Before digesting Zoe Kazan’s seven-part reconsideration of “East of Eden,” I never would have suspected that we, as a society, had been conditioned to misread Cathy Ames, the angel-faced succubus at the broken heart of John Steinbeck’s novel.
Cathy has always had her champions, mind you. The internet is laden with Reddit arguments and academic examinations questioning Steinbeck’s portrait of her beastliness. The author himself was conflicted about her, writing Cathy as a dangerous beauty incapable of empathy in his book, yet expressing how dear she was to him in letters to his editor, Pascal Covici. My English teachers and literature professors were probably too tired to parse such nuance, and I don’t blame them.
