At the surface, East of Eden, John Steinbeck’s self-proclaimed masterpiece, is a celebration of self-determination and the ability of every human to choose either the moral path or the immoral. Yet this message is complicated by the character of Cathy Ames Trask, whose portrayal contradicts this rule of moral agency. Cathy is portrayed as sociopathic, lacking empathy from birth, a “malformed soul”(Steinbeck 72). 

Many critics of East of Eden have pointed to this contradictory message, while others have explored the ways in which choice and moral agency can still be ascribed to Cathy’s character. Whether or not Cathy’s character contradicts the novel’s message of self-determination, it is clear that she stands apart from the novel’s many other characters, who possess the “potential of conscience”(Steinbeck 72) that she lacks. This raises a question about Steinbeck’s choice to vilify the most narratively prominent female character in the book, which follows six main characters, the other five of whom are men. Steinbeck’s portrayal of Cathy falls neatly under the archetype of the “femme fatale,” and examination of Cathy’s actions and roles within the book suggest that her “evilness” is grounded in the rupturing of gendered social norms. Cathy’s rejection of the roles of wife and mother, her promiscuity, and her emasculation of men are integral to her evilness, and while Cathy is seemingly a sociopath, Steinbeck’s male characters, however immoral their actions, are granted a conscience. This portrayal ultimately raises the question of whether Steinbeck’s portrayal of women is ethical, and for what audience East of Eden was written.

Moral Agency and Perspective

The novel’s deliberation on moral agency centers around the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, and the attempt of several characters to understand this story’s significance. Adam Trask, arguably the main protagonist of the novel, falls in love with Cathy Ames after finding her, beaten and half-dead, on his land. Although Cathy feels nothing for Adam, she sees use in his inherited wealth, and marries him. She gives birth to twins, and leaves soon afterwards, shooting Adam when he objects. Months later, Adam, in a deep depression, has still not named the twins. Samuel Hamilton, who owns a neighboring farm, visits Adam, determined not to leave until the twins are named. That night, Adam, Samuel, and Lee, Adam’s servant, try to decide on names for the boys, and the discussion turns to the story of Cain and Abel. 

In the Book of Genesis, Cain and Abel were the first children, the progeny of Adam and Eve. Cain was a “tiller of the ground,” and Abel a “keeper of sheep”. Both sons came to bring offerings to the Lord– Cain offered “the fruit of the ground,” while Abel offered “the firstlings of his flock”(Steinbeck 267). The Lord accepted Abel’s offering, but rejected Cain’s.  When Cain responded to this rejection with anger and sadness, the Lord said to Cain:

“Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.”

Angry and jealous, Cain slayed his brother Abel. As punishment, the Lord cursed the land that Cain tilled so that it would no longer be fertile, and ruled that Cain would be a fugitive roaming the earth, and that any man who tried to kill him would himself be cursed.

“And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden.”

After Samuel finishes reading aloud the story of Cain and Abel, Adam remarks that he has always questioned the fairness of the Lord’s judgment. “I remember being a little outraged at God,” he says. “Both Cain and Abel gave what they had, and God accepted Abel and rejected Cain. I never thought that was a just thing”(Steinbeck 269).

Adam’s servant, Lee responds, “I remember that this story was written by and for a shepherd people. They were not farmers”(Steinbeck 269).

This comment from Lee introduces the idea that a text, even one as seemingly universal as the Bible, is written from and directed towards a certain context and perspective. Though the stories of Genesis and The Fall are accepted in certain religious communities as truths about humanity, at the time they were recorded they were stories like any other, necessarily intended to send a certain message to a certain population. This realization, that literature serves a function and is intrinsically biased, is useful when discussing Steinbeck’s portrayal of Cathy considering the social context of the time period. 

The three men– Adam, Samuel, and Lee– settle on the names Caleb and Aron for the twins, foreshadowing the destructive struggle between Caleb (Cain) and Aron (Abel), a struggle which was previously enacted through the relationship between Adam (Abel), and his brother Charles (Cain).

Later, the three men revisit the story of Cain and Abel when Lee raises a question that he has been contemplating. Lee has realized that three translations of the Bible offer three different interpretations of the story. In the King James version of the Bible, which the men had used to name the twins, the Lord says to Cain, “…if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him”(Steinbeck 301). Thus the Lord promises Cain that he will conquer sin. In the American Standard Bible, the Lord instead says, “Do thou rule over him”(Steinbeck 301), ordering Cain to conquer sin. Finally, in the Hebrew Bible, the Lord uses the Hebrew word timshel, meaning “Thou mayest.” In this interpretation the Lord gives Cain the choice to rule over sin, or to submit to it. Lee tells Adam and Samuel, “the Hebrew word, the word timshel…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’”(Steinbeck 303).

