As the elder of two girls born to parents similar and dissimilar in equal ways, it’s always a loaded exercise trying to figure out what I’ve inherited and what is entirely mine. There are things that are glaringly obvious to people looking into my face: your eyes are like your mother’s, they say, but something about your chin is entirely your father. There is the way I push up my glasses, fingers crooked just so, that is my father in minuscule, and his father too.
There are less obvious things that are harder to trace, like my tendency to put on a stoic front, or the ability to learn new languages, or the left-handedness that no one seems to know the origin of.
At some point, it’s hard to tell whether I am the way I am because of what was handed down, what I repeated until it felt like mine, or what emerged wholly and entirely from me.
I think families are well primed to make this confusion worse. Children get labels early and often. They’re called responsible, sensitive, difficult, pleasant… Eventually, these descriptions calcify into a trait, and then a role. If everyone believes in it long enough, that role begins to resemble prophecy.
This anxiety is the torrent that tears through East of Eden. Its cast of characters inherit the usual suspects like land, money, faces and names. But they are much more shaken by the possibility of inheriting character, that the worst of a parent can survive them in the child.
Cal Trask, the Cain to his brother Aron’s Abel, carries this fear most tangibly. In the midst of his already turbulent young years, Cal discovers that his presumably dead mother was alive and running a disreputable establishment nearby. On top of that, he finds out Cathy’s nature: cold, manipulative and seemingly incapable of any tenderness. At some point, she’s called a “psychic monster” with a “malformed soul”.
Now that Cal can’t un-know the truth, he begins to read himself through her. “I hate her because I know why she went away,” he tells Lee, his family’s confidant, at one point. “I know—because I’ve got her in me.” He starts to see signs of ordinary human ugliness in himself as inherited prophecy, like his jealousy towards his angelic brother and his sheer anger.
When a quality is entirely yours, you can go about changing it, perhaps toning it down or wrestling it into a box. But inherited things have a whiff of inevitability about them. Is this you, or the vestige of someone else that has survived in you?
At no point is Cal told that he is secretly good, or that if he’s inherited the worst, then he might have inherited the best, too. He’s instead told that “Whatever you do, it will be you who do it, not your mother”. His origin is not his absolution.
But this question repeats itself time and time again in the book, with different combinations of people: fathers and sons, favoured and unfavoured, accepted and rejected. Cain and Abel hover behind them all. The recurrence feels so deliberate that it feels less like people are living a new life made for them, or simply stepping into a role waiting for them.
In the writing of the book, Steinbeck is overly certain in assigning roles to his characters. Cathy is introduced almost like a biblical aberration, a “monster born to human parents”. Her husband Adam, meanwhile, is given a much kinder diagnosis of naïveté. Adam could:
- idealise Cathy beyond recognition
- retreat almost entirely from his children after she leaves him
- blatantly favour one son over the other
- reject his struggling son’s attempt to please him
but these failures never seem to contaminate his essential goodness. Cathy’s failures, on the other hand, define her entire being.
It was really hard for me to not read into the decision to make into a monster the woman who refuses wifehood, motherhood, dependence and nearly every other role prescribed to her. All this while the man whose innocence repeatedly wounds the people around him remains, bafflingly, an innocent. It seems the book inherits one of Western culture’s oldest stories about women and sin. Steinbeck doesn’t give Cathy the exit from condemnation he generously gives her son: Thou mayest.
Thou mayest—timshel—is Lee’s reading of the Cain and Abel story. His interpretation of the Hebrew word is not thou shalt overcome sin, which is an order. Neither is it thou will, which is a prediction. It is thou mayest: a small kernel of choice. Whatever a quality’s origin, they are ours to answer for now.