East of Eden Recap: A Girl Like That

East of Eden
Cathy
Season 1 Episode 2
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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“Just needed a little authority.” These are the words that turn Cathy Ames into a murderess, and they’re also at the core of East of Eden. Do we need authority, and if so, what kind? The violence Cathy’s father doles out is meant to punish her for her presumed role in the suicide of her schoolteacher, Mr. Grew. The military service Cyrus pushes Adam into is meant to toughen him up. The difficulty of Charles running the farm by himself while Cyrus and Adam are away is supposed to make him independent, to channel his frustrations into physical toil. All of this, these characters are told, is for their betterment. And all of these actions have unintended consequences, which in “Cathy” we see play out in, obviously, Miss Ames, who embodies Zoe Kazan’s largest changes to John Steinbeck’s novel. Within Florence Pugh’s performance is the series’ most straightforward proclamation about how our pasts — no matter how much we try to escape them — remain with us, guiding our actions forward in ways we can’t quite always articulate but always, always feel.

Here is the most meaningful alteration Kazan makes to Steinbeck’s text: Cathy’s a human being. To Steinbeck, she’s basically an abstraction, a manifestation of original sin and incarnate evil who from childhood uses her femininity to seduce, trick, harm, and manipulate people. One of the most “My man, what the fuck?” moments in the novel is when 10-year-old Cathy frames two 14-year-old boys for sexually assaulting her, a plan she prepared “coldly, foreseeing difficulties and preparing for them,” and carried out just because she could. The plan wasn’t revenge for something that actually did happen; Cathy had no personal motivation. She simply wanted to see if she could get away with it and secure her parents’ and neighbors’ sympathies — and she did. “There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She would have been exorcised to cast out the evil spirit, and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community,” Steinbeck writes. In the novel’s ongoing dissection of what it means to be “good” or “bad,” Cathy’s at the extreme “bad” end of the spectrum. 

As a female reader of East of Eden, I struggled to a certain degree with Cathy’s early characterization — even as I understood it to be inflected by Eve as a figure of temptation and sin in the Bible — because her sole motivation was power, and I wondered what that power was in service of. Now, do I think sexual assault as a means of building out a character’s backstory is always successful? I do not. But for Cathy and the time period in which this character is situated — and as a means of justifying why she is always chasing her own self-actualization and why her relationships with men so often involve building escape routes for herself — I think it makes sense and works. In this episode, we spend a lot of time within Cathy’s memories, and it’s a fascinating choice that she remembers so much about her near-death experience, the beating her father gave her, and her murdering her parents, but the sexual assault she suffered as a child is hazy, unspecific, allusive. The man who lured Cathy with candy, leading her away from her picnic and into a tunnel of trees to rape her, is tied up with her reading of Alice in Wonderland, and the Cathy from before and the Cathy created after are different people. “But if I’m not the same, the next question is, who in the world am I?” Cathy narrates, and here, too, in the Trask house, is another divide. Remember how the previous episode ended with Cathy (we know now) vibing off Alice in Wonderland about how “no door can keep you out, and no door can close you in”? Cathy will not go down the rabbit hole again. She will climb out, no matter what.

“Cathy” begins by establishing how close she was to death — her skull was cracked, her jaw broken — and the doctor tells the Trask boys, “Someone tried to kill this girl.” The solution is a lot of morphine and a lot of rest, both of which Cathy undertakes with Adam constantly (and chastely) by her side. When the sheriff questions Cathy about her assault, she claims to remember nothing, but that’s when East of Eden propels us into her past. In Massachusetts in 1893, Cathy was a preternaturally beautiful teenager and a seemingly devoted daughter whose pleasant, placid expression only cracks when neighbors judge her parents for spending money on her schooling and say of her goal to be a teacher, “She won’t be a teacher for long, not with a face like that. What a wife she’ll make someday.” No one in Cathy’s family seems to know she was assaulted, but for us, that information contextualizes her now-twisted understanding of her own looks and sexuality. She understands her value as quantifiable, especially by men — those two pieces of candy are now a tin of valuable treasures from admirers, which she lies about, telling her parents they are “baubles” she found along the roads or in town. “A girl learns quickly. There is no avoiding the attention of the opposite sex … Divert the river correctly, and one can generate power,” Pugh narrates, and Cathy’s consideration of herself is both cynical and heartbreaking. Then, as she grows older, it becomes even more disturbing.