Steinbeck thus makes the issue of choice and moral agency central to East of Eden. It is important to note that, in the above quote, Lee says that timshel throws the choice “right back on a man”(Steinbeck 303). This gendering of the holder of choice may seem insignificant, as “man” is often used to mean “a person.” Yet this theme of the man as the holder of power and agency continues, as Lee says, “I feel that a man is a very important thing– maybe more important than a star”(Steinbeck 304). In these cases, and several others, Steinbeck could easily have substituted “man” for “person” or “human”, yet chose not to. 

Like the story of Cain and Abel, written “for and by a shepherd people”(269), East of Eden is written for and by the self-made, working class man, the man who feels oppressed by his responsibilities to family, country, and land. It gives this man a sense of power and agency. The novel frequently focuses on the corruption and greediness of several characters: Cyrus Trask and Will Hamilton’s acquisition of riches at the cost of honesty and family is contrasted with the happy poverty of the rest of the Hamilton family. This ideal of the self-made man relies on the nurturing mother and wife; Liza Hamilton, who is happy to spend her entire life cooking, cleaning, reading the bible, and rearing children, exemplifies this dynamic. Cathy, who not only rejects the roles of wife and mother, but proceeds to grow her own fortune through corrupt means, is a threat to male self-determinism. 

If we take the story of Cain and Abel to be fact, we are all, men and women alike, the children of Cain, as Abel had no children. Assuming that as descendants of Cain we receive the Lord’s gift of timshel, why would some be excluded from this gift? Cathy’s apparent lack of choice in her own immorality reflects a deep resentment for ambitious women in a time period that privileged male self-growth and economic agency.

Cathy Ames and Timshel

It is clear that Cathy is set apart from other characters in East of Eden by her sociopathic nature. Steinbeck’s depiction of Cathy as a “born monster” is seemingly in contradiction with the novel’s theme of Timshel, “thou mayest,” which says that we each have the ability to choose between the moral and the immoral, kindness and cruelty. Furthermore, Steinbeck’s cliched portrayal of Cathy as a femme fatale suggests an ingrained hostility towards and suspicion of women, in particular those who belie misogynistic conceptions of how women should or must act, as wives and as mothers. 

Scholars of Steinbeck and East of Eden have long strived to make sense of Cathy’s characterization in a book that argues for free will. Steinbeck does backtrack slightly on his statement that Cathy was born without a conscience, writing, “When I said [she] was a monster it seemed to me that it was so. Now I have bent close with a glass over the small print of her and reread the footnotes, and I wonder if it was true. The trouble is that since we cannot know what she wanted, we will never know whether or not she got it”(Steinbeck 182).

Cathy’s ability to feel regret does appear to develop somewhat towards the end of the novel: when she sees teenaged Aron one day and notices his resemblance to herself, she begins to dream of getting to know him, and attending church with him. Later, she leaves all of her money to him in her will. While these actions seem to suggest that Cathy is capable of affection, they do not necessarily indicate sympathy. Cathy is drawn to Aron because he looks like her, and she only chooses to help him by willing her money to him because the money will be of no use to her when she is dead. She also takes no interest in a relationship with Caleb (Cal). In a book that repeatedly stresses the destructive consequences of brotherly rivalry and the favoring of one child over the other, it is difficult to look at her favoring of Aron over Cal as moral. 

Cathy is ultimately driven to suicide by her final realization that she is lacking in something which everyone else has. To a “psychic monster,” Steinbeck writes, “the norm must seem monstrous”(Steinbeck 72). From Cathy’s perspective, lying, stealing, and murdering are justified because everyone else is as corrupt as she is– she is simply hurting them before they can hurt her. In fact, Cathy seems not to believe in the existence of human goodness and altruism for the majority of the novel. Her realization that other people possess an innate goodness and moral compass that she lacks is spurred by her interactions with Aron, in whom she sees an inherent innocence and integrity, and Cal and Adam, who force her to confront her own deficiency. “I know what you hate,” Adam tells her when he finally faces her in her Brothel, “you hate something in them you can’t understand. You don’t hate their evil. You hate the good in them you can’t get at”(Steinbeck 323).

