How can one defend a female character who, at the age of ten, lures boys into sexual experimentation; at age sixteen, drives her Latin teacher to suicide and then incinerates her parents; runs away to become mistress to a brothel owner and, after being brutally beaten by him, marries another man for protection; shoots her husband and deserts her twin sons (one of whom was fathered by her husband’s brother on her wedding night); returns to prostitution and murders the madam in order to become madam herself of the most infamous brothel in the west; and commits suicide by drinking poison ?
From the beginning, Cathy does not appear to fit into the novel’s patriarchal structure postulating free will; rather she eschews a choice between good and evil because she appears driven to defy 19th century conventions which involve binary oppositions between good and evil, specifically the timshel theme which, on one level, centers the book. Set outside this framework, Cathy/Kate exists as an amoral monster who brings into question the validity of this theme. She falls into a triploid of familiar associations: an amoral monster, a satirical fantasy, and a genetic mutation, all of which suggest the subterranean mystery at the heart of East of Eden.
In his article “The Mirror and the Vamp: Invention, Reflection, and Bad, Bad Cathy Trask in East of Eden,” Louis Owens raises critical questions about Cathy’s character:
A consideration of East of Eden as a self-conscious fiction may also allow us to come to terms with one of the major problems often cited by critics: Cathy Ames Trask. Is Cathy the C. A. T., a genetically misshapen monster who simply is predetermined to be evil because of something she lacks? (Is she, as Benson suggests, a product of Steinbeck’s pondering upon the evils of his second wife?) Or is she more psychologically complex than this, as her early and late obsessions with the Wonderland Alice seem to suggest? Why, if timshel must apply to all of us, does it seem not to apply to Cathy or Adam, or even Charles, who is incapable of feeling sorry? If this novel is designed to mark the end of an era—naturalism with its emphasis upon pessimistic determinism—as Ditsky has persuasively suggested, why does Steinbeck create absolutists such as Adam and Cathy, who seem, for most of the novel, incapable of free will? (253)
Cathy is beyond evil; she is a monster to those of conventional morals and mores, but, from her perspective, those who judge her are monsters. Steinbeck writes early in the novel:
to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others.…It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life. Some balance wheel was misweighted, some gear out of ratio. She was not like other people, never was from birth. (72)
Here Steinbeck’s comments sound more like those of a clinical psychologist than those of an overt moralist, and in his Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, he writes that he, too, in a way, is a monster like Cathy and details fluctuating shifts in her characterization. Moreover, he also describes her enigmatic contradictions in the novel.
Cathy always had a child’s figure even after she was grown, slender, delicate arms and hands—tiny hands. Her breasts never developed very much. Before her puberty the nipples turned inward. Her mother had to manipulate them out when they became painful in Cathy’s tenth year. Her body was a boy’s body.…Her feet were small and round and stubby, with fat insteps almost like little hoofs… .
Even as a child she had some quality that made people look at her, then look away, then look back at her, troubled at something foreign. Something looked out of her eyes, and was never there when one looked again. (73)
From the beginning, Cathy is seen as the “other,” “a girl set apart,” and, according to Jackson Benson, is “Steinbeck’s nonteleological white whale. Like so many other Steinbeck characters, she is a sport born out of nature who simply does what she does …” (167).1 In her denial of conventional morality, Cathy questions the binary opposition between good and evil; she exists outside the norm of the biblical symbolism which structures the novel. In her phantasmagoria, she lives as an alien who refuses to fit into the conventional code of the good woman. But in her perversity she remains eerily fascinating, an enigma who cannot be contained. Cathy defies classification in a male-dominated world. From her viewpoint, she is an observer of the true monsters of masculine control as seen in Mr. Ames, her father; Mr. Edwards, her master; and Adam Trask, her husband. Therefore, she is beyond the boundaries of conventional family life as exemplified by the roles of daughter, wife, and mother. Instead she emerges as a force beyond good and evil, a force of perverse freedom. Yet she is more alive than any other character in the novel.2
As Mark Schorer notes in his review of the book:
With Adam Trask we move, too, into the core story, if we accept at all, we accept at the level of folklore, the abstract fiction of the Social Threat, of a Witch beyond women. This account may suggest a kind of eclectic irresolution of view, which is, in fact, not at all the quality of the book. I have hoped to suggest, instead, a wide-ranging imaginative freedom that might save the life of many an American Novelist. (22)
Strangely enough, Cathy is linked not so much to the biblical symbolism of the book’s superimposed patriarchal ideologies, but rather to a seemingly innocuous children’s fantasy: Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. When Cathy’s mother asks, “What’s the book you are hiding?” Cathy retorts, “Here! I’m not hiding it.” Her mother rejoins, “Oh, Alice in Wonderland. You’re too big for that.” And Cathy replies, “I can get to be so little you can’t even see me.…Nobody can find me” (82). This image of willing herself to become small, this telescoping of self in order to escape the restrictions of control, are repeated near the end of the book when she, like Alice, recalls the literary injunction to “eat me,” and “drink me,” and she swallows the poisoned tea.
