The dreadful beauty of East of Eden
searching for the good and evil in Steinbeck's masterpiece
We only have one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.
Everything we might become exists inside us from the moment we are shoved into this world. What then, makes us good? Makes us evil? A conscious commitment to either side? A series of micro-decisions that somehow add up to a moral or immoral life? Innate nature we cannot thwart because it exists in our minds if not our actions?
Or is the difference simply man’s best invention?
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You can't escape American high school without reading or being threatened by at least one Steinbeck novel. Mine was The Grapes of Wrath. I was picked to read it on my own time, in addition to standing coursework, and then attend a library discussion event of some sort with a few other classmates. Instead of reading it and finally participating in something, I completely avoided the book and the teacher until it was over. I still live with the guilt of abandoning the obligation.
Since then, I had an idea of what a Steinbeck novel was, and it involved a lot of desolate poverty and dry landscapes. Happily, I was desperately incorrect. East of Eden was dramatic, messy, and scandalous. My copy is now full of tabs noting the nuggets of wisdom that proliferate the pages. My expectations were subverted. I will remember the characters’s names forever.
East of Eden is beloved by many, as I have discovered since starting a buddy read with
and chatting with other bookworms. It sounds stodgy and preachy from a plot description: a story about three generations of two intertwined American families settled in the Salinas Valley during the turn of the 20th century. As the Trasks and Hamiltons procreate, grow, marry, and procreate some more, they play out the “first” story - the only story - of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace and Cain and Abel’s treacherous brotherhood. Adam and his brother Charles are round one, Adam’s children Caleb and Aron round two. Samuel Hamilton is a bit of a God figure, Cathy both Eve and the devil, while Lee is the moral guide disguised as a hired Chinese man who substitutes for Cathy in the domestic sphere. Abra is a love interest for Aron and the voice of reason.This may be the only time you hear me say I enjoyed a novel with such overt Christian themes.
Man invented both angels and devils
If man invented both angels and devils, then he also invented good and evil. At first, it seems we are meant to sort all characters into one pot or another. Then we repeatedly see characters crawl out of their buckets and into another, half in and out, uncommitted to either side, stranded like floppy fish on marshy land. Adam and Charles, our first set of brothers, present as foils - inherently good and bad, respectively - but as the story progresses, these dichotomies fall apart. A loss of innocence is more accurately the catalyst to disaster than any strict morality. Steinbeck hints that some men are just not meant to withstand the harsh reality of life. Adam and his son Aron are naive, sensitive, and well-liked until they devolve into whiny assholes in the face of shattered reality. Charles and Adam’s son Caleb are discerning and complicated like abandoned junkyard puppies. These brothers fight for love, assurance, guidance - something, anything! - while their fathers are sat pondering the nature of their creation.
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Samuel says of the Bible, “There’s nothing to understand,” and Adam replies, “It’s not a comforting story, is it?”
[Minor spoilers ahead]
Madonna or the whore, but both are mannequins
How do you participate in life if life refuses to see you as existing in all dimensions? If you are painted a cardboard cutout? Madonna or the whore, but only through a man’s eyes, unable to hold contradictions or nuance. Liza, who is chaste, religious, uptight, and a mother, is good. Cathy, who abandons husband and children to run a whorehouse, is evil. We see them only through their husbands’ or sons ’ eyes. Through Aron’s gaze, even Abra is a fake out, a hologram of the good mother he never had.
Cathy was easily the most interesting character because of her extreme capacity for cruelty, self-control, selfishness, and indifference. She presents as pure evil, a devil in a dress who rejects motherhood over independence and wealth. Yet she is never happy, never satisfied, never safe. She literally shriveles up and dies. Did the horror or her mind eat her up? All her badness leaked out until her outside looked like her insides? If anything, Cathy presents as psychopathic rather than evil, devoid of feeling or empathy, although there is a shimmering moment at the end of her life that hints maybe she chose to be this way (“You missed something. They had something and you missed it."). She is not vindicated, she is not triumphant.