In “Defending Steinbeck: Morality, Philosophy, and Sentimentality in East of Eden”, Hannah Noël offers a way in which Cathy’s depiction can be read as consistent with the theme of timshel. Noël argues that Cathy chooses not to see the goodness in others which she does not possess in herself. In order to avoid facing her own profound lacking, she convinces herself that everyone else is just as corrupt and immoral as she. In one scene, Cathy tells Adam, “my own mother and father [were] pretending goodness. And they weren’t good”(Steinbeck 321). “Do you mean that in the whole world there’s only evil and folly?” asks Adam. “That’s exactly what I mean,” Cathy responds(Steinbeck 322). Thus, Noel states, “Cathy’s evil nature is not derived from an inherent genetic flaw within her character, but from her choice not to recognize the empathy that she lacks”(Noël). Had she chosen to come to terms with her emotional deficiencies, perhaps Cathy’s life would have taken a different trajectory. 

This interpretation is supported by Cal’s character development. Cal, always the “bad” brother to Aron’s “good,” learns of his mother’s true nature and occupation–Adam had told the twins that their mother was dead–and fears that “badness” is in his genes. Driven by this fear to meet his mother, he visits Cathy at her brothel and asks her, “did you ever have the feeling like you were missing something? Like as if the others knew something you didn’t—like a secret they wouldn’t tell you”(Steinbeck 465)? He questions whether he, like his mother, is incapable of goodness, and whether he should simply give in to genetic predestination. Lee urges Cal to see that he is not his mother, and to accept the philosophy of timshel. 

Frustrated by Aron’s refusal to believe that their mother is an evil woman, Cal brings him to see Cathy. Destroyed by the disintegration of his image of his mother as pure and moral, Aron leaves his religious life and joins the army, where he is killed in combat. Cal’s cruelty thus indirectly leads to Aron’s death. For Adam, now an older man, Aron’s death is too much to handle. As Adam lies on his deathbed, Lee begs him to forgive Cal and give him his blessing, saying, “your son is marked with guilt out of himself…almost more than he can bear”(Steinbeck 602). In the last lines of the book, Adam utters the word timshel, telling Cal that he is the maker of his own life and his own choices. Unlike Cathy, who chose to see only the evil in herself and others, Cal must decide to see both the good and the evil in himself, and choose the good. 

Cathy Ames and the Archetype of the Femme Fatale 

From the moment we are introduced to Cathy, we are told that she is “a monster born into the world to human parents…born without kindness or the potential of conscience”(Steinbeck 72). Steinbeck writes that unlike other children, who lie through harmless storytelling or as an imaginatory practice, Cathy lies “to escape punishment, or work, or responsibility”(Steinbeck 74). When she is ten, Cathy’s mother catches her engaging in sexual exploration in the barn with two older boys, who are punished after Cathy claims they coerced her into the interaction. While Steinbeck uses these anecdotes to suggest Cathy’s innate lack of conscience, they seem to fall on the spectrum of relatively normal juvenile behavior. Many or most children lie for their own benefit, and childhood sexual exploration is common(Frayser). It seems only natural that a girl of ten would blame the older boys, knowing that her word would be trusted.

This is not to say that Cathy’s later crimes fall in the realm of normal, morally-driven action. Over the course of the novel, Cathy orchestrates the death of her parents, drives her school-teacher to suicide, shoots Adam, and murders the Madame who takes her under her wing, as well as multiple other people who threaten to unearth her past crimes. She seems to act only in her personal interest. Like the typical Femme Fatale, Cathy wields her sexuality as a weapon against men.

Though he describes Cathy as sexually desirable and almost irresistible to men, Steinbeck also emphasizes her snake-like features, alluding to the snake of the Garden of Eden, and Medusa, an early femme fatale and evil temptress. Steinbeck describes Cathy’s “little pointed tongue”(Steinbeck 135) which “flick[s] around her lips”(Steinbeck 173). Interestingly, in Greek Mythology, Athena transforms the beautiful Medusa into the hideous figure that we are familiar with as punishment, after Medusa is raped by Perseus in Athena’s temple. The female sexuality, even when unwanted and nonconsensual on the part of the female, is depicted as the ultimate evil. 