She thrust her mind back to Alice. In the gray wall opposite there was a nail hole. Alice…would put her arm around Cathy’s waist, and Cathy would put her arm around Alice’s waist, and they would walk away—best friends—and tiny as the head of a pin. (554)
Steinbeck’s association of Cathy with Alice is significant in that this fantasy—with its correlation with free imagination and satire—again places Cathy outside the biblical symbolism in the novel. In a sense, the other characters may be seen, from her point of view, as puppets on a string. In an inversion of the norm, she may also be viewed as a bewildered Alice caught in a nightmare world. For, in her mind, she is not culpable but is instead an observer of the true monsters—the mad hatters, the queens and kings of hearts, or as Richard Wallace suggests in a decoding of the word “hearts,” haters (39).
In a letter to his friend, Carlton Sheffield, written 16 October 1952, Steinbeck says of Cathy’s character:
You won’t believe her, many people don’t. I don’t know whether I believe her either but I know she exists. I don’t believe in Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Jack the Ripper, the man who stands on one finger in the circus. I don’t believe Jesus Christ, Alexander the Great, Leonardo. I don’t believe them but they exist. I don’t believe them because they aren’t like me. You say you only believe her at the end. Ah! but that’s when, through fear, she became like us. This was very carefully planned. All the book was very carefully planned. (SLL 459)
Indeed, in a sense East of Eden may be viewed as an intricately plotted mystery as well as a morality tale. At the heart of the mystery lies the enigmatic Cathy/Kate—a shift in name signifying an ever-shifting characterization—and a split personality. Paradoxically, Cathy appears to develop and change from defiance to fear in the course of the novel. After being brutally beaten by Mr. Edwards, Cathy is next introduced in Chapter 11 as a non-human species:
A dirty bundle of rags and mud was trying to worm its way up the steps. One skinny hand clawed slowly at the stairs. The other dragged helplessly. There was a caked face with cracked lips and eyes peering out of swollen, blackened lids. The forehead was laid open, oozing blood back into the matted hair. (110)
While Charles instinctively gleans the truth about Cathy’s character in this scene, Adam benevolently ministers to her every need and sees in Cathy the purpose for his life, a dream built upon the illusion of his own needs. After Adam’s proposal to Cathy, we are given a rare glimpse into her motivation for marriage.
She had not only made up her mind to marry Adam but she had so decided before he had asked her. She was afraid. She needed protection and money.…And Mr. Edwards had really frightened her. That had been the only time in her life she had lost control of a situation. She determined never to let it happen again. (121)
But it does happen again. Late in the novel Joe Valery convinces Kate that a witness with circumstantial evidence related to the murder of Faye is still alive, and Kate reacts to the news with “almost hopeless fear and weariness.”
But Kate is seen not only as powerful or fearful. In a brief reversal from a life of sin, after confronting her twin sons in the brothel, Kate wills her fortune to Aron. After her death, we learn that she has stored her marriage certificate in a safe deposit box, a rather conventional gesture. Earlier, she fantasizes about moving to New York and attending concerts with her fair-haired son Aron. Nearer home, she attends the Episcopal Church in Salinas so that she may view her favorite son Aron. These shades of chiaroscuro in Kate’s character, however, mask a sociopathic personality. Alternating between a wish for respectability and a new life with her “angelic” son Aron and a fear of discovery by Cal “the smart one—the dark one—” Kate muses:
mother of two sons—and she looked like a child. And if anyone had seen her with the blond one—could they have any doubt? She thought how it would be to stand beside him in a crowd and let people find out for themselves. What would—Aron, that was the name—what would he do if he knew? His brother knew. That smart little son of a bitch—wrong word—must not call him that. Might be too true. Some people believed it. And not smart bastard either—born in holy wedlock. Kate laughed aloud. She felt good. She was having a good time.
The smart one—the dark one—bothered her. He was like Charles. (512)
This inner debate is immediately followed by a new dark plan of attack—"a comical murder" of Ethel, the aging prostitute who divines the truth about Kate’s murder of Faye. Although changes in her character appear, Kate ultimately runs on parallel tracks that end nowhere. She commits suicide, never achieving a resolution of her self-willed sense of superiority and Cal’s unspoken affront. “The glint in his eyes said, ’You missed something. They had something and you missed it’” (554).
