호주, 미국, 카나다, 영국, 브라질, 이민, 원주민 경험: East of Eden - Let Cathy Ames Be a Monster

Let Cathy Ames Be a Monster | The New Yorker

Let Cathy Ames Be a Monster
In the captivating new “East of Eden,” only one note rings false: the softening of John Steinbeck’s most evil character.
By Alexandra SchwartzOctober 3, 2026

Photograph from Everett

Cathy Ames, the villain of John Steinbeck’s novel “East of Eden,” is not what E. M. Forster, or anyone else, would call a round character, the kind who grows and changes over the course of a story. She is crafty, cunning, manipulative, murderous—evil through and through. What made her that way? Nothing. Her badness, Steinbeck tells us, was baked in from the start. “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,” he writes. Cathy observes other people much as Steinbeck observes her: coldly, analytically, with the fascination of the scientist for the specimen squirming under a microscope. She has no empathy; she has no guilt. If she had been born in the distant past, Steinbeck writes, “a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil” and burned as a witch. Today, we’d call her a sociopath. That term appeared in the DSM-I in 1952, the same year that “East of Eden” was published. As it was, Steinbeck simply called her “a monster,” produced by “a malformed soul.”

When we meet Cathy, it is late in the nineteenth century, and she is a little girl, the only child of a well-enough-to-do family in a Massachusetts town. Her father, who runs a tannery, suspects that his daughter is different from other children, and this makes him uneasy, but he can’t say exactly what the difference is. Cathy is beautiful, with a heart-shaped face and golden hair. She has the features of a doll: tiny lobeless ears; tiny rosebud mouth; tiny hands and breasts; tiny feet “with fat insteps almost like little hoofs.” Girls copy her; boys follow her around. Cathy lies, but she is good at it and is never caught. She wants power, and she learns, very early, that the surest way to get it is to exploit other people’s interest in sex. One spring morning when Cathy is ten, her mother is hanging the washing on the line when she hears giggles coming from the family’s carriage house. It can’t be Cathy, because Cathy never giggles:

The double doors were closed. The murmur of voices came from the inside, but she could not make out Cathy’s voice. She made a quick stride and pulled the doors open and the bright sun crashed inside. She froze, mouth open, at what she saw. Cathy lay on the floor, her skirts pulled up. She was naked to the waist, and beside her two boys about fourteen were kneeling. The shock of the sudden light froze on them too. Cathy’s eyes were blank with terror. Mrs. Ames knew the boys, knew their parents.

This extraordinary scene is like something from a vampire movie: the blast of sanitizing light that stops the predators as they descend, terribly, on their innocent victim. Cathy can’t move; her hands are bound with rope. Later, she can’t speak; the doctor says that she’s in shock. Yet the boys proclaim their innocence. Cathy came up with the plan, they say. She made them pay her five cents each. She tied her own hands. The town is outraged by their lies. The boys are whipped by their horrified fathers and sent to a house of correction.

And they are the lucky ones. Before long, Cathy has racked up a nice little body count. When she is fourteen, the Latin teacher at her high school shows up to the Ames’ house late at night, banging desperately on the door, lovesick and demanding to speak to Cathy’s father. Mr. Ames turns him away, and the next day the teacher is found dead in a church, having shot himself in the head. A couple of years later, Cathy declares that she is leaving school, absconds for Boston, and is retrieved by her father, who gives her a reluctant whipping. After that, she is the model of a dutiful daughter. She helps her mother in the kitchen; she attaches herself to her father, who proudly teaches her all about his tanning business. He gives her the combination to the company safe and is proud when she remembers it on the first try. One night, she opens the safe, takes everything in it, and burns down the family home, with her parents locked inside. In the carriage house, she stages a scene of an apparent struggle between herself and some nameless aggressor, complete with a hair ribbon splashed with the blood of a slaughtered chicken.

