Seprpent, Thy Name is Woman

As those who are familiar with the Bible know, Eve was the woman who put the stain of sin on the human race. As you may recall, while still living in the Garden of Eden, Eve came upon a serpent near the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (there’s a name for you). Adam and Eve had been forbidden by God from eating from this tree but, as we all know, the serpent convinced Eve to take fruit from the tree and eat it. When God found out that she and Adam had eaten the fruit, he banished Adam and Eve from Eden. (On a side note, banishment was a common punishment in the Bible as God also banished Cain to live east of Eden, so there’s the true story of the title).

Now to the untrained eye, the East of Eden character Cathy Ames may seem like the parallel to Eve in the novel. Eve, however, had redeeming qualities: mother of mankind, for example. Cathy has none. Everything we learn about her in novel suggests she has nothing resembling a conscience nor does she do anything to help other people. Eve had no instinct for sin until the serpent actually suggested it. Cathy, on the other hand, commits evil for no reason or sometimes just to entertain herself (like when she sleeps with her husband’s brother). Cathy accepts sin as inevitable and therefore just embraces it in everything she does.

Eve’s sin was also not a malicious sin but a sin of curiosity. Cathy’s sins, on the other hand, are all malicious and none can rightfully be attributed to human instinct. She attempts to kill her unborn children, shoots her husband, and abandons her infant twins. We even learn that she killed her parents before joining a brothel in Massachusetts. She doesn’t seem to do these things because it was part of a certain agenda, but just because she could. The same can be said about her actions when she arrives at the brothel. Just as she exploits Adam’s good nature early in the novel, she exploits the semi-good nature of Faye, the madam at the brothel, who takes her in as a sort of apprentice. She cruelly poisons her and takes control of the brothel. We don’ really learn why, she just does it because she can.

Cathy is easily the most evil character in the novel, so how can she be a parallel to Eve? Eve may have committed the original sin of humanity, but it was, despite the title of sin, fairly innocent. Cathy murders and attacks people at the very heart of their existence. She is actually such a terrible person, that critics argue that she is a flaw in Steinbeck’s novel. She is an unrealistic character, they say, since she is just so cruel for absolutely no reason. I believe that Steinbeck was actually dead on in his depiction of Cathy. The critics have the mistaken impression that Cathy, like Eve, needs to have motives or guilt for her evil. I theorize, however, that Cathy is actually the embodiment of evil in the novel, not the embodiment of human sin. Cathy is not the character who shows us what sin is and how it punishes humanity. Cathy is the character who shows us the true face and depth of evil. It’s too simple to assume that Cathy would be Eve’s parallel since she is Aron and Cal’s mother. She is no parallel to a humanly flawed, apple-eating mother of humanity. She is the parallel to the snake, evil itself. (595)

JStor Articles:
John Steinbeck: Novelist as Scientist
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345452

Human Relations in Literature
http://www.jstor.org/stable/813685


The Friend at the Round Table: A Note on Steinbeck's ActsThe Friend at the Round Table: A Note on Steinbeck's Acts
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2924782