After 74 Years, Florence Pugh's New Netflix Show Totally Changes One Of Literature's Stone-Cold Villains

Published Oct 6, 2026, 2:01 PM EDT Abby Shewmaker is a journalist covering books, art, entertainment, and culture. She studied Communications and History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and is a Contributing Writer at FLAUNT Magazine. The following article contains spoilers for Netflix's East of Eden. Few literary villains are as reviled and bone-chilling as Cathy Ames in John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Born without a conscience, Cathy's manipulative and cunning ways represent pure, innate evil in Steinbeck's retelling of Genesis, exploiting Adam’s devotion and Charles’s distrust to deepen the brothers’ rivalry and leave Adam devastated by her betrayal. Zoe Kazan's Netflix adaptation of East of Eden stars Florence Pugh as Cathy, Christopher Abbott as Adam, and Mike Fasit as Charles. Debuting to rave reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, the story takes some liberties with Cathy's characterization, most notably framing her cruelty as a response to childhood trauma. While these changes add a compelling layer of complexity to her character, they may also undermine her symbolic role in Steinbeck’s exploration of evil, inheritance, and free will. Cathy’s Cruelty Creates the Stakes for East Of Eden’s Central Conflict Credit: Netflix Steinbeck establishes Cathy’s place within East of Eden before readers learn the full extent of her cruelty. Introducing her through a meditation on people born without kindness or conscience, he presents her as a frightening exception to typical human morality. That characterization becomes especially consequential for Cathy's son Cal, who fears that he has inherited his mother's cruelty—which would mean his fate has already been decided. Throughout the novel, Cathy exploits the affection of people who believe they understand her, or even that they are close to her. Adam mistakes her vulnerability for innocence, imagining a marriage and family that she repeatedly tells him she does not want. After giving birth to their twins, she shoots him and abandons the family. Later, under the name Kate, she gains the trust of brothel owner Faye, murders her, and takes over her business. Kindness offers Cathy opportunities to gain power over the people who extend it. That characterization also exposes Adam’s tendency to confuse goodness with his own expectations. He is so invested in the woman he believes Cathy to be that he dismisses who she is, and who she tells him she is. His devastation comes, in part, from discovering how completely his imagined marriage differs from hers. Through their relationship, Steinbeck examines the danger of idealizing someone whose intentions remain fundamentally unknowable. Cathy’s symbolic role becomes more complicated when considered alongside the novel’s emphasis on free will and moral choice. Through Cathy, Steinbeck argues that there is some evil that is inborn in this world, and it remains up to the people who live in it to decide how to navigate it, and resist its corruption. Cathy embodies the certainty of evil in a novel whose central promise is that people can choose to overcome it. She cannot, and will not change for the better, making her the perfect opposition to Steinbeck's central premise. Netflix Gives Cathy’s Evil A Psychological Explanation Netflix's East of Eden adaptation may be fantastic, but it completely changes how audiences understand Cathy’s childhood. In the novel, Steinbeck presents an incident involving older boys as an assault allegation she fabricated, using it to establish her early capacity for manipulation. Kazan reads the incident differently: Cathy was abused as a child, and the adults responsible for protecting her failed to believe and protect her. This change muddles the origin point of Cathy’s evil. Implying a true origin for her behaviors and lack of empathy or morality humanizes her, which may lend itself to a more layered and sympathetic character, but also changes what her character represents in a highly symbolic novel. Her distrust develops in a world that has already violated her safety, giving audiences a psychological explanation for the control she later seeks over other people. This interpretation also changes the emphasis of Cathy's marriage to Adam. Cathy explicitly rejects the future he plans for them in California, but he proceeds as though her resistance will eventually disappear. The adaptation places her desire to escape within a history of having her agency denied and desires ignored. Adam’s devotion can therefore feel confining, particularly when it depends on Cathy becoming a wife and mother she never agreed to be. There is value in examining those circumstances. Cathy’s lack of interest in motherhood and her desire for independence deserve consideration separately from her willingness to harm others. An adaptation can question the expectations imposed on her while still holding her responsible for shooting Adam or killing Faye. The difficulty comes when her history seems to account for her cruelty so comprehensively that her decisions feel predetermined and out of her control in a different way than originally described. athy's lack of a moral conscience and sociopathy as a response to childhood abuse and trauma is still a fate that has been forced upon her, like a source of inborn evil, but lends itself to an explanation of systemic failures that made Cathy who she is, when the original novel postulates that her cruelty is natural. Humanizing Cathy Changes What Cal Must Overcome The consequences of this reinterpretation extend beyond Cathy herself. Much of Cal’s anguish comes from believing his resemblance to his mother reveals something permanent about him. His jealousy, anger, and desire to hurt others seem to confirm his fear that he possesses the same essential defect, and that he is destined to be like his mother. But if Cathy's decisions stem from a childhood wound, would Cal still be destined to repeat the cycle? By the end of East of Eden, Lee offers the Hebrew concept of timeshel, interpreted as “thou mayest.” Cal can choose how to act, regardless of his ancestry or previous mistakes. His mother’s cruelty does not settle the question of his own character. The novel’s moral reassurance depends on the possibility that even someone who recognizes evil within himself can build a different future. Giving Cathy’s behavior a tangible origin point shifts the terms of that struggle. Cal’s fear of inherited evil remains, but audiences have been offered a different explanation for the woman he fears resembling. Her cruelty emerges through experiences and responses to trauma—something much more human than some sort of malignant nature. Thus, the story places greater emphasis on how harm travels through a family and how later generations might interrupt it. It's true this emphasis supports Steinbeck's belief in change. But it also alters the symbolic force of Cathy’s character. Her apparent absence of conscience makes Cal’s fear especially terrifying: he worries that something fundamental within him may make goodness impossible. Because Cathy is evil because of trauma, this fear of inheritance feels a little less powerful, and it becomes much less of an obstacle. The strongest criticism of Kazan’s approach is therefore about how the added explanation changes the novel’s moral structure. Cathy’s frightening opacity serves a purpose, even when it makes her less psychologically convincing than the surrounding characters. Understanding her humanity changes the reader’s relationship to that purpose. Netflix’s East of Eden offers a compelling interpretation of how Cathy became capable of cruelty. In doing so, it revises the uncertainty surrounding what she represents. For a story so concerned with the freedom to choose, the crucial question is whether that explanation deepens her responsibility—or makes her choices seem like the unavoidable consequences of her past. Release Date 2026 - 2026-00-00 Network Netflix Directors Garth Davis Cast Christopher Abbott Adam Trask