“East of Eden” is not a book about women. It is a book about men and their troubled bonds to one another. In it, Steinbeck set out to retell the Biblical story of Cain and Abel—what he called, in a letter to his editor, “perhaps the greatest story of all.” At the center of his version is Adam Trask, the son of a Connecticut farmer and Civil War veteran, who survives a motherless childhood, ten years of queasy service in the cavalry massacring Indians, and a period of train-hopping, vagrancy, and work as part of a Southern chain gang. By the time he returns home, his father is dead; his half brother, Charles, tends the farm now. Love runs between the men. So does an undercurrent of rage. In their youth, Charles, jealous of their father’s love for Adam, nearly killed his brother. Now they have established a truce, but Adam is restless. He talks about getting out, going West. His chance arrives when a woman shows up at their door, bloody and battered. This is Cathy. She has been living as a kept woman, the mistress to a pimp who operates a local circuit of brothels. That man fell hopelessly in love with the fantasy of her; when she drunkenly showed her true self, he beat her within an inch of her life.

Charles is no stranger to whores, but pure-hearted Adam immediately succumbs to the woman without a past upon whom he can project his own dreams and wishes. Cathy will be his wife. They will move to California, to the Salinas Valley, and plant the land to make a modern Eden. They will have children—two sons, twins. And then Cathy, who has told Adam that she has no desire to live in California or to stay with him once her babies are born, will abruptly take over the authorship of their story, shooting him in the arm and vanishing into thin air.

“East of Eden” is a powerfully strange novel, its high, allegorical melodrama intercut with amiable episodes of historical realism: dances at the country schoolhouse, descriptions of what it was like to ride in a primitive airplane. Steinbeck wrote the book in part to account for his own origin story; the tale of the Trasks is braided with that of the Hamiltons, the Irish clan who were Steinbeck’s kin on his mother’s side. But the novel’s bigger project is to give the origin story of all mankind. There is something anti-, indeed almost pre-modern about its preoccupations and methods, a quality of which Steinbeck was fully aware. “The writers of today, even I, have a tendency to celebrate the destruction of the spirit and god knows it is destroyed often enough,” he wrote to his editor as he was drafting the book. “But the beacon thing is that sometimes it is not.” He wanted his tale, like its inspiration in the Book of Genesis, to be “the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate”—and, ultimately, of the good triumphing over the bad.

Cathy represents the dark half of those dichotomies. Her sons by Adam, Caleb and Aron—note the not so subtle repetition of Cain and Abel’s initials across the generations—will have to wrestle with her legacy as they become men. The novel has a humanist moral, which appears in the form of the Hebrew word that Steinbeck gives as timshel, used by God to address Cain before he murders his brother. The King James Bible translates the word as “thou shalt rule,” as in “thou shalt rule over sin,” but Steinbeck, through one of his characters, interprets it instead as “thou mayest,” a more empowered, if more ambiguous, gloss. Each of us, he says, has the ability to choose to reject sin; nothing is preordained. In this way, Steinbeck performs a kind of reversal in emphasis of John Milton’s famous line, in “Paradise Lost,” that God made mankind “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.” In Steinbeck’s postlapsarian world, the fall is the given; the glory is in the possibility of prevailing over it. Naturally, this doesn’t apply to Cathy, who is singularly damned from the jump.

All of this would seem to make “East of Eden” an unusual candidate for a modern adaptation. Yet Zoe Kazan, who has turned the book into a sumptuous seven-episode miniseries on Netflix, professes the novel to be one of her favorites, and she has put Cathy, played, as an adult, by Florence Pugh, at the center of her adaptation. Kazan does not want us to think that Cathy is a monster, and you can understand why. Instead of a villain, we get an antihero with the kind of traumatic backstory that justifies her descent into a life of murder and prostitution. The scene with the boys in the carriage house and the cleverly self-knotted rope is dispensed with—a touch too psychotic. The Latin teacher is turned from a delusional, manipulated sap into a predator who tries to sink his hooks into a fourteen-year-old girl and gets his rightful comeuppance. And, crucially, when Cathy is whipped by her father, it is not for running away, but for being a temptress and a slut. “You’re my property!” he screams before he lashes into her back. “You’ve defiled my property!” Steinbeck’s timid father has become a tyrant, less a bamboozled patriarch than a snarling representative of the patriarchy itself. When the fire at the house goes up, the message seems to be: burn the whole thing down.

