John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is a sweeping story of family, desire, morality and free will, built around the biblical story of Cain and Abel. But what makes it particularly fascinating to read today is what it reveals about the anxieties of its own time.
Published in 1952, it arrived in the middle of post-war America: women’s participation in the workforce was beginning to rise, while marriage was happening remarkably young—the median age for women was just about 20—and America was entering the extraordinary baby boom. Marriage, motherhood and the ideal of the domestic woman were being powerfully reinforced.
And then there is Cathy Trask.
Cathy refuses almost everything this ideal demands. She does not want to be a mother or a housewife. She wants money, control and independence, and she defines herself through her work and her ability to control her own finances. She even turns sexuality into an economic resource by running a brothel. From the book’s introduction: “…she refigures the realm of male fulfilment and reminds us that the ‘oldest profession ‘ is, after all, female!”
And this is where Cathy becomes contradictory—and fascinating. Steinbeck gives her the economic and sexual autonomy that feminism would later demand, but constructs that very autonomy as pathological and evil. She is not a feminist heroine; she is almost a frightening premonition of female independence—a woman the novel cannot imagine without condemning.
Cathy can therefore be read as a shadow of the “gathering female rage” that would surface more openly a decade later in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), an essential companion to this novel.
Steinbeck’s treatment of prostitution is equally revealing.
“There is great safety for a shy man with a whore. Having been paid for, and in advance, she has become a commodity, and a shy man can be gay with her and even brutal to her.”
The brothel becomes a strange form of welfare, where women are “fed and clothed and taken care of,” while men find safety in a woman who has become a “commodity.” There is insight here, but also romanticisation and a distinctly patriarchal gaze.
There are also uncomfortable racial assumptions in the portrayal of Black and Native American characters—another reminder that powerful literature can contain ideas that have not aged well.
East of Eden is extraordinary literature. Read it for the storytelling, the moral questions and the biblical echoes, and with an awareness of how far the world has moved on.
Read Steinbeck. Question Steinbeck.
And if you read East of Eden, read The Feminine Mystique alongside it. Then go back to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men.
All the above titles are available at Kunzum. We can deliver to you, or you can drop in to pick up, along with a cup of coffee or chai.