East of Eden on Netflix: Good and Bad Are Transient States for Steinbeck's Characters
Netflix put all seven episodes of East of Eden online on October 1. Zoe Kazan adapted it, which closes a family loop of sorts: her grandfather Elia Kazan directed the 1955 film with James Dean, and that film used only the last stretch of Steinbeck’s novel. Lee doesn’t appear in it at all.
The series takes the whole thing, from 1862 to 1918. Tracy Letts plays Cyrus Trask, with Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist as his sons, Adam and Charles. Florence Pugh is Cathy. The twins, Cal and Aron, are Joseph Zada and Joe Anders. Hoon Lee plays Lee and Ciarán Hinds plays Samuel Hamilton, while New Zealand stands in for the Salinas Valley.
So plenty of people are meeting the Trasks for the first time this week, and they’ll come away with the question readers have chewed on since 1952. Are these good people or bad people?
I don’t think Steinbeck lets anyone in the book be either one for long. Good and bad, in East of Eden, are transient states. The characters pass in and out of them, sometimes inside a single day, which is why so much of the story sits in the grey between.
Nobody gets to keep either one.
Almost everyone in the book switches sides
Start with Charles. As boys, he and Adam each bring their father a birthday present. Charles bought a knife; Adam found a stray puppy. Cyrus plainly prefers the puppy, so Charles beats Adam half to death, then goes back for a hatchet. That same Charles spends years alone on the farm writing his brother letters, waiting for him to come home.
Adam is the decent brother, and his decency works like a blindfold. He looks at Cathy and sees an angel. Years later he looks at Cal, the son trying hardest to reach him, and barely sees him at all. When Cal hands over the money he made selling beans during the war, Adam (who sits on the draft board, picking local boys for the army) won’t touch it. He tells Cal he’d rather have had what Aron gives him, something to be proud of. That refusal does more damage than Charles ever managed with his fists.
Samuel Hamilton is the kindest man in the valley. He’s also the one who, on his last visit, decides to tell Adam where Cathy went: she’s running a brothel in Salinas under the name Kate. He knows it will hurt. He does it anyway, on the theory that a shock might wake Adam up after years half asleep. It works. It’s still a deliberate wound from a good man, and Steinbeck doesn’t tidy it up for you.
Then there’s Cal, who does the most damaging thing in the last part of the book. Stung by Adam’s rejection, he walks Aron into Kate’s place and shows him the mother he’d been told was dead. Aron enlists and is killed in France; the news brings on Adam’s stroke. Cal is also the character who works hardest at being good. Both are true of him at once.
The two who stand still are warnings
Two characters do try to hold one state permanently. Steinbeck treats both as warnings.
Cathy is the obvious case. The narrator flatly calls her a monster born to human parents, an odd thing to hear in a novel this generous with everyone else. She shoots Adam, walks out on her newborn twins, poisons Faye to get the brothel, then kills herself with morphine and leaves her money to Aron. Across all of it she never moves. She’s the one character with no second state, and in this book that’s what makes a monster. (Of everyone in the new cast, Pugh has the hardest job.)
Aron is the quieter case. He’s the golden twin, the one people love on sight, and he tries to freeze himself in goodness. He builds his life on a mother he imagines died a saint and on a plan to enter the ministry; even Abra, the girl he’s meant to marry, works out that he loves an idea of her more than her. His goodness has never met a hard fact. When Cal shows him Kate there’s nothing underneath it. It snaps.
Frozen evil makes a monster. Frozen goodness, Aron’s kind, lasts until the first hard truth.
Timshel is why good and bad don’t stick
The book’s argument runs through Lee, which is why leaving him out of the 1955 film cost it so much. When Samuel, Adam and Lee sit down to name the twins, they read the Cain and Abel story aloud and snag on one verse, where God tells Cain about ruling over sin. Lee can’t let it go. Years later he comes back with an answer from a circle of elderly Chinese scholars who learned Hebrew to settle it. The two English Bibles he’d compared read the verse two ways, the King James as a promise and the American Standard as an order. The Hebrew word, timshel, means “thou mayest.”
That’s a choice. A choice behaves differently from a trait, because it doesn’t stay made. You make it, and the next morning it’s sitting there waiting for you again. Good and bad keep shifting in this book because the choosing never stops.
It’s also why the Cain and Abel story keeps coming back around in the Trask family. Cyrus slights Charles’s gift; Charles goes for the hatchet. A generation later Adam turns down Cal’s gift; Cal takes Aron to Kate. Blood and old resentment push hard, and the repeat starts to look like fate. Lee is the one who won’t call it that.
When Cal learns who his mother is, he goes to Lee sick with fear that her evil is in his blood. Lee agrees it’s in there. Then he tells Cal the other thing is in him too, and asks whether he’d be worrying about the bad at all if the good weren’t there. Whatever Cal does from here, he’ll be the one doing it.
The novel ends at Adam’s bedside. He’s had the stroke and can barely speak, and Lee begs him to give Cal his blessing. Adam gets out one word, timshel, and he gives it to the son who set the whole disaster in motion.
Cal is guilty that night. He doesn’t have to stay that way.