It has become somewhat de rigueur in contemporary adaptations of older material to underline the fact that women in the nineteenth century had even fewer rights than do women today. Greta Gerwig, in her 2019 take on Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” had Amy March, also played by Pugh, deliver a speech to Timothée Chalamet’s Laurie to helpfully inform him that, when she married, her money and children would become her husband’s. Here, a similar strategy is used to explain why Cathy, after shooting Adam and leaving his ranch, moves to Salinas, changes her name to Kate, and goes to work as a whore in the employ of a certain Madam Faye (played, fabulously, by Martha Plimpton). “The only true freedom in this world is economic freedom,” Pugh says, in voice-over, as we see Cathy assessing herself in the mirror of her new room, mingling with the other girls in the parlor, and performing her bedroom duties. “She could marry into wealth, of course, but those assets would belong to her husband as surely as she does. No, there are only two ways for a woman to acquire her money. She can be fortunate enough to have a rich relative die. Or she can own and run her own brothel.”

Kazan’s “East of Eden” is a rich, captivating work, a judicious, intelligent refashioning of its material (the Trask half, that is—the Hamiltons have mostly been cut, which is fine), and well worth watching. But this girl-boss-of-the-brothel speech rings false. Cathy is already well-versed in murder by the time she crosses paths with the Trask brothers; would it really be so hard for her to imagine killing the besotted Adam, whose father has left him a very wealthy man, and taking his money? (As it is, she never even bothers to divorce him, and, despite their estrangement, her marriage makes her far richer than any brothel ever could.) More than money, what Cathy wants is power and control, and to get it she returns to the lessons of the carriage house. At Madame Faye’s, Cathy becomes a kind of sui-generis dominatrix, skilled in the exquisite torture of her clients. When Cathy connives to turn Madame Faye’s brothel into her own—you can guess the method that she uses to take over the poor woman’s role—the house becomes known as a sordid place. As madam, Cathy can rule over men and women alike. She takes to collecting photographs of her esteemed clientele in various poses of bondage and humiliation, for potential blackmail; it is the having of the pictures, rather than their use, that you feel satisfies her. She feeds off the ugliness in others.

Still, for all the pat speeches and the tedious foundational-trauma business, you can understand why Kazan wanted to soften her interpretation of Cathy just a bit. In some ways, her reading is more Steinbeckian than Steinbeck’s; she seems to want to extend the promise of timshel to the one character he excluded from it. And, in spite of some other questionable choices (a kind of sentimentalized lost-love story between Cathy and Charles, who is played by a strangely cast Mike Faist, too delicate and sensitive for the role of the lug), we do still get her exhilarating, egotistical wickedness, that tantalizing mix of Tom Ripley and Undine Spragg. All of this is good news for admirers of Pugh, especially those who cannot forget her turn as Charlie—the headstrong young actress turned Mossad spy in “The Little Drummer Girl,” Park Chan-wook’s 2018 miniseries adaptation of John le Carré’s thriller—and have longed to see her at the center of a work outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Cathy is a sort of actress, too—an impersonator, like Ripley, who takes on the form that will make her hardest to truly see. When you glimpse her next to Christopher Abbott’s sad-eyed Adam, the apparent picture of a damsel in distress, you can’t wait to watch her eat him alive.