In swallowing the final draft of poison, the “drink me” potion, Kate returns to the fantasy world of Alice in Wonderland, perceiving herself as a victim surrounded by towering trees of enemies, but never fully confronting her involvement in a life gone awry. She seeks Alice as an innocent feminine icon, but finds herself desolate and isolated from even that fantasy. Steinbeck captures her whirling perceptions: “She thought or said or thought, ’Alice doesn’t know. I’m going on past.’” Kate goes on her last adventure alone.
Her eyes closed and a dizzy nausea shook her. She opened her eyes and stared about in terror. The gray room darkened and the cone of light flowed and rippled like water. And then her eyes closed again and her fingers curled as though they held small breasts. And her heart beat solemnly and her breathing slowed as she grew smaller and smaller and then disappeared—(554)
Steinbeck brilliantly concludes this passage with the dismissal “and she had never been,” the total annihilation of her character. The next reference he makes to Kate is clinical:
Already Kate was on the table at Muller’s with the formalin running into her veins, and her stomach was in a jar in the coroner’s office. (559)
However, the riddle of Cathy/Kate remains. In willing her fortune to Aron and leaving her marriage certificate behind, she may be subtly reinforcing the timshel theme; yet, in Kate’s case, the timing suggests a shadow theme: her choice for good may be seen as a kind of epiphany when the reader is dealt a final shock: We remember her not only as the serpentine Eve (or more precisely Lilith) of the beginning, but as a kind of avenging angel at the end.
The mystery of Kate’s complex characterization comes full circle. After incinerating her parents and staging a mysterious disappearance, the young “Cathy left a scent of sweetness about her”; the aged Kate leaves a final shock of apparent conversion—until we remember the ugly photographs of her customers—and her determination to blackmail them. Certainly the fearful, tormented Kate at the end is a kaleidoscopic reversal from the defiant and desolate Kate we find in Chapter 25 when she confronts Adam with the fact that perhaps Charles fathered one son. Although Kate prefers Aron, who physically resembles her and, like Adam, represents all she is not, it appears that Cal is the probable son of Charles, the man Kate “could have loved.” As Louis Owens notes:
Caleb and Aron, the twin sons born to Cathy, pick up the Cain and Abel theme introduced in the characters of Charles and Adam and carry it through to the end of the novel. The twins are each “born separate in his own sack” (194), and it is impossible to determine their respective paternity. Again, determinism and psychological realism are confused in the characters of the boys—Is Cal bad because he may be descended from Charles or is he bad because, like Charles, he feels rejected? Is it the “channel in the blood” that makes Cal different from the good Aron, or is it the father’s response that determines each son’s character? Steinbeck makes it impossible to determine who the boys’ respective fathers may be. (JS’s Re-Vision of America 152)
The multiple ironies of this dilemma both undercut and strengthen the timshel theme. If Cal is not Adam’s son, his genetic roots lie with Cathy and Charles and hence the question of choosing good over evil becomes more problematic, although, admittedly, he has found his mother out and rejects her. “’I was afraid I had you in me.’ ’You have,’ said Kate. ’No, I haven’t. I’m my own. I don’t have to be you’” (466). If Cal is not Adam’s son, Adam raises himself to a level of spiritual transcendence when he offers Cal the opportunity to choose between good and evil. Like Joe Saul in Burning Bright, Adam acknowledges a spiritual paternity which transcends and reconciles the rivalry of three generations of Trasks.
And yet we don’t know what choice Cal will make after the final scene; he appears strangely passive and the ending is open-ended, enigmatic, and ambiguous. After all, it is Lee’s energy which propels the action at the end of the novel when he delivers his Daedalus-like analogy of a craftsman who had refined his cup with “all impurities burned out,” leading to Adam’s climactic offering of timshel.
Steinbeck notes his exhaustion near the completion of the book in a letter to Covici:
So we go into the last week and I must say I am very much frightened. I guess it would be hard to be otherwise—all of these months and years aimed in one direction and suddenly it is over and it seems that the thunder has produced a mouse. Last week there was complete exhaustion and very near collapse. (JN 171)
In a sense, then, the ending of East of Eden is as problematic as the characterizations of Cathy and Cal: both bring into question 19th and 20th century attempts to define morality by conventional norms. Indeed, both may be seen as precursors of Generation X’s skepticism of conventions, an evolutionary cycle. Almost like X-Files detectives, they peer, with x-ray vision, into the raw truth of human behavior and lift the veil of pretense behind hypocrisy. Cal’s cry near the end of the novel—"I’ve got her blood"—questions the predictability of an optimistic, moralistic ending, although Lee and Abra’s words offer hope, as does, finally, Adam’s labored whisper of timshel, which applies to Cal, and today still, to Everyman and Everywoman.