Alexandra Schwartz considers what happens when a modern adaptation insists that even John Steinbeck’s most unambiguously evil character needs a sympathetic cause. Zoe Kazan’s East of Eden miniseries gives Cathy Ames trauma, patriarchal abuse, and an economic-freedom rationale for becoming a brothel owner.
Steinbeck’s Cathy is stranger and less reparable:
- She is manipulative and murderous from childhood, without a redemptive origin story
- Sex is a means to power, not liberation
- She wants control more than wealth, collecting evidence of clients’ humiliation because possession itself satisfies her
- She is excluded from timshel—the novel’s promise that a person may choose against sin
Schwartz admires the adaptation and Florence Pugh’s performance. Her objection is specific: explaining Cathy as a trauma-shaped antihero blunts the gothic force of a character designed to be monstrous.
The revision works better with Lee, Adam Trask’s Chinese American servant and the twins’ real parent. Like Cathy, Lee performs an identity others expect. But when each risks dropping the mask, the contrast sharpens: Lee reveals anger, care, and moral agency; Cathy reveals an appetite for domination.
Updating an old novel’s gender and racial politics can deepen it. The trouble starts when moral modernization becomes compulsory explanation—when a villain is no longer allowed to remain frighteningly, irreducibly strange.