Let’s talk about the violence, shall we? Cathy’s schoolteacher, Mr. Grew, kills himself after Cathy, rather than going public with their relationship and marrying him, breaks up with him. Cathy sets her family home ablaze to fake her own death and leave town; her parents suffer agonizing deaths in that fire. It’s unclear whether Cathy harms the sex worker she asks to be her mentor, but I’m going to say the woman’s assessment of their lot is an observation of the brutality they deal with: “A girl is not a perennial. Every year they plant a new crop.” And then there’s brothel owner Mr. Edwards, who taught Cathy her greatest lesson: You can’t control a man in love. Cathy plays her little games with him like she’s a decades-in-advance, gender-flipped version of the pickup artist: telling him he’s fine sexually but, like, not the best she’s ever had; saying she just had to change the locks to the apartment he bought her; bleeding him for everything he’s worth. Pugh’s faux-apologetic delivery of “I nearly forgot: I have a grocery bill for you. It’s a little higher this month, I’m afraid,” got a legitimate scream of delight out of me. But this kind of relationship can only last so long. Would Cathy eventually hurt Mr. Edwards to escape him, too? He certainly thinks so once she gets drunk and reveals she’s not actually the pure, poor girl he thought she was and after his private investigator discovers she killed her parents. Those two pieces of information imbue Mr. Edwards with enough heartbroken fury to take Cathy on a trip to Connecticut and try to kill this young woman he claimed to care for more than any other, and director Garth Davis effectively uses a couple of long takes to capture the practically rabid nature of Mr. Edwards’s attack. “Please,” Cathy begs, but I don’t think Mr. Edwards stopped beating her out of mercy; I believe he thought she was dead and his work was done.

But … Cathy lives, bitch! And her presence in the Trasks’ home accentuates the different things Charles and Adam want out of their lives and the different ways they view the world. Of course Charles would be suspicious of this pretty, educated girl who shows up out of nowhere, refuses to share what brought her here, and has clearly ensnared Adam. And of course Adam would be taken in by Cathy’s save-me routine, how she presents herself like a jittery rabbit about to bolt, a lost lamb in need of protection. Why does Cathy accept Adam’s proposal when she knows a man who loves her is her greatest danger? I think her circumstances are just that dire and Adam seems so controllable. Look at how easily she cons him with the swapped sleeping draught on the night of their wedding. Adam is not a man who expects anything immoral or untoward out of Cathy, which basically gives her the freedom to do whatever she wants — you know, like sleeping with Charles. Hot, suspicious Charles with a forehead scar that matches hers and one of the series’ defining lines: “Maybe kind just recognizes kind.” There’s something within Cathy that Charles senses within himself, some capacity for darkness Adam doesn’t naturally possess. It’s in the smile Cathy gives Charles in response to his observation about the two of them, in how she says “So?” when he tries to turn her away by saying he’s “already been with a whore tonight,” in how their kissing looks like a battle for dominance rather than a romantic act. And Adam, “poor bastard,” sleeps through the whole thing. What else about Cathy will Adam close his eyes to? 

California Dreams

• Something from the book I wish the show had more time for: Charles and Adam’s bonding after their 13 years apart, before Cathy enters the picture. I’d particularly like to see Adam telling Charles about how he was imprisoned for robbing a store and then worked on a chain gang: “Charles had more respect for Adam after he knew about the prison. He felt the warmth for his brother you can feel only for one who is not perfect and therefore no target for your hatred.” That would have been good additional texture for the “Which brother is good; which brother is bad?” question driving the series. 

• Something I’m glad the show added: Cathy reading Wuthering Heights in bed as a teenager. I absolutely think Cathy relates to Heathcliff.

• Clock this for later: Cathy doesn’t like to drink; specifically, she dislikes the powerlessness that comes from getting drunk. 

• A couple of foreshadowing nods I enjoyed in this episode were Cathy embroidering the line “What is a home without a mother” and her father reading to her from the Bible about Cain and Abel. Yes, I did the Leo-pointing meme.

• How are we feeling about the main trio’s performances so far? There’s a grandiose, theatrical quality to all of them that I like, in particular Pugh’s attempt at a grande-dame, Elizabeth Taylor–style accent and how melodramatically Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist are screaming at and grappling with each other. That moment when Charles shouts at Adam, “She is going to tear you apart … and I don’t want to watch it. I won’t watch it,” before pulling him into a hug really got me.