“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.” Genesis 4:7 (KJV)
Cathy Ames and the Woman Who Chose the Dark
Does it really work, this idea that women cannot be evil? Somewhere along the way our culture settled on a story that goes like this: goodness begins with acknowledging that men hurt women, and the harm never travels in the other direction. When a woman does something monstrous, we are taught to look past her hands and search instead for the man, the father, the system, or the wound that must have made her do it. But Scripture gives every one of us the same word God spoke to Cain when sin was crouching at his door. In John Steinbeck's East of Eden, that word is timshel. The old translations made it a promise, thou shalt, or a command, do thou, but Steinbeck understood the Hebrew to mean thou mayest. Thou mayest rule over it. The choice belongs to each of us, man and woman alike. I finally sat down and watched Netflix's new limited series East of Eden, and I was not surprised. Zoe Kazan, the granddaughter of Elia Kazan, who directed the 1955 film starring James Dean, took Steinbeck's novel and turned it into a cultural piece rather than grapple with the reality the book refuses to look away from. Women can be evil, and women can choose.
We do not need a novel to tell us so. We have watched the case of Lindsay Clancy in Duxbury, Massachusetts, a mother who took the lives of her three children. We live in a time when women stand at podiums and argue that ending the life of a child in the womb is a right, and we have watched copycats follow one another into tragedies that should have been unthinkable. Yet the culture keeps reaching for the same explanation, as if a woman's will were always something done to her and never something she exercised.
Steinbeck knew better. Cathy Ames is a sinner like the rest of us, but she is also vicious, mean, and cruel, and Steinbeck wrote her that way on purpose. As a child, she learned how to make others pay for what she wanted. She ruined the young teacher who desired her. She set fire to her parents' home with them inside it and walked away with their money. When she finally landed on Adam Trask's doorstep, beaten nearly to death by a whoremaster she had used and been used by, she found a man willing to give her everything: a home, a name, safety, and a way out of the darkness. She drugged him on their wedding night and went to his brother's bed. When her twin sons were born, she shot Adam and walked out, leaving both boys behind without a backward glance.
Even if you set aside her behavior and blame the brutality of men, even if you blame her father, the series cannot get around one fact. Adam opened the door, and she refused to walk through it. Over and over, from childhood forward, Cathy declined to dwell in the light. She preferred the darkness, and she strolled right into it every time it was offered to her as a choice.
Nowhere is this clearer than in what she did to Faye. Faye was the madam of a brothel in Salinas, a woman who took Cathy in, trusted her wholeheartedly, and came to love her as a daughter. Cathy repaid that trust by poisoning her slowly until she died, then took her house, her business, and her name off the door. Faye put her life directly into Cathy's hands, and Cathy closed them.
The life Cathy built afterward speaks to more than her wickedness. It speaks to her understanding of men and women who sell their bodies for silver and gold. As Kate, she played the same game countless men had played before her, trading in flesh, collecting secrets, photographing the respectable men of Salinas so she could own them. She enjoyed every minute of it. In that house she answered to no one, and she ruled it as its master.
And yet the series, told largely from Cathy's perspective, asks us to see her as a victim. Critics have noticed the shift. Where Steinbeck believed some monsters are born, Kazan leans on a childhood incident to suggest this one was made. In her final scenes, a woman who spent her life committed to self-interest and revenge is suddenly offered to us for sympathy, weeping as she swallows the poison she prepared for herself.
Here is what I find most striking. Steinbeck himself gave Cathy a kind of exemption. He described her as born without what the rest of us carry, a soul missing its conscience, the one character he placed outside the promise of timshel. So when I say she chose the dark again and again, I am holding her more accountable than Steinbeck did, and far more accountable than Kazan does. I believe that is the most biblical reading of all. Scripture does not excuse Eve because of the serpent, and it does not excuse Cain because his offering was rejected. God told Cain that sin was crouching at the door and that he could rule over it. Cathy heard the same knock her whole life, and she opened the door every time.
The same instinct shows up in how the series handles Lee, and here the change is quieter but no less telling. Steinbeck wrote Lee as a Chinese American servant in a California that despised him, and he never pretended otherwise. But Steinbeck let Lee answer that contempt with his own mind. Lee speaks a broken pidgin to strangers because that is what they expect from a man who looks like him, and when Samuel Hamilton sees through it, Lee drops the act and speaks in polished English. He explains, with a dry humor that cuts deeper than any lecture, that people would not understand him if he spoke properly. Steinbeck let the reader discover the racism through Lee's intelligence. Lee sees the prejudice clearly, works around it, and keeps his dignity on his own terms. He is the scholar of the household, the man who carries the word timshel to the Trasks, and the one who raises Adam's abandoned sons when their father cannot.
Kazan keeps the moment where Lee sheds his accent, and Hoon Lee plays it beautifully. But the series does not trust that moment to carry the weight. It brings the racism forward and presents it as culture, something to be condemned on screen so we know which side to stand on. The difference is nuanced but real. Steinbeck painted a picture of a culture and left the judgment to the reader. Kazan's version condemns the culture in a way that feels pushed down your throat. Kazan even wrote an eighth episode, which Netflix cut, following Lee to San Francisco in 1912 to chase his ambitions, and in the series it is the racism he meets there that forces him to give up his dream.
That is a significant departure. In the novel, Lee leaves to open his bookstore with Adam's blessing, and the two part on good terms. He comes back on his own, a short time later, because he misses the family he has given his life to. His return is an act of love freely chosen. In the series, the parting carries anger between the two men, and the failure of Lee's dream belongs to a society that would not let him have it. Once again a decision Steinbeck placed inside a person has been handed over to forces outside him. Cathy's cruelty gets explained by a wound. Lee's return gets explained by oppression. In both cases the series takes away the very thing Steinbeck's novel is about: thou mayest.