The Femme Fatale breaks the taboo on female sexuality by not only engaging in sex, but initiating sex, and using it to her pleasure and advantage. In “Representation of Women as Femmes Fatales: History, Development and Analysis,” Ayman Hassan Elhallaq cites several scholars’ feminist interpretations of the Femme Fatale. The Femme Fatale is characterized by “a refusal to submit to conventional rules controlling the man-woman relationship”(Elhallaq 85), and a desire for social mobility and financial independence. Eleanor Marx wrote that the Femme Fatale “reinvents herself, but only to attack the very domestic roles by cross-dressing, remaining unmarried, and calling for personal styles or professional pursuits”(Elhallaq 86). She “understands the oppressive nature of the social class system that keeps her subordinated”(86). 

Another main tenet of the Femme Fatale archetype, writes Elhallaq, is that she is “amoral or beyond the common tradition of morality”(85). Cathy fits these characterizations of the Femme Fatale to a tee. She is enticing to men, uses sex as a means of manipulation, and is motivated by socioeconomic advancement. Moreover, she is denied a conscience by Steinbeck, the metaphorical God of her world. Yet Steinbeck does not condemn female sexuality or desire for advancement outright: Faye, the madame of the Brothel whom Cathy eventually kills, is described as “the motherly type, big-breasted, big-hipped and warm”(Steinbeck 220). Before Cathy’s arrival, Faye’s whorehouse is “the cinnamon-scented kitchen of one’s grandmother”(220). Other female characters, such as Dessie and Olive Hamilton, are applauded for their ambition and success in their careers. 

Ultimately, it is not sexuality or ambition that make Cathy “evil”– it is her failure to confine her sexuality and ambition to what is socially acceptable of women. Most notably, Cathy rejects the woman’s role as wife and mother when she first attempts to abort the twins, then leaves after their birth. In contrast to Olive and Dessie, a school-teacher and a dressmaker, Cathy is drawn to prostitution, a much less acceptable occupation. Furthermore, the whorehouse that she runs after killing Faye is not the clean, nurturing house that Faye, a more feminine and motherly character, once ran. 

In “Cathy Trask, Monstrosity, and Gender-Based Fears in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden,” Claire Warnick writes that “Steinbeck’s characterization of the monstrous woman focuses on specific mid-century American cultural fears…those of emasculation and the potential flexibility of gender roles”(Warnick). Steinbeck’s is obsessed with male self-determination, and this male self-determination relies heavily on the upholding of gender roles and norms. While the Hamilton men toil to profit off their nearly barren land with determined spirits and inventive minds, the Hamilton women keep house, marry, choose appropriate professions, and raise sturdy boys and well-behaved girls. It is the division of labor and responsibility by sex that allows for the self-made man.

In one chapter, Steinbeck himself appears as a character. Steinbeck’s mother was Olive Hamilton, the daughter of Samuel Hamilton. When their uncle, Tom Hamilton, visits, young John Steinbeck and his sister Mary ask him how Mary can become a boy. Mary professes, “I want to be a boy. A girl’s all kissing and dolls. I don’t want to be a girl”(Steinbeck 279). After Tom tells her that she can not become a boy, Mary angrily stalks out of the room, leading Tom to remark, “she’s a girl alright”(Steinbeck 280). This anecdote is clearly intended to be light and amusing, but it suggests an essentialist view of gender that, while very typical for the time period, is dangerous when combined with negative portrayals of women as conniving and deceitful femme fatales. While the opinions of a character do not necessarily reflect the views of the author, sources on Steinbeck’s life suggest that he did in fact have strict views on how a woman should act. 

The Real and Imagined Women of John Steinbeck

While the Hamilton family is the most autobiographical element of East of Eden, Steinbeck also admitted to modeling the character of Cathy Ames on his second wife, Gwyn Conger. After five years of apparent verbal abuse from Steinbeck and infidelity on both sides, Conger asked for a divorce in 1948. Steinbeck began work on East of Eden that same year. 

Steinbeck fostered an intense hatred for Conger after their divorce, and demonized her role in their marital problems and separation. In A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia, it states that “[Conger’s] revelations of infidelity and not having loved him for years nearly broke Steinbeck”(Railsback & Meyer 353). Steinbeck also resented her demands for alimony payments after their divorce. Yet Steinbeck was himself unfaithful, and it seems reasonable that he should support Conger financially, considering he was a wealthy author, and she had taken full custody of both of their children, Thom and John IV.

