Florence Pugh had a nearly impossible job with Netflix’s East of Eden. Cathy Ames is one of those literary characters people arrive with opinions about already fully formed. Audiences have one major complaint about her take on the character, but I think they’re wildly wrong. Netflix’s new seven-episode book-to-screen adaptation, created by Zoe Kazan, makes a different choice. Pugh’s Cathy is still capable of horrifying things, but the series gives her experiences and emotional context that Steinbeck largely denied her. Since East of Eden arrived on the streaming schedule on Oct. 1, that decision has become one of the biggest points of debate surrounding the show.(Image credit: Netflix)Cathy Ames Is a ‘Born Monster’The clearest version of the argument comes from The New Yorker, which praised the series overall but argued that its biggest false note is softening Steinbeck’s villain. In the novel, Cathy is described as essentially broken from birth. The adaptation instead gives her childhood abuse and reshapes several early events so viewers can understand how she became the woman we meet later.Steinbeck left very little room for that kind of interpretation. His Cathy lies, manipulates and murders her way through the novel with the moral temperature of a reptile under a heat lamp. She is a monster because, as Steinbeck presents her, that is simply who she is. The series gives her more motivation, and some readers think that fundamentally changes what the character is doing in a novel so preoccupied with good, evil and the choices people make between them.That debate spilled onto Reddit after Pugh explained that she does not view Cathy as simply “pure evil,” and some longtime readers were not thrilled:u/sumoraiden: No Steinbeck is pretty clear she’s born a monsteru/snoopwire: There are characters you can humanize, there are ones you can demonize. But when a story is a deep dive into good and evil in a society you can't flip them.u/LordJelly: The issue is Cathy as written IS a Lecter, Landa, Goth type character. She has opportunities to redeem herself and turns her nose up at them. She has no redeeming qualities, and there is no hint ever of her having any justification for what she does. She is black and white pure evil.u/broganism: The entire point of her character is that John Steinbeck was furious at his wife for having less sex with him when their son was born with health complications. Literally told her he wished their son would just die because the boy was taking up too much of her time. She left him. He wrote a book featuring the worst woman he could think of so he could tell everyone it was based on her.I understand the concern. Cathy occupies a very specific place in Steinbeck’s moral architecture. The novel repeatedly frames her as something unnatural, almost an embodiment of evil dropped into a book obsessed with whether people can choose good over bad. Although I think people are conflating understanding a character with forgiving one.(Image credit: Netflix)Pugh’s Cathy Is Still EvilCathy still does terrible things in this adaptation. The show does not suddenly reveal that she was secretly misunderstood all along or send her skipping toward redemption. She hurts people. She manipulates them. She makes selfish, sometimes monstrous choices. What changes is that the Midsommar star can play a complicated woman like she likes, but she also has the scaffolding of a real human character, which she needs to play those scenes convincingly.The English actress told Radio Times that she had to love Cathy enough to understand her, even while preserving the awful things she does. She said the series was trying to give the character context without pretending she escaped the consequences of her choices.That strikes me as Actor 101. You cannot spend seven episodes thinking, “I am evil because the author says I am evil.” People rarely wake up believing they're monsters. They have rationalizations, wounds, appetites, blind spots and private logic. An actor needs access to that internal logic, or else the character might ring hollow or become boring.One Reddit commenter, u/ConsistentGuest7532, made essentially the same point. They wrote:But from an actor’s perspective, you can’t “play evil” if you want to give a naturalistic performance. It’s part of a good actor’s job to justify what their character does and come up with reasons the character is the way they are.Frankly, I find that version of Cathy scarier. A woman born with a metaphorical EVIL sign hanging over her head can be fascinating on the page, particularly within Steinbeck’s biblical framework. On screen, though, Pugh lets us glimpse the person underneath all that cruelty, which makes her choices hit harder.The series gives Cathy reasons for what she does without excusing any of it. For my money, that distinction matters, and I think the Black Widow actress understands it perfectly. And hey, if this interpretation doesn't work for you, there are two earlier adaptations to revisit. The 1955 film starring James Dean takes a more humanized approach to the character, while the 1981 miniseries lets Jane Seymour embrace much more of Cathy’s “born evil” energy.Florence Pugh is terrific, but she is only one piece of an absolutely stacked cast. Christopher Abbott completely won me over as the family patriarch, and now I’m even more convinced he'll make an incredible Charles Xavier in the MCU’s series of X-Men movies.