Fiction set in past eras often portrays women as either damsels in distress or early feminists determined to challenge the gender roles of their time. You can find monstrous men galore, individuals who think they own women and take advantage of them left and right, while women are frequently reduced to being innocent victims of their time. And amid the ongoing debate surrounding Christa Pike’s death sentence, watching East of Eden, which shows that women can be monstrous too, is definitely refreshing. It forces us to confront a reality that fiction often shies away from: women are fully capable of their own profound monstrosity.
I’ve been following Zoe Kazan’s career ever since Ruby Sparks, and her seven-part Netflix miniseries adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is a particularly ambitious showcase of her extraordinary writing talent. The miniseries presents a generational saga that chronicles the volatile intersection of the Trask family and the enigmatic, calculating Cathy Ames (Florence Pugh). Spanning from the Civil War to World War I, the narrative begins with brothers Adam (Christopher Abbott) and Charles Trask (Mike Faist), whose bitter rivalry is permanently disrupted when a severely battered Cathy crawls onto their doorstep. Adam marries her and moves to the Salinas Valley, only for Cathy to shoot him and abandon their newborn twin sons, Cal and Aron, to re-establish herself as a ruthless, wealthy brothel madam. As the twins grow into adolescence, they unconsciously reenact the biblical Cain-and-Abel conflict that haunted their family, ultimately building toward the series’ central thesis of timshel: the human capacity to choose between good and evil regardless of generational trauma.
The complex psychological conflict between Cathy and Adam is anchored by magnificent, deeply unsettling performances from Florence Pugh and Christopher Abbott. Pugh is spectacular as Cathy, infusing her with a calculated, razor-sharp intelligence; she plays the character not as a cartoon villain, but as an intensely focused survivalist whose coldness is a shield. Opposite her, Abbott delivers a masterful performance as Adam Trask. He plays Adam not as a simple romantic hero, but with an overbearing, forced idealism that feels increasingly claustrophobic. Abbott’s exquisite portrayal of Adam’s rigid moral purity builds the very cage that pushes Pugh’s Cathy to her monstrous limits.
I haven’t read Steinbeck’s novel, but Cathy Ames has long been notorious as one of literature’s most infamous female villains. Zoe Kazan’s adaptation, though, presents her as a woman trying to survive in a world ruled by men by any means necessary. From Kazan’s perspective, East of Eden becomes an autopsy of how society creates its monsters. Instead of viewing Cathy as naturally evil, she becomes a study of what happens when an independent woman comes to believe that the only way to retain autonomy in a patriarchal world is to out-monster the men around her.
However, the series’ emphasis on the Hebrew concept of timshel prevents Cathy’s traumatic history from becoming an excuse for her actions. Translating to ‘thou mayest,’ timshel emphasizes the human capacity to choose between good and evil, and to own the consequences of those choices. We see a striking parallel to this in the real-world discourse surrounding Christa Pike; online commentators routinely attempt to excuse her monstrous behavior by pointing to her deeply traumatic upbringing. The uncomfortable parallel with Christa Pike is that both cases force us to confront the difference between explaining a person’s capacity for violence and excusing it. While trauma can help explain monstrous behavior, the concept of timshel insists that explanation cannot become absolution. East of Eden argues that neither genetics nor past trauma can be used as a shield against accountability. In a world full of systemic oppression, timshel reminds us that circumstances may shape our choices, but they do not make those choices for us.
Zoe Kazan’s East of Eden does something far more daring than simply giving a literary villain a sympathetic backstory. It builds a bridge of understanding toward Cathy Ames, only to demand that we hold her morally accountable anyway. By viewing her monstrosity through the lens of timshel, the series elevates women from flat, historical archetypes of helpless victimhood or unblemished virtue. It recognizes their terrifying human autonomy: the freedom to choose destruction. In a landscape of period fiction that often sanitizes female agency, this adaptation reminds us that true equality means acknowledging that women possess the same capacity for darkness as the men who try to rule them.
