother isn’t an instant sign of evil, but much more complicated. In another scene pulled straight from the book, in which a doctor threatens to prosecute Cathy after she nearly bleeds out from a botched abortion attempt, her actions aren’t presented as devilish—if anything, they’re devastatingly relevant.
Predictably, as soon as promotional materials for the Netflix adaptation debuted with Cathy front and center, discourse quickly followed. I sympathized with some—I also hoped that, by centering Cathy, this East of Eden wouldn’t try to redeem her or diminish her actions to make her “likable.” But others took issue with the show’s decision to focus on Cathy, period.
The backlash to Kazan expanding Cathy’s character says more about the black-and-white moralization audiences have come to expect of modern storytelling than 'East of Eden' itself.
“Cathy is a sociopath who ruins the lives of everyone around her,” one person commented on the show’s teaser trailer. “She is NOT the main character, and to make her ‘misunderstood’ or sympathetic is against everything Steinbeck wrote.”
After East of Eden’s release, some viewers have walked away with competing takes: that in making Cathy sympathetic in any way, the series is wrongfully making people assume she isn’t a villain; or that because Cathy is an assault survivor and a woman who couldn’t access an abortion, she isn’t a monster but a victim of her surroundings.
Paradoxically, refusing to acknowledge the nuances of Cathy’s character disregards “timshel,” which is predicated on choice. (Even East of Eden’s narrator, who initially describes Cathy as evil from birth, later admits that he isn’t positive she is a monster, adding, “It is easy to say she was bad, but there is little meaning unless we know why.”) East of Eden draws inspiration from the Biblical tale of Cain and Abel, but it is hardly a straightforward moral fable. As villainous as Cathy can be, Steinbeck understood that people are too complicated to be defined as simply good or evil—a reality that the Netflix adaptation builds upon.
Steinbeck wrote, "When I said Cathy was a monster it seemed to me that it was so. Now I have bent nose with a glass over the small print of her and reread the footnotes, and I wonder if it was true."
Of course, conversations about the ethics of enjoying media are nothing new. Whether cultural anxieties over reemergent conservatism and misinformation are stoking fear that media literacy is dead, or audiences are really struggling to dissect complexities more than ever, the issue remains: Too many of us expect fictional stories to have clear heroes and villains whose actions are cleanly rewarded or punished by the end. Within this black-and-white binary, any central character must be the hero, and the writers must endorse their actions. This year alone, some have assumed that Yesteryear author Caro Claire Burke shares the views of her novel’s unreliable tradwife protagonist, that we’re meant to feel sorry for Obsession’s Bear because he’s the lead character, and that Primetime director Lance Oppenheim is sympathetic to child predators because he criticized To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen’s complicity in a subject’s death by suicide. It’s no wonder that an iconic villain like Cathy is so emblematic of audiences’ inability to contend with more complicated themes.
Although East of Eden’s musings on human nature are universal, its existence as an American reimagining of the Bible befits a country whose culture has never fully disentangled itself from its Puritanical roots. It’s uncomfortable to face the fact that some modern viewers are as afraid to acknowledge the nuance of Cathy and other multi-dimensional female villains as many readers were when the book was first released. It’s a shame that this rigid sense of morality still keeps audiences from engaging with the richness of a story like East of Eden. They’d do well to take one of its most famous quotes to heart: “Now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
