'East of Eden' has finally made its way to the streaming platform Netflix, but how close is it to the original story?
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Add BollywoodShaadis on GoogleNetflix is back with a period drama from the 1900s called East of Eden. Based in a time when man's worst nightmare was still the wrath of God, and the closest he came to a tyrant was his own father. The story is considered one of the Greatest American Novels. It was certainly John Steinbeck's masterpiece, and the most ambitious and autobiographical of all his novels.
You may also like to know that it was published in 1952 and is considered an early example of autofiction. However, there are some differences. According to reports, none of Steinbeck's relatives shot their husband, walked out on their newborn twins, or reinvented themselves as a brother-madame by poisoning the woman who took her in. So, what even was true? Let's find out. Warning: Spoilers ahead!
The 'Hamiltons' are the novel's other family: an immigrant Irish clan who settled a ranch neighboring the 'Trasks's' in the Salinas Valley. Their lives run alongside the main 'Cain' and 'Abel' plot rather than inside it. Where the 'Trasks's' provide the drama, the 'Hamiltons' provide the texture: a large, loving, perpetually broke household who never do anything as dramatic as murder or betrayal, but whose ordinary joys and griefs anchor the book in something real.
According to the book, John Steinbeck, who also narrates the novel, uses them almost as a chorus, commenting on, and occasionally intervening in, the 'Trasks's' unfolding tragedy. In his letter to Pascal Covici, Steinbeck writes of the Hamiltons as:
"They were a high-strung bunch, the Hamiltons. My father used to say they affectionately said that they were all crazy. And I guess they were and I guess I am. I feel so some of the time, anyway."
The Hamiltons were John Steinbeck's grandparents, who, just as in the novel, moved to California from Ireland in 1846. The reason, however, for Samuel Hamilton's emigration was opaque. As he says in the book, whispers suggested it was love in his family that drove Samuel out, rather than the love of the wife he married. He added, "But whether it was too successful love or whether he left in pique at an unsuccessful love, I do not know. We always preferred to think it was the former."
Samuel Hamilton spent his life farming dry, unforgiving land, and never struck it rich, but was, by every account, adored by his large family. Steinbeck barely fictionalizes him at all in the book. Talking about Liza, Samuel met her in 1948 in NY soon after they arrived from Ireland. They eventually got married and traveled to California in 1850 to make a new life. Liza, too, had emigrated from Ireland, but, according to Steinbeck, didn't have the same finesse as her husband.
In a 1953 article for Collier's Magazine, he called his grandfather a great man, a man of sweet speech and courtesy. However, his wife was "bog trotting" and put out milk for the leprechauns in the hills behind King City. He added, "When a groundling neighbor suggested the cats drank it, she gave that neighbor a look that burned his nose off." Steinbeck also talked about his mother, Olive Hamilton, in the novel.
She appears as one of Samuel's daughters, drawn straight from life rather than imagination. Olive would grow up to have four children, the last of whom was a boy, John, born in 1902. He confessed in a letter to a friend that the portrait of his mother was "not as well drawn as the others", but felt that was natural. However, he did include a story in the book about his dear mother.
He recalled how, furious after Germany killed a local boy she'd known, Olive talked her way into a stunt plane at a war-bonds rally and went up over Salinas to sell Liberty Bonds from the air- pure Olive, in other words: personally declaring war on the German Empire. In East of Eden he wrote:
"If the Germans had known Olive and had been sensible, they would have gone out of their way not to anger her. But they didn’t know, or they were stupid. When they killed Martin Hopps, they lost the war because that made my mother mad, and she took it out on them. She had liked Martin Hopps. He had never hurt anyone. When they killed him, Olive declared war on the German Empire."
However, what is a funny addition to the novel is that, with no training and only sheer nerve, Olive insists on doing loops and stunts mid-air. She ends up terrifying the pilot rather than the other way around, then lands to sell bonds as though nothing had happened. The family is clearly drawn from Steinbeck's imagination, and there are no letters, biographies, or interviews that tie her to a real person.
In his letters to Covici while writing the book, he calls her "a tremendously powerful force" he needed to fully understand before he could write her. This is why readers and critics often think that there has to be a real person behind her, because the detail feels too clinical and specific to be a work of imagination. In the novel, Steinbeck further goes on to frame her almost as a case study rather than a character and calls her a "psychic monster" born, he writes through the character Lee, the way a "malformed egg can produce physical monsters."
She has no redemption arc, as Steinbeck says she's designed as evil from birth. While the entire novel seems to be taking inspiration from real people and incidents, Cathy's addition has always been a point of curiosity for viewers.
What are your thoughts on East of Eden?
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