When she does, Adam is nursed back to health not by some other woman, but by the unexpected figure of his Chinese American servant, Lee, played in Kazan’s series by Hoon Lee. One of the shocks of Steinbeck’s novel, which is not exactly unmarked by the biases of its day, is his surprising and sympathetic portrait of this marginalized man, who begins the novel speaking a stereotypical pidgin English that turns out to be merely a form of disguise. The unconventional household that Lee comes to run for Adam, in which he serves as a sort of non-romantic domestic partner and primary parent—a mother, really—is sustained by his grit and wisdom. It is Lee who raises the twins when Adam, incapacitated by his grief at the loss of Cathy, falls into a lengthy depressive stupor, and Lee who articulates for him, and for us, the redeeming concept of timshel. Kazan, along with the writer Alexander Chee, has fleshed out Lee’s dislocation from the Chinese world to which he doesn’t entirely belong and can’t really return, and given him some justified flashes of anger at the obliviousness of the well-meaning, morally upright, yet astonishingly blinkered white man in whose life he finds himself permanently implicated. Like Cathy, his foil, Lee has learned to impersonate the character others expect him to be, and, like her, he decides that it is finally worth the risk to expose himself to the world. What is revealed is a very different kind of soul. ♦

Alexandra Schwartz has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2016, and is a co-host of the magazine’s Critics at Large podcast.

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Andy Paras

Book: Everyone can choose between good and evil — except Cathy, she’s just evil.

Paul Cello

I don't find it "softening". I find it an expansion of what constitutes "evil". And what evil might be beyond the boogeyman or "the devil". Zoe Kazan did a marvelous job with this adaptation and Florence Pugh is brilliant as usual.

Leslie Bennett Stahl

I enjoyed the series but Steinbeck's Cathy needs to be taken with a grain of salt. She is modeled after Steinbeck's second wife who left him because he was basically a misogynistic, angry, tortured man who treated women terribly. I'm glad the series softened her and gave her a grain of backstory, something Steinbeck couldn't find it within his blackened, resentful heart to give her.

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Teresa Lischka

Nothing soft or heroic about the character. Some backstory included in the adaptation but it doesn't go into depth nor does it explain or excuse her choices.. she's still pure monster. The series was brilliant.

Ashley Hall

I didn’t feel this softened her. I felt it gave her depth, added to her allure, made it more emotional for the audience and also made her relationship/outcome with Adam sadder. She stayed pretty harsh the whole time. The backstory was good, and the ending scene with young Cathy/Alice was beautiful/sad.

Pam Ilnick Gersh

Nope. This was a human adaptation of his story where both Cathy and Adam are extremely flawed human beings and the children pay the price. The character that Hoon Lee plays is the arc of the story.

Sheila Fields

Psychopathy can be acquired, congenital or both. Understanding her childhood doesn't negate/soften-- it just explains.

Brian Alnutt

Interesting character definition: this is a Bible metaphor and she's supposed to be Satan, thus pure evil. But...in personal letters Steinbeck made it clear she was based on his ex-wife for whom he had a DEEP grudge.

Branwen Raven

Yes, let’s liberate women from the patriarchal religious impugned worldview that women should be inherently good and if they aren’t it must be from satanic forces and not from the men that abuse, repress and seek to control them.

Carol Christenson Schilling

I don’t see it as a softening of her character at all; she still is a complete sociopath. I see it as an explanation for her being the sociopath. The ramifications of childhood sexual abuse can be Cathy. A child, even if an actual sociopath at that young age, does not seduce multiple men to sexually abuse her.

Bri Harvey

They didn’t soften her. They gave her depth. She can be both a monster and nuanced.

Johanna Sihler

A psychopath is not always evil. There is just no capacity of compassion or empathy.

So no shame or guilt and no fear. Ultimatively free?

No. Cannot leave the structure of this charakter.

This looks evil in our eyes In their’s it’s normal.

Jennifer Jones

Nature versus nurture turns into nature AND nurture in this adaptation. It also asks the question around “Thou mayest” as it applies to gender, generational wealth, YTness or the adjacent YTness of some, and how “Thou mayest” holds layers of accessibility when one is a woman living under the Patriarchy.

