The internet was wrong about ‘East of Eden’

When Netflix released the first teaser for its adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, the reaction was not one of excitement, but rather one of trepidation.

According to Netflix’s description of the series, East of Eden, written and executive produced by Zoe Kazan, would focus “new attention on its indelible antihero, Cathy Ames, played by Florence Pugh.”

For anyone familiar with East of Eden, a multigenerational retelling of the Cain and Abel story set within California’s Salinas Valley, calling Cathy Ames an “antihero” is a misread of the character. Steinbeck introduces her with a lengthy passage on how monsters with “malformed souls” can be born to human parents. Throughout the novel, she murders and manipulates. She shoots her husband, Adam (Christopher Abbott), and abandons her newborn twins. In Steinbeck’s tale of good and evil, she’s about as evil as you can get.

So between the “antihero” description and Pugh’s hopes she could bring some “humanity” to Cathy, Steinbeck fans feared the worst: that East of Eden would neuter one of literature’s great antagonists and transform her into some misunderstood girlboss. Look at the worried comments under the teaser or the irate Reddit threads writing off the adaptation entirely before having seen it.

But all that worry turns out to be unfounded. While East of Eden does complicate the idea of Cathy as purely evil, she is still a villain through and through, and Kazan’s engrossing series does not shy away from that darkness.

Florence Pugh’s Cathy Ames is still terrifying.

In the series, just like in the novel, Cathy is a malevolent force of nature who’s both alluring and off-putting. When Salinas mainstay Samuel Hamilton (a tragically underused Ciarán Hinds) meets her for the first time, he feels a chill, like a goose has walked over his grave — a line that, like much of Steinbeck’s dialogue, makes it into the TV show.

Also making it into the show are most of Cathy’s most reprehensible acts: her fiery murder of her parents at a young age and, years later, her calculated, drawn-out poisoning of kindly brothel madam Faye (Martha Plimpton). Through it all, Pugh delivers a sensationally sinister performance. As the role of Cathy demands, Pugh dons a mask of nicety when it suits her, but as soon as she doesn’t need to put on airs, the mask falls, revealing a dark emptiness. When forced to drink, Cathy’s true nature comes out, and Pugh renders that change in all its snarling, beastly glory.

Netflix’s East of Eden looks for humanity in Cathy — but then again, doesn’t the book?

Florence Pugh in “East of Eden.”
Credit: Geoffrey Short / Netflix

Kazan (herself the granddaughter of Elia Kazan, director of 1955’s East of Eden film) makes a large change to Cathy’s role in the story right at the very start of East of Eden. Steinbeck’s novel begins with a lengthy, evocative description of the Salinas Valley before focusing on Samuel, then the Trask family. Cathy does not become a factor until much later. However, Kazan’s East of Eden puts her front and center from the start. Kazan skips forward several chapters and drops us into one of the most harrowing moments of Cathy’s life. Beaten nearly to death by brothel owner and former lover Mr. Edwards (Josh McConville), she crawls towards the farmhouse of the Trask brothers.

If you hadn’t read East of Eden before watching the show, you’d see an image of a beaten, bloody woman and immediately sympathize with her. If you had read the book, the moment immediately complicates your sentiments towards Cathy. Even as you’re yelling at the Trask brothers not to let her in, as if she’s some monster from a horror film who must be kept out, Kazan invites you to have compassion for her.

So begins one of East of Eden‘s most fascinating points of tension. Because yes, Cathy is a horrible woman who has done awful things. But people have also done horrible things to her.

Look at some of the things that happen to Cathy on paper, without considering Steinbeck’s early assertion that she is a monster. When she is a teenager, an older teacher develops a romantic interest in her. Her former lover, Mr. Edwards, nearly kills her. Adam moves her across the country against her wishes, where she’s forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. The show also implies that Cathy experienced sexual trauma when she was five years old, spurring a habit of dissociating and imagining herself shrinking, Alice in Wonderland-style, out of harm’s way.

East of Eden doesn’t treat any of these experiences as excuses for Cathy’s nasty acts, but more as explanations for why she hunts power and control. If she is to shrink, to diminish herself, she only wants to do so on her own terms.

Later in the novel, Steinbeck writes, “when I said Cathy was a monster it seemed to me that it was so. Now I have bent close with a glass over the small print of her and reread the footnotes, and I wonder if it was true.”

The series, then, is approaching Cathy’s monstrosity through a similar lens. Like Steinbeck’s narrator (himself a fictional version of Steinbeck), Pugh and Kazan scour Cathy’s origins to find flecks of humanity, while still acknowledging her inclination to do harm.

Take, for example, a show-only scene at Faye’s brothel. Cathy, now going by Kate, learns that a customer has been particularly rough with one of her fellow sex workers. Cathy asks to see him next, with the show setting their encounter up to be a potential revenge fantasy. The worries about the flattening of Cathy rear their head, but they soon go away when Cathy takes the man on as her client and puts in motion her grand plan to turn the brothel into a sadomasochistic den. From there, she can rustle up blackmail about the most powerful men around.

Here, and elsewhere throughout the show, Cathy gets the opportunity to make the right choice, but rarely does. It all ties back to East of Eden‘s core concept of timshel, meaning “thou mayest,” an idea that offers up a choice between good and evil. But since Cathy only sees the ugliness of humanity (and also herself), she only ever opts for the ugly route. There’s a tragic quality to that that Kazan’s adaptation and Pugh’s performance seek to illuminate. They, too, have bent over the character with a glass and have wound up creating a take on Cathy that isn’t the aberration early critics expected, but rather a compliment to a formidable literary figure.

East of Eden is now streaming on Netflix.