As an American descendant of slavery, I know something about living inside a culture that holds you in contempt. I also know that our ancestors did not let that contempt write the whole of their story. They chose, inside of limits no one should have imposed on them, how they would live, whom they would love, and what they would build. To reduce a man like Lee to what was done to him is to take from him the same dignity Steinbeck went out of his way to give him.
Then there is Adam. In the novel, Adam spends years in a fog after Cathy shoots him and leaves, half alive, unable even to name his sons. When he finally learns where she is, he goes to her house in Salinas and sits across from her in her room. She mocks him, tries to frighten him, and lays out her contempt for every decent thing he ever believed. And something breaks open in Adam. He sees her plainly for the first time, as she truly is, and her hold on him falls away. He walks out of that house a free man. It is one of the great moments of liberation in American literature, and it belongs to Adam. He chose clarity over the illusion he had loved, and that choice gave him back his life and, eventually, his sons.
The series takes that moment from him. Kazan's Adam carries a lingering love for Cathy even after he sees her, as though the woman who drugged him, betrayed him with his brother, shot him, and abandoned his children still deserves a place in his heart. I understand the impulse. It makes Cathy more tragic and her pull more powerful. But it costs Adam the one victory Steinbeck gave him. A man who could finally say no to the darkness is left still reaching for it. Here again the series refuses to let a character choose, and here again the person who pays for that refusal is the one who was harmed.
The last omission is the one that tells me the most about whose culture this series wanted to shine a light on. Steinbeck did not give Salinas a single brothel. He gave it a whole Row along Castroville Street, with three houses each serving a different kind of need. Jenny's was the loud one, full of music and laughter. Faye's was the motherly one, where boys and lonely husbands went for comfort. And the third house, the Long Green, was owned and run by a Black woman. Steinbeck never gives her a proper name. The town calls her by a slur, and so does he. But he does not make her a joke. Her house was the dignified one, the solemn one, where men went to be held in their sadness. She ran her business through decades of Salinas history, and when she died, Steinbeck paused his story to record a spare and quiet funeral. In 1952, a white novelist writing about turn-of-the-century California saw a self-made Black businesswoman and wrote her into the record.
Zoe Kazan, writing seventy years later with seven hours of television, a stated commitment to a more culturally aware retelling, and a story bookended by the Civil War, did not. The series expands Lee's story, invents an episode about the racism he faced in San Francisco, and builds its entire frame around a war fought over the bondage of my ancestors. Yet the one Black woman Steinbeck placed in Salinas, a woman who owned property and ran a business in an era when the nation barely counted her as a person, never appears. Steinbeck gave her a crude name and little interior life, but he saw her. The series, in all its eagerness to be aware, did not see her at all. That is what selective awareness looks like. It will condemn the culture of the past in the loudest possible voice and still leave American Blacks out of the room.
Timshel. Today I cannot help but feel that we are living in a world that wants to program us to believe the worst of men and boys and the best of women, no matter how cruel the woman. We are told, over and over, that women carry the most pain, endure the most abuse, and suffer the most oppression, and that whatever a woman does must be measured against what has been done to her. But that story does not hold up against the truth of Scripture or the truth of our own lives. We as women are subject to the same standard as every other human being. We live with the good and the bad in us, and we have a choice. Thou mayest. These days it seems many women are making the wrong choice, and yet we pretend that is not the case. We would rather rewrite Cathy Ames as a victim than admit that a woman can look at the light, understand exactly what it is, and walk the other way.
We do not have to look to Steinbeck to see what happens when a culture decides in advance who the villain must be. Consider the case the internet has named the Cornell 7. In October 2024, a twenty-year-old student went to the Chi Phi fraternity house in Ithaca, and what happened there involved several young men. She reported it to campus police that November. According to the Tompkins County District Attorney, her original statement described the drug use and sexual activity as voluntary and consensual. Her attorney disputes that, and the Governor has faulted the campus police for leaving out her statement that she was certain she had been raped. The men were investigated and none were charged. Cornell, in its own separate process, expelled and suspended students anyway. Nearly two years later, she filed a civil lawsuit alleging she was drugged and gang raped. Within weeks, celebrities were demanding arrests on social media. Florence Pugh, the very actress who plays Cathy Ames, was among the first to condemn them. Governor Kathy Hochul announced she had lost faith in the local district attorney and appointed Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor. As of this writing, none of the seven has been charged with a crime, and no evidence has been tested in any courtroom, yet seven young men have already been convicted in the only court that seems to matter anymore, the court of public opinion.
I do not know what happened in that house, and neither do the celebrities who have already pronounced judgment. That is precisely my point. There are two accounts of that night, and the question of which one is true belongs to evidence. If a woman's account is treated as settled truth before it is tested, while the men's account is dismissed before it is heard, then we have stopped believing that every person stands before the same standard. We have decided that a woman's word is righteous because she is a woman, and a man's guilt is presumed because he is a man. Justice requires evidence, and justice requires that everyone, woman and man alike, be held accountable for the choices they make.
That is the lesson Steinbeck understood and the series refused to learn. When God spoke to Cain, He offered him no excuse about his brother's favor. He warned him that sin was crouching at the door, and that he could rule over it. The same word is spoken to every one of us, and to every one of our daughters. Thou mayest. Whatever has been done to a woman, the question that remains is what she chooses to do next.
