Should Netflix Have Left John Steinbeck’s Misogyny Intact? East of Eden Fans Are Split
by Chrissy Stockton · Thought CatalogUpdated 10 seconds ago, October 4, 2026
Netflix’s East of Eden gives Cathy Ames, played by Florence Pugh, a history of abuse that explains her actions. That change puts a question at the center of Zoe Kazan’s adaptation: how much of a celebrated author’s treatment of women should a new version preserve?
Steinbeck presents Cathy as innately monstrous. She falsely accuses 2 boys of rape, kills her parents by setting their home on fire, shoots her husband, leaves her twins and operates a brothel. The novel supplies no trauma to account for her cruelty.
Kazan’s miniseries retains Cathy’s crimes while changing the circumstances around them. Her allegation of assault is true, and she’s disbelieved.
Her father treats her as property. Those changes give viewers a way to understand her violence through abuse and survival.
Kazan has described her approach as drawing out Steinbeck’s more humane instincts and giving Cathy personhood. Pugh has said she wanted viewers to feel sympathy for Cathy and perhaps even some love.
The case for those changes rests on how Steinbeck wrote women. Critics of his misogyny point to letters and fiction that cast women as one dimensional. They are idealized figures, disappointments or dangerous predators.
Cathy occupies the last category, serving as an Eve figure in the novel’s biblical framework. For supporters of the adaptation, a woman revisiting that material in 2026 has room to challenge its assumptions about female evil.
The artistic objection is that explaining Cathy diminishes what makes her frightening. The New Yorker’s “Let Cathy Ames Be a Monster” criticizes the removal of the carriage-house cruelty, the father’s heavy-handed characterization and a speech about female empowerment at the brothel. Slate also argues that giving Cathy a traumatic backstory sacrifices the unusual possibility of a female villain whose evil has no explanation.
Both positions acknowledge that Cathy still kills. Their disagreement concerns what an explanation does to the character: whether it gives her a humanity Steinbeck denied her or reduces the disturbing force of his creation.
Steinbeck later complicated his own portrayal, writing that readers would hate Cathy because they recognized something familiar in her. Defenders of the novel argue that this recognition already gave her enough human complexity without supplying a cause for her crimes.
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