Janet Perrella D'Alesandro

Why can’t different versions coexist? Let the reader choose the original if that’s all they want. I thought the series was excellent while the book will forever also be a masterwork.

Nicole Bell

I thought the same thing after watching the series. They made her character much more empathetic with the additional back story. In the book, she was just a bad seed.

David Kimbrough

Hello Alexandra Schwartz, this is the same dilemma that every film adaptation of a book faces. What works in print may not work on film. What worked in 1956 may not work in 2026. We just went through this exact struggle with the recent adaptation of The Odyssey. The problem in this case is that of motivation. Why does this character do the things that she does? Mr, Steinbeck provides no motivation for her actions, she is simply “evil”. What does that mean? The problem is that it is unclear how that motivates her actions. Mr. Steinbeck was trying to construct a sort biblical tale of good and evil with Cathy standing in for the latter. There might have been some resonance in the mid-1950s for that sort of black-and-white morality tale but it is unclear that a contemporary audience would find that sort of naive dualism satisfying. I think that this is more true in cinema. Reading a book one might put it down and cogitate on subtle nuances. In a movie, time is limited and very linear, one must keep the story moving. An anti-character devoid of motive is a difficult thing to convey in a book but it is fatal to the impatient demands of cinematic storytelling. Staying true to the opaque 1950s character in a movie in the first quarter of the 21st century is not good business.

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Andrea Casey

I loved the series and the book, but the Cathy in the book was pure evil, I found myself having a little teeny bit of empathy for the Cathy in the series.

Emily Seeley

lol the amount of times I said “oh my god that wretched woman!” out loud hopefully will assure everyone that Cathy is still a monster in this adaptation.

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Diana Daniel

Book Cathy gets a TON of backstory. Her childhood, the boys in the barn, the teacher who shows up at her house that one night, the house fire

🔥

Johann Weidemann

It only seems like a "softening" of Carhy Ames' character, because times have changed, and so have people. Her original crimes are so much more prevalent now. Maybe the softening lies with the Society of today.

Nancy Hamilton

I've read EoE twice and have always thought something was missing in the description of Cathy. Adam, Charles, Aaron, and Caleb all do terrible things, but we understand their motivation in the context of cruelty done to them. Cathy? Nope! She's just a bad'un.

Elizabeth Rodriguez

I’m a bit perplexed. I just watched the series but have not read the book. Pure psychopathy with no reason I believe, is exceedingly rare. That’s the bad seed theory. In the series she says that as a woman she had 2 choices in life: be subservient ( and potentially a victim) or be in control. She chooses control which connects to the idea of Temsuh (?). Everyone, despite their circumstances has a choice to be good or evil. So giving her a backstory just makes her motivation clearer. Otherwise who would “pure evil” commit suicide? Pure evil has no conscience to be tortured by. Steinbeck perhaps didn’t truly understand that women have the same psychological agency as men.

Brenda Wood

In real life? All of these things can be true for a person at the same time. People aren’t one or two dimensional. Zoe Kazan didn’t take away from Cathy Ames at all. If anything, she gave the character more depth within her story.

Sandra Hare

What interesting philosophical thought and discussion this series has caused .

Jessica Schell Steinman

I haven’t read the book, but plan to soon. Just curious….when she mentioned that the happiness of someone important to her was the reason that she was in that line of work while interviewing for the pros. position….she was simply referring to herself, right?

Karen Stromhall

Cathy’s sociopathic tendencies were a result of her early childhood sexual and physical abuse. Like she said ‘I learnt my craft in my crib’. I truly felt for her.

A difficult time in American history - a very white patriarchal society.

Brilliant acting by Florence Pugh.

Linda Holman Bentley

I watched it. She is clearly a monster. Even monsters have back stories.

