Publisher and Conservator of Fine Literary & Contemporary Fiction
Publisher and Conservator of Fine Literary & Contemporary Fiction
There is something profoundly troubling about the modern appetite for reimagining great works of literature. It is one thing to adapt a novel for the screen, making the necessary accommodations of dialogue, pacing, and narