Are monsters created, or is one born evil? In East of Eden, future Nobel laureate John Steinbeck backs innate evil through Cathy Ames, one of the most ruthless femme fatales ever written. Now, a woman screenwriter has challenged his take on that chicken-and-egg ouroboros in Netflix’s seven-episode adaptation of the American classic.Steinbeck’s Cathy is a serpent-tongued Eve who leads men astray, leaving only death and regret in her wake. Zoe Kazan—granddaughter of Elia Kazan, who directed the 1955 adaptation starring James Dean—tells the story from the villain’s perspective.To the delight and dismay of Steinbeck’s readers, Kazan gives Cathy, played by Florence Pugh, a villain-origin story.Here is what you should know about how Steinbeck wrote Cathy, what the series changes, the split verdict on the adaptation, and the novel itself.Steinbeck’s Cathy Portraits John Steinbeck in 1962 and 1939. (Wikimedia Commons)I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.From the outset, Steinbeck describes Cathy as something inherently evil, calling her a “psychic monster” with a “malformed soul.”He says Cathy learns early to use sex as power. In Steinbeck’s telling, she gets two older boys punished for assaulting her. As a teenager, she seduces her Latin teacher, who kills himself. She sets fire to the family home with her parents inside, empties her father’s safe and fakes her own death. She sleeps with her husband’s brother on her wedding night, tries to end her pregnancy, takes over a brothel by poisoning its owner, and turns it into a house of sadomasochism and blackmail.With such a litany of crimes, she is portrayed as a soulless monster, a seductress, with Steinbeck reaching for Satanic descriptors to describe her: her feet are small and stubby, “with fat insteps almost like little hoofs,” and on one occasion, her tongue flickers like a serpent.Story continues below this adWhat the series changesIn the Netflix adaptation, Cathy commits nearly all the same crimes, but Kazan tries to rationalise it as a traumatic response of a child violated. The aforementioned carriage-house frame-up is replaced with a scene in which an older boy lures Cathy with candy when she is but a child. In her teens, her lovesick teacher becomes a predator, and her timid father is portrayed as a tyrant who whips her and treats her as his property.In Kazan’s telling, Cathy is a woman exposed to the world’s cruelty at a young age, and rather than be exploited, she decides to manipulate the world and be cruel in turn.Her ambition to be free from the restrictions of society and family spurs her to escape all kinds of bonds, often through murder. She takes over a brothel through underhanded means, and uses it to gather blackmail. This is a perverted rebellion against the ambition of her contemporaries, motherhood and marriage, which in the mid-20th century would make her villainous even without the murders.Pugh told Radio Times that despite the empathetic treatment granted to a woman who in the original text is an irredeemable psychopath, Cathy is not given absolution; she does not get away scot-free.”Story continues below this adAlso Read | On its 250th, 25 novels that chase the white whale of a Great American NovelFor better or worse Published in 1952, East of Eden is a 600-page American saga. (Source: amazon.in)Many commentators have argued that the changes defang Cathy and reduce her to a traumatised victim, when she actually is an unrepentant perpetrator. It also robs the story of its originality by allowing a female villain with criminal tendencies who isn’t driven by a moment of desperation or a last resort.As the influential critic Louis Owens, who wrote in John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America, says, “Cathy is evil; that’s simply the way it is.”Many of Steinbeck’s detractors believe the changes to be an improvement, as they prevent Cathy from staying a one-dimensional character, the archetypal personification of the original sin that cost Adam Paradise, or even Lilith, who refuses to bend.The change allows the character to be more than an unflattering caricature of his ex-wife Gwen, with whom he had an acrimonious split, with allegations of infidelity thrown on either side.Story continues below this adBesides the novel’s central idea, timshel, the Hebrew word Steinbeck translates as “thou mayest,” gives the male characters the luxury of choosing their own path, but denies the same to Cathy, who is sentenced to be a monster from birth to death.Sarah Appleton Aguiar also argues in a 2005 essay that “Cathy’s malevolent nature tends to present itself only when she is feeling cornered or trapped.”Does Steinbeck hint at abuseBibliophiles who have already watched the adaptation point out that Steinbeck himself writes that Cathy learned very young that sexuality is “the most disturbing impulse humans have.”In chapter 17, the narrator doubts himself, admitting that without knowing what Cathy wanted, it is easy to call her bad and hard to say why. In the letters to his editor later published as Journal of a Novel, Steinbeck went further: “To that extent I am a monster like Cathy.”Story continues below this adAnd when a correspondent told him that Cathy only became believable at the end of the book, he replied that this was “when, through fear, she became like us.”What is East of Eden?Published in 1952, East of Eden is a 600-page American saga, which Steinbeck wrote for his two sons.Reception was mixed, with some calling Steinbeck moralistic, melodramatic, and misogynistic, but it quickly became a bestseller within two months. The book has never gone out of print, and it saw another burst of popularity in 2003, when Oprah Winfrey chose it to relaunch her book club.The Trask story retells the biblical tale of the rival brothers Cain and Abel twice: first through Adam and his violent half-brother, Charles, then through Cathy’s twins, gentle Aron and moody Cal.Story continues below this adVillain or antihero, Cathy remains its most argued-over character. Whatever one’s view of good versus evil, or nature versus nurture, a book that still sparks this much debate almost a lifetime after publication has earned its place among American classics.