#BookView (1/2) — EAST OF EDEN

John Steinbeck was a Nobel Prize winner and East of Eden is everywhere, especially on TikTok page. Every time someone make here's books you should read, this book is there. So I read it, but unfortunately I don't get the hype. I tried to understand why everyone loves this so much, and I can absolutely see that Steinbeck can write because there were definitely moments where I was like okay yeah I get why people love this man, but the actual story and especially the characters just kept annoying me more and more. If I'm not mistaken this book also isn't particularly well received by critics. The first thing that really bothered me was the women. Almost every woman in this book felt to me like she was either evil, cold, naive, passive, or just there to suffer because of some man, and Cathy is obviously the worst example because she barely even feels like a character, like she's just evil and that's it. She's selfish, cruel, manipulative, heartless, and basically everything Steinbeck wants us to associate with evil, but there's so little actual person behind all of that that I eventually stopped finding this character interesting. She's a great villain, sureeee, but I don't think she's a great character, and I kept waiting for there to be something more to her, some contradiction, some vulnerability, some fucked-up reasoning that would make me understand her even if I hated her, literally anything that would make her feel like an actual human being, but nope, she's just Cathy an evil woman. And it feels like Steinbeck took every misogynistic idea about women and poured all of it into one woman and then went look, evil, and the fact that she's basically the most important female character makes it even worse. I wanted her to be a person so badly and understand her. I wanted to see something underneath all that cruelty, but instead her entire existence feels like it's there to prove a point about evil. I think this problem is probably connected to the entire structure of the novel because East of Eden is such a rigid retelling of Genesis and the story of Cain and Abel. You got Adam, warring brothers, you have the mother figure cast out through this whole framework of original sin, and once you build the entire story around those archetypes, the characters inevitably start feeling very stock and rote to me. They have to behave in certain ways because they have to fit into the story that Steinbeck is retelling instead of being allowed to develop naturally outside of it if you get it. And Cathy especially suffers from this because she has to be the antagonist and embody evil, has to fit into this very specific biblical framework. And because of that I never really felt like her core character came through. She's a caricature before she's a person. And I think you can say something similar about a lot of mid-century American literature where the characters sometimes feel like they're carrying an idea on their backs instead of just existing as complicated people. Steinbeck doesn't give himself much freedom to actually update or disrupt the archetypes he's working with. So even though the setting and circumstances are different, the underlying roles stay almost painfully recognizable. Adam is Adam, the brothers are the brothers, Cathy is the evil mother, and everyone has to keep moving according to this structure. Well that's probably intentional, but it feels like the characters never escape the story they're supposed to represent. They feel like biblical figures being placed into a modern story, do you get it? They don't feel like people who happen to resemble biblical figures. That's huge difference to me okay. I don't have a problem with allegory, but I do have a problem when I can constantly see the skeleton of the allegory behind every character. Makes everything feel predetermined. I already know what role they're supposed to play so I'm just watching them fulfill the function he gave them. And Lee the one major POC character, some of the way he's written also made me increasingly uncomfortable.