Conger, who in her memoir describes Steinbeck’s “masochism, his kleptomania, his drinking, his womanizing and his sadism”(Conger 1), tells a different story of her marriage to Steinbeck. She writes, “by the end of our marriage, I had lost all of my identity. Then it was too late. He made me a subservient thing, and I was helpless to change it”(Conger 1). Similarly, in a personal interview to Audrey Lynch in 1971, Conger said, “my function was to take care of the house, answer the phone and keep the kids quiet while John stayed locked in his room writing”(Lynch). Even A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia, which seems somewhat biased towards Steinbeck, touches on Steinbeck’s oppressive views on the roles of the woman, wife, and mother, saying, “John wanted the feminine homemaker whose first concern would be his own well-being, whereas Gwyn wanted a career and to control John”(Railsback & Meyer 353).

Ultimately, Conger’s crime in Steinbeck’s eyes was her failure to play the role of loving and obedient wife. Just as Cathy cheats on Adam, Conger cheated on Steinbeck, threatening his masculinity. Of course, Steinbeck’s own infidelity goes unmentioned in much of the writing on his marriage to Conger. Just as Cathy leaves Adam, Conger left Steinbeck, renouncing her role as wife and claiming an agency in the relationship that Steinbeck clearly did not want her to have. In East of Eden, Cathy rejects her roles as both wife and mother. Although Gwyn maintained custody of Thom and John IV, Steinbeck may have seen her leaving the marriage as a betrayal of the institution of the nuclear family, and thus as a betrayal of their two sons. Through Cathy’s obsessive and violent climb to power in Faye’s brothel, and her emotionless manipulation of Adam and other characters, Steinbeck demonizes Gwyn’s natural desires for “a career” and “control”(Railsback & Meyer 353) in a household that delegated her to mothering and cleaning.

Cathy’s– and, indirectly, Conger’s– evil and unfeminine qualities are emphasized through contrast with the qualities of Abra, the second-most prominent woman in East of Eden. Abra is the love interest of Aron, and, after Aron’s death towards the end of the novel, Caleb. Throughout the novel, Abra personifies Steinbeck’s ideal of the perfect woman: Steinbeck wrote in one of his daily letters that Abra represented “the strong female principle of good”(Journal of a Novel 185). Lee describes her as having “the loveliness of woman, and the courage—and the strength—and the wisdom”(Steinbeck 573). Steinbeck repeatedly attributes her goodness of character and wisdom to some innate womanly quality, writing, “her feminine mind knew that such things [supporting Aron’s turn towards religion] were necessary but unimportant”(Steinbeck 451). When commits himself to a life of celibacy, Abra is supportive yet secretly hopes that “this phase would pass”(Steinbeck 451). This reaction demonstrates that Abra is sexual yet in control of her sexuality. She is principled yet also willing to yield to her man’s principles, and her so-called feminine wisdom allows her to distinguish between what is important and unimportant and to understand the ever-changing nature of life. 

Abra at times acts as a mother figure to both Cal and Aron. When Aron and Abra play pretend as children, Aron asks her to pretend to be his mother. Steinbeck writes, “She put a cooing tone in her voice and said, ‘Come, my baby, put your head in Mother’s lap. Come, my little son. Mother will hold you’”(Steinbeck 424). In this passage we see that Abra instinctively settles into the role of the mother, and senses Aron’s desire to be held and soothed.

The dichotomy between Abra’s and Cathy’s characters is typical of Steinbeck. Scholars of Steinbeck have noted his tendency to depict women at polar extremes, often using the tropes of “the mother and the whore”(Warnick 21). In The Indestructible Woman in the Works of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck, Mimi Reisel Gladstein writes that these three canonical authors epitomize the inability of many American male authors to “allow full humanity to their female characters”(Gladstein vii). In East of Eden, women are either profoundly nurturing (Abra, the Hamilton women) or profoundly lacking in the ability to nurture and love (Cathy, Adam’s mother). 

Interestingly, while Steinbeck holds Abra and her fellow “indestructible women” to an unattainable ideal, he simultaneously condemns Aron’s idealization of Abra. He writes, “of Abra he made his immaculate dream and, having created her, fell in love with her”(Steinbeck 524). Abra recognizes both the good and the bad inside herself, and comes to see that Aron’s love for her is really a love for an ideal that he has created. Following this realization, she begins to gravitate towards Cal, with whom she can share her imperfections. Steinbeck thus rejects the idealization of the perfect woman as morally pure, yet upholds the idealization of the nurturing and tempered household wife and mother.