Carol Davis Koeller

There’s a lot in the book that gets glossed over. We don’t really know what happens when Cathy disappears into the woods when she was a girl, and when abra and Aron go under the willow tree (which wasn’t depicted in the Netflix adaptation) there seemed to be some symbolism there

Tiffany Way

Totally agree! Series was so enjoyable, that I let the softening that was slipped in at the end slide, but it was not lost on me that this was not Steinbeck’s intent, Cathy was born a monster

Tavares Ellis

She was a monster the same way Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger is viewed as a monster

Gina DiGiovine Goodwin

I don’t think she’s softened at all. In fact, Cathy on screen seems worse to me than Cathy in the book. However, it has been many years since I read the book.

Christina Marigold Houen

I think the rationalisation of Cathy's character is false. There are, as Steinbeck says through the narrator's voice and the voices of Lee and others, people who lack the capacity for empathy, conscience and care. As far as I'm aware, psychopathy can be born into a person. Steinbeck calls it evil, we call it psychopathy. It's not naive, it's true. The audience or readers are not meant to feel empathy for her. They may feel pity at the end, when she realises what she's lost, but motive doesn't come into her psychology. She sees the dark side of everything. Some people do that. We've had some famous pyschopaths in our century.

Barbara Clarke

She has been called ‘the most evil woman in literature’.

Chelsea Hand

Ted Bundy was abused, Ted Kaczynski was tortured, John Wayne Gacy was beat and emotionally abused… doesn’t make them softer. It’s a combination of nature and nurture that creates the worst monsters.

Carole Shaw

Steinbeck's book is a masterpiece. You can change whatever you like for this brilliant series but it's your interpretation not his.

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Jill Bertodatti Condon

He says there are dime people born without a soul. It’s Kathy. The whole reason he describes evil is to say some people are just evil

Tanya Gordon

Steinbeck did not give Cathy/ Kate a backstory. I know plenty of women who did not experience an idyllic life. They did not evolve into a Cathy/ Kate. I wish Steinbeck's son had prevailed in his legal fight. He would never had allowed them to play with his father's prose! Steinbeck's stepdaughter is overseeing the estate. She gave permission for this adaptation. I enjoyed watching with the exception of them trying to redeem Cathy/ Kate.

Bree Garc

Perfectly fine seeing her through the lens of a woman.

Maggie Faircloth

I dont think a woman having agency is evil. She didnt want to move, she didnt want children. She wasnt respected so she left. An absent parent is better than one who stays and is resentful of or hateful to the child. She clearly had some deep psychological issues, and she made choices. Obviously the whole slow murder thing was pretty evil, but MOST of the discussion i see around Kathy focus on leaving her husband and children.

Jane Oh

Always causes, without them there are no effects…

Paula Hillman

This was a really good series. I did not feel the softening of Cathy. She was momentarily touched by Aaron and then her guilt did her in.

Kaylie Weaver

I’m not a psychologist, but I think Kathy developed some type of personality disorder from the trauma she experienced as a child. To go with the bible reference, god doesn’t create us to be evil from the start, it’s a developed character trait. If Kathy was pure evil she wouldn’t have shown signs of regret or remorse at the end. She wouldn’t have killed herself because she wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with her actions.

María Greenberg

I think she was evil, but it could not be obvious, otherwise how do you explain that people who met her fall in love with her.

The only moment that shows a genuine pain is when she sees her son Aaron. And I think it is because he saw her as what she was. She always tried to justify herself. Evil people usually think they are righteous.

Mujtaba Rashid

Cathy Ames is villain with a V!

Sara Jane

I’m gonna hold your hand when I say this, nothing Cathy does in the series is soften or excused by the addition of her back story.

Spoiler alert: she still told Adam to throw those babies in a well. Any prior abuse she endured does not excuse that.

Susan Dinicola

I still found her to be a monster. Having a back story of abuse doesn’t change things too much for me. Yes, maybe her trauma brought her there but isn’t that just as frightening as someone just “born that way?” Either way, it’s incredibly frightening

JD Williams

Thank god somebody talked about her sympathized characterization in the very good limited series as a director’s rhetorical choice.

