By Hannah Morris-Voth
April 26, 2021
East of Eden, a 1952 novel by John Steinbeck, is a long, sprawling, sometimes slow, but often very intense, read. Steinbeck considered it his magnum opus, termed in his journal as “the first book”, an illusion to its Genesis inspiration.
It begins at the turn of the century in Connecticut, telling about the difficult childhood of Adam Trask and the pains and troubles caused him by his half-brother Charles. Adam and Charles’ relationship is the first incarnation in the story with parallels to the biblical Cain and Abel. Steinbeck takes the story of Cain and Abel and makes Cain the sympathetic character. Here, Charles is parallel to Cain and Adam to Abel—the dynamic is nearly what you’d expect, though there’s an arc of slight redemption for Charles. It is hardly clear-cut, however.
Concurrent with Adam and Charles’ story, we meet another central character: Cathy Ames. She is intriguing, but questionable, right from the beginning: conniving and planning in order to get exactly what she wants. Soon, Adam meets Cathy Ames is taken in by her evil charm. He loves her blindly and, against the advice of Charles, decides to marry her.
They move out to the Salinas Valley in California, where they have twin sons, Aron and Cal… and the Cain and Abel motif repeats itself in a second generation. Cathy abandons her young family and heads off to (secretly) be a prostitute in a nearby town, adopting the name of Kate. Aron and Cal grow to be young men: Cal is wild and reckless, Aron is dependable and good-hearted, always believing the best of others.
To make things even more complicated Steinbeck weaves in a storyline about the Samuel Hamilton family, Irish immigrants … and Steinbeck’s actual ancestors. (Samuel Hamilton was the “prophetic Irishman” and Steinbeck’s grandfather!)
John Steinbeck
So often, Steinbeck’s insightful comments on a person or a situation struck me deeply; he has a marvelous way with words. He also has a gift for writing complex and conflicted characters, though it’s not always exercised fully, especially with some of his female characters. However, Abra, Aron’s girlfriend, is a wonderful character, especially in her resistance to Aron’s false idealization of her and her parents’ focus on social position and wealth.
The Cain and Abel theme, reflected in the reoccurring C & A pairs, which shows up with Adam and Charles and resurfaces in the second generation with Aron and Cal, was fascinating: not just the good and evil dichotomy (though the evil is mixed with some good, and is often more just human weakness), but also other echoes of the original Biblical story. For example, the Cain characters work with farming and the land, like the original Cain; Abel was a shepherd and Aron wants to be a priest (a spiritual shepherd), and so on. I loved how Steinbeck humanizes the Cain characters and emphasizes how we all have a choice in how we act and react to events in our lives.
I was shaken by the character of Lee – a philosophic “Chinaman” who is Adam’s housekeeper. Towards the last third of the story, we begin to see more of his thought and the following excerpt still has me reeling. In fact, it is something that seems would take to an analysis of its own, but for now:
“The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel–‘Thou mayest’–that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’–it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ “
This theme continues throughout the rest of the book—this element of choice, and is, in fact, the moral and driving force of the entire novel.
While I am, most assuredly, an advocate for Steinbeck’s work, I must acknowledge the imperfections of the novel: it tries to do so much that it’s a bit fragmented, and it sometimes veers toward heavy-handedness and melodrama. However, if you’ve read Grapes of Wrath, then Steinbeck’s tendency to fragment stories will not surprise you—it’s just part of his style. Overall, this is an amazing and moving work that I must strongly recommend.