Thou mayest, but not if you have money
Agency is the word, bird, but don’t hand anyone any money, for surely that will ruin their lives. Who has money, who gets money, how they get it, and what they do with it are inversely correlated with moral happiness level. There is also an underlying tension with the physical landscape that one small change - in weather patterns, society, technology - and everything will fall apart. What a precarious way to live!
Samuel, our philosopher, is described as smart, kind, a great, storyteller, but always dirt pool, unable to eek a living out of the ground. His children resent him for caring about his intellectual life more than his family. Adam becomes wealthy twice through no actions of his own and then proceeds to either live in a stupor completely detached from life & family or squander it away. We already know about Cathy and her whore money; Caleb becomes wealthy from scamming farmers during the war, which leads to bad things; Lee has buckets of money but doesn’t live out his dreams so he can stay with his “family;” the one man in town with any business sense is described like some sort of Tammany Hall boss. Is this a comment on the evilness of money or a comment on the constitution of the characters? Perhaps a bit of both.
Children are people too
Children are always having their illusions shattered in East of Eden, and the more realistic their understanding of the world, the more likely they are to survive. Each generation learns the same hard lessons - a parent’s fallibility, man’s capacity for cruelness, or their own moral failings. But each generation builds on the lessons of the last.
When a child first catches adults out - when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, they're thinking true, their sentences just - his world falls into panic and desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone.
The generation that straddles the line of tradition and modernity, who can think for themselves, finally have some agency over their lives. I keep returning to the framework at play - Steinbeck purposely gives us three generations to show how generational trauma must be overcome, how the sins of the parents follow the children, yet they have the greatest chance of moving forward by building on those lessons. The Caleb and Abra arc was surprising and nuanced, a departure from the fall of Caleb’s mother and father. Caleb and Abra are the most self-aware characters aside from Lee. These three alone give this text hope.
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It is going to be very difficult to top such a classic novel. I could list quotes all day, but I will leave you with this one about the thrill of modernity. In this passage, the narrator’s mother has just won an airplane ride for her war-supporting efforts:
Even vicariously this was an eminence we could hardly stand. But my poor mother - I must tell you that there are certain things in the existence of which my mother did not believe against any possible evidence to the contrary. One was a bad Hamilton and another was the airplane. The fact that she had seen them didn’t make her believe in them one bit more. In the light of what she did I have tried to imagine how she felt. Her soul must have crawled with horror, for how can you fly in something that does not exist?
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Verdict👩⚖️: The only way I will ever enjoy biblical-adjacent stories.
For Fans Of 🖤: Scandalous classics like Edith Wharton, maybe some Americana like Lonesome Dove, or any of Tolstoy’s examinations of good and evil.
Further Reading📚
and and I all buddy-read East of Eden together. Check out their takes on itJune Reads from Martha
Thou Mayest from Bitch Sensei
I was surprisingly unable to find many articles on East of Eden. This podcast transcription was interesting.
This was a very challenging review to write. I did one of those sit-at-the-desk, procrastinate, wiggle, write one sentence, and go do something else type deals. Eventually, I got in the shower, and the thoughts appeared. The buddy read moments that kept me going:
“I’d be insane if I was a farmers wife in the 19th century with 100 children and no money” - Martha
“These Steinbeck men loooooove to project an ideal onto a woman, even when they directly say things like "I don't want to move cross-country with you and will absolutely leave you." - Bitch Sensei
“Adam is literally useless” - Me
Have you read East of Eden? Who is your favorite character? Or if not, are you likely to ever read it? Let me know in the comments 😁
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See you around the bookshelf!
Natalie
I am still mildly traumatized from my high school Grapes of Wrath experience but this has me wanting to give East of Eden a try?
Ah! I can’t imagine kids today appreciating Steinbeck. I am really enjoying Stoner. It was so easy to get into it.