John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel East Of Eden asks a lot of questions. The just-released Netflix adaptation drives them home, leaving us to reflect on family dynamics, and if who we are is rooted in where we come from. In this series of essays, we’re exploring the answers – and what we can learn from the lives played out onscreen. Note: this article contains spoilers.
There is a version of John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel East Of Eden in which the most important character on the page is neither a father nor a son. On its surface, that’s what the story seems to be about: part retelling of the biblical relationships of Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve; part meditation on the American West; part family history. The novel spans three generations of the Trask and Hamilton families making a life in the Salinas Valley at the turn of the 20th century, raising questions about inheritance and what we do with it.
However, running just beneath its surface is another story: one of the great literary villains, Cathy Ames. She burns her parents alive, marries a man she doesn’t love, tries to abort the twins she’s carrying, abandons them, shoots her husband and escapes to run the most notorious brothel in town. All this with a cold calculation that belies her angelic features. In his novel, Steinbeck poses the question: “Can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? ...If a twisted gene or malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?” He writes Cathy as the answer.
Steinbeck himself seemed almost afraid of his creation. Writing in his journals, he feared there was more of Cathy in him than he was ready to make peace with. Every screen adaptation that has followed the novel has had to make its own peace with her evil, too. The latest, a seven-episode Netflix limited series executive produced and written by Zoe Kazan, joins a cinematic conversation that began 70 years ago. With it, Zoe brings another dimension: a granddaughter talking to her grandfather.
Her own grandfather, Elia Kazan, adapted the book for the screen in 1955. It came at an inflection point for Hollywood, embodied by the performance of 24-year-old James Dean as Cal in what would be one of only three movie roles before his death. With just three films Dean was forever immortalised as the face of the decade’s delinquent youth. As the unloved, “bad” twin son of Adam Trask, Dean plays a character in constant tension with the censorship of the era, which forced the film to find ways of depicting sex work by obscuring it, relegating the unique depravity of Cathy’s brothel to the background. Off screen or in dimly lit rooms, the camera prefers characters’ reactions to what they witness.
It’s a lesson that the most successful adaptations aren’t always the most faithful. Rather, they’re more faithful to the spirit of the text than the flesh. Elia’s film is consistent with his career-spanning attraction to stories about the unstoppable force of misunderstood, troubled young men meeting the immovable object of overbearing, indifferent authority figures. Elia’s East Of Eden doesn’t bother with anything that comes before Cal and Aron Trask. That is how it makes its peace with Cathy: by looking away from her. While Steinbeck’s novel spends its first two-thirds building the Trask and Hamilton history and tracing Cathy’s cruelty back to childhood, Kazan skips straight to Cathy (played with bitter, sarcastic edge by Jo Van Fleet) as an older woman veiled in black, pursued by the troubled son she abandoned 20 years ago. It’s really Cal’s story, more than anything.
And so the film also discards Lee, Adam’s Chinese immigrant housekeeper who, in the novel, effectively raises the twins after their mother abandons them and their father enters a fugue state of despair. Lee also introduces moral architecture on which the entire story rests. Lee is more than a caretaker. He is a scholar, and he supplies the moral architecture the entire novel rests on, introducing its central concept: timshel. A word that Lee reveals to be Hebrew for “thou mayest”.
In 1981, a three-part miniseries by Harvey Hart poured back in this idea of timshel, and everything Elia Kazan’s film left out. This retelling of East Of Eden focused on the entire family saga, beginning with Cyrus Trask. Jane Seymour played Cathy, promoted as a “school girl as wicked as she is beautiful... a girl with a thirst for evil.” Her Cathy delights in her cruelty, her ability to conceal it with the way she looks. In one scene, a pimp who has fallen in love with her and made her a kept woman forces her to get drunk on champagne. Her coquettish innocence melts away. She throws her drink in his face, twirling without a care as she tells the man that he disgusts her; gleefully laughing as she reveals she has been using him all along.
Speaking about the role decades later, Seymour said her Cathy never thought of herself as evil, was never emotionally impacted by any of her misdeeds. It’s an interpretation not far from Steinbeck’s “malformed soul”, except that what reads as a novelist’s tenuous diagnosis on the page becomes, on screen, pure 1980s spectacle.
Spectacle suits an epic, biblical tale like this one. Steinbeck thought of all his characters chiefly as archetypes, “essentially symbolic people”, as he wrote in his journals. But in 2026, Florence Pugh’s Cathy sees the first real attempt to let the character tell her own story. “I wanted to make sure [Cathy] was also a person and not just an archetype,” Zoe Kazan told Tudum. “I think that really required me to do some unfolding rather than inventing. Basically, everything that’s in the series has at least a root in the book.”
In the novel, one of Cathy’s first cruel acts, at age ten, is to falsely accuse two teenage boys of sexually assaulting her. In Zoe’s retelling, we instead see a five-year-old Cathy led into the woods by an older boy. The implication is clear: something happened to her, something awful enough to shut down her capacity to give or receive love. Pugh plays her as someone more oriented towards survival rather than the thrill of being bad. In her quiet moments she is stern, almost blank, only animated when she has someone to perform for. There is nothing so tidy as an excuse. Her actions are not painted over with the glossiness of a girlboss overcoming the patriarchy. Instead we’re shown that her cruelty has a logic, an economy.
In episode five, a montage follows Cathy’s new life at a brothel, where she wins over the madam, Faye, who adopts her as a daughter. Over images of her entertaining johns we hear Cathy’s narration: “The only true freedom in this world is economic freedom. And for the modern woman, that presents a problem. She could marry into wealth, of course, but those assets will belong to her husband, as surely as she does.”
The speech echoes one from another Pugh character, in another adaptation of a classic American novel. In Little Women (2019), her character Amy calmly explains to Laurie why she must marry for money, not just love. In both cases the speech illuminates a mercenary logic and when Pugh’s East Of Eden character Cathy goes on to take over the brothel (culminating in Faye’s murder), that logic comes fully into view. To Cathy, survival and love have nothing to do with each other. Indeed, the latter often complicates the former.
In every iteration we’ve seen on screen, one of Cathy’s great tragedies is that she has mistaken survival for freedom. This Netflix series shows us why. It asks, “Is that enough?” What the latest iteration of East Of Eden has to say about who we are now is, perhaps, that we are tired of pretending the evils of the world arrive fully formed, from nowhere. Every abusive system depends on this fiction, and every person trapped in that fiction is bereft of something. By failing to face the shadow, the wound, we doom ourselves to later pain.
East Of Eden is now available to watch on Netflix. 