The Ethics of East of Eden

Whether we read Cathy as a sociopath without moral agency or as a woman who has actively chosen evil, it is indisputable that her characterization is not flattering. Steinbeck makes a small, and insufficient, effort to minimize the demonization of Cathy, writing, “perhaps we can’t understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water? Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong”(Steinbeck 132). Based on accounts from his three wives and other close companions, it seems that Steinbeck surely had such a pond. 

The ethics of the femme fatale trope are complicated. On the one hand, the femme fatale ruptures gender norms. She is often strong and cunning, unlike the many weak-willed and helpless damsels-in-distress who populate American literature. Yet she “simultaneously fit[s] neatly into those long standing parables about the temptations of evil women”(Moss), and the harmful depiction of women as untrustworthy and different from men on an essential level.

Of course, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with depicting an evil female character. “While a female antagonist is not inherently problematic, Cathy’s misogynistic representation of the female antagonist is detrimental to the feminist agenda”(20), writes Bianca Saputra. The lack of nuance and humanity in Cathy’s portrayal suggests Steinbeck’s “animosity toward neurotic, dominating, manipulative, conscienceless women, terms that are indicative of much of his postdivorce attitude towards American women”(Saputra 20). This damaging portrayal of women could have been avoided by a more concerted effort to humanize Cathy’s character on Steinbeck’s part, or simply by the inclusion of other prominent female characters to counteract the effects of Cathy’s portrayal. The problem with Cathy’s characterization is that Cathy is the only important female character, in a sea of male characters whose every subtlety and emotional nuance is explored. Abra, the next most prominent female character, serves mostly to further demonize Cathy and to facilitate the growth of Aron’s and Cal’s characters. 

Both the time period during which East of Eden was published and the time period in which it is set were characterized by instability of gender roles and the strong patriarchal figure, and rapid economic and social change(Rabinovitch-Fox). In the 1950s, when East of Eden was published, marriage and birth-rates skyrocketed, and the role of the woman was placed firmly in the household. At the same time, American men had returned from World War II to women who had taken on leadership of the family and filled what had before been men’s jobs, creating a threat of emasculation and shifting gender norms.

The story in East of Eden spans roughly from Adam’s birth in 1862 to his death in around 1915, focusing heavily on the second half of this period. This span of time also saw huge changes in the roles of men and women, as the Women’s Suffrage Movement grew and the first women’s bloomers were introduced. Furthermore, the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 19th century, and the rapid modernization that characterized the first half of the 20th century, threatened the American ideal of the self-made man living off his land, and the flourishing of the small business. In this social and economic climate, some writers “presented the femme fatale as the evil avatar of modernization and industrialism”(Suwabe 7)– and I would add emasculation to this list.

Cathy’s villainy is an articulation of the cultural fears of white men. The very qualities in Cathy that Steinbeck disparages are similar to those that the contemporaneous society respected and lauded in men– she has a “tooth-and-claw determination to survive regardless of the emotional cost to [herself] or others”(Meyer 186). Considering the social context which championed self-determinism and individualism, would Cathy be received the same way if she was a man? I think not. While a man with the same qualities and behaviors as Cathy would still be read as a villain– the murder is hard to ignore–the cunning narcissism attributed to Cathy would be read completely differently in a male character. Just as an iron-fisted female boss is a “bitch” while a similar male boss is seen as commanding and competent, Cathy’s reception suffers from her womanhood. 

To return to Lee’s reminder that the story of Cain and Abel was written “for and by a shepherd people”(Steinbeck 269), it is clear that Cathy’s portrayal, as well as the portrayal of lesser female characters such as Abra, catered to a population that had traditional ideas on womanhood and the appropriate roles of the woman. By villainizing Cathy, the one female character who defies feminine norms and rejects the roles of wife and mother, Steinbeck added fuel to the harmful ethics of feminine conduct that disciplined the bodies and regulated the lives of women in the 1950s. If we accept Lee’s statement that the story of Cain and Abel was written for and by a people who valued the shepherd over the tiller, the story consequently reaffirmed and fed the pro-shepherd biases of its readers. Similarly, East of Eden, a novel that is worshipped on an almost biblical level in literary circles, affirms oppressive concepts of sex and gender roles through its condemnation of atypical femininity. While Steinbeck was certainly a master of the written word, and East of Eden is and should remain a valuable part of the literary canon, we would be remiss to undertake a critical analysis of the novel without consideration of its ethical implications on the gender politics of its era.