Of course The New Yorker is the incisive one!

Hire me!

I taught it for years, and though Steinbeck’s initial Chapter 8 characterization of CathyKate is as monstrous, his revision (bc it’s a first person narration) in Chapter 17 is no less confounding.

Edwards, Charles, Joe, Samuel, Lee, and Cal can “see” some part of Cathy, but it’s Adam’s neverending goodness, dumbassery, blindness, and naïveté that brings us back to the choice of having a choice over evil. As concluded by the Steinbeck narration in Chapter 34.

7 hour limited series vs 26-hour book, so of course its culled. But I wanted more from the Hamilton family, especially Tom.

Kate is as evil as Tom Hardy in The Revenant or Anton Chigurh or Commodus or Amy Dunne.

Meg Heubeck

I really liked this telling. It was creepy and suspenseful.

Kathi Marshall

Cathy is a monster in the adaptation.

Denise Fleming Deutschman

Goodness, Florence was soft?

Elle Evans

I dont think it softened it. What it gained was a complexity to the character rather than just a simplistic tale of an evil monster wrecking havoc. The complexity elevated the story into a truly captivating and haunting brilliance.

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Beth Beach

Loved the series. Florence Pugh is excellent at her portrayal of the main character Cathy.

Holly Gray

I totally disagree - she held an incredible tension of opposites which rings much more compelling than a flat evil monster with no depth or familiarity. I think it gave us a look at evil in a brilliant way without softening its impact.

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Elena Lee McCune

I was very ambivalent at first (thought I loved the performance) due to some of the changes to Cathy and the backstory. I grew to love the adaptation more and more. To me it "excuses" nothing! She is a sociopath without guilt, without the capacity to love, and she murders, and manipulates everyone she meets. I do hate it when I see a few "using" it to excuse her. They still have the "monster" quote at the beginning even. To me, it just added depth. Most with horrible abuse do not become murders.

Renee Yniguez-Cotton

Loved the series. Cathy is a monster. Florence Pugh was captivating and she came across as an unfeeling woman for almost the entire series, eventually falling deeper into madness. However, Pugh's incredibly expressive face showed glimpses of unexpected emotion allowing the viewer to see a glimpse of what she could have been instead of the evil person she was.

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Daniel Wippermann

The fact Cathy shed tears after meeting both of her sons was actually a bit cheesy. But up until that point – a great show!

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Sheryl Morris

Nobody’s born all bad. Imho. Leaving out back stories is what might be called “monstrous”.

Sarah Capper

I think the history of violence perpetrated against her provided some key insight to understanding where she ended up.. and this is true to life - most women who commit murder have a history of violence perpetrated against them at some point. I think it just provides a more real life lens to the character.

Kerri Bratcher

Expanding the story to explain her personality doesn't take away or excuse her evil actions though. If the moral of the story is that people have the capacity to choose between doing good or evil, why would she be an exception?

Rebecca Nicholson

It rings more true to life. Most sociopaths and serial killers have some kind of traumatic past

Jennifer Shafer

I think it was a very timely portrait of women's bleak options, trauma and cpstd. Of course, Kazan's granddaughter has a different understanding than her grandfather and Steinbeck. Misogyny is very distorting. Art interprets.

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Susan Perkins

Plenty of sociopaths aren’t necessarily evil though. I think the backstory gives the reason she tipped from just being cold and self-serving to being evil. Most psychological disorders show up due to both genetic and environmental factors. we know more about these things now, a character just being ‘evil’ is too one dimensional.

Theresa Huxford Millikan

I agree, Steinbeck meant for her to just simply be evil. We can still guess as to how she became that way. The series is a very interesting view of how that happened. In the end it does not matter , like in the scene with Cal and Lee. Whatever you do it will be you that does it! That doesn’t mean there is no forgiveness. Timshel is supposed to signify one’s ability to move on and do what is right.

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María Alicia

코폴라의 드라큘라를 떠올리게 했어요

See original (Spanish)

Laaleen Sukhera

It wasn’t softening. You just find her fascinatingly flawed.

Nic Ramsay

I disagree- I felt the tv adaptation made Cathy more nuanced and believable as a character for me. Florence Pugh was simply amazing 🤩 In the book I found Cathy to be one-dimensional, just pure evil which didn’t ring true to me.

Mags Zielinska

It's not softening, it's the fact everyone can't help but love Florence Pugh.

Robin Downey

I haven't read the book, but the series is chilling.

Lindsay Hamilton

The moments when she wept (no spoilers) in one episode didn’t ring true. Other than this I saw no softening.

Matthew Jensen

I was sceptical about this portrayal but often, what works in a book does not work on screen, Cathy was given a different personality and back story for the miniseries and it was mostly successful, I don't know if I would have made the same choice, but it didn't damage the story.

Barbara Lee Burke-Bates

I agree with this assessment; she was a sociopsychopath as she is portrayed by Steinbeck and one of the most perfect presentations of this particular personality disorder according to the DSM/Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI).

Laur Pasquaflora

Not much softening, she is portrayed as a horrible monster, IMHO. I’m gonna read the book, and I DREAD EXPERIENCING a worse monstrous Cathy.

Erin Frizelle

I think the whole story is overly tragic and a bit unrealistic in that sense. I couldn’t warm to Cathy in the Netflix series at all.

Kathy Shore

The 1981 mini series more closely followed the book, and in my view,,was better.

Kala Nayar

Absolutely gripping just as the book was which I read years ago. Cathy chose evil. Everyone has the right to choose between good and bad.

Dom Ross

East of Eden was wonderful storytelling - captivating!

Kristen Prestridge

It seems that Cathy is written as an evil monster so that we better understand the struggle of Cal to be “good” when he feels so “bad.” We know the evil that has been passed down to him through his mother. In Kazan’s adaptation, Cal watches as his father breaks down after receiving the news that Cathy/Kate has died. Seeing that his father still loves her despite her evil helps Cal to eventually accept himself for who he is and, hopefully, make better choices in his future, to free him and allow him to embrace timshel. Thank you Zoe Kazan for a brilliant and beautiful adaptation.

Riz Santos

the book is filled with complex, morally grey male characters and when it comes to the female protagonist, he's trying to convince you that she is purely and simply evil. it's not only misogynist but also boring as fuck to think like that. cathy is a complex female with a dark side, and yes, she's evil, but there's reasons and feelings behind that – such as the pressure of being a young woman with great aspirations of power in a world of patriarchy. honestly the series is somehow even better.

Elena Praticò

not so soft according to me

Mel Bryan

Wow, most of you have no mental health background at all. I would not say she is a sociopath. She showed remorse for her sons and there was contradiction in the storyline. I do not believe she had no remorse at all. She has extreme CPTSD and head trauma. She later in the movie had other things that caused her to hear voices. There is not enough medically to know if she had a medical cause for any of this. As a Therapist for 30 years she was not a sociopath. True sociopaths, especially females are very rare. She definitely has mental health issues but I would say they fall under Trauma and brain injury along with substance abuse. Medical advancement was not able to do MRIs of her brain or her spine so we could not say what was happening there. I would imagine a lot after she was assaulted.

Emot Verzola Farley

I agree that it softened her which I did not appreciate much. But the explanation of why she became what she was (what happened to her as a 5 year old) was a valid explanation.

Andree Noska

She rocked it!

Liz Pineda

I agree. The adaptation softened her but I understand thst it is hard to translate the depth of the book into a series. If you know the book the series falls flat. But I can see why people like it.

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2026년 10월 24일 토요일

East of Eden - Let Cathy Ames Be a Monster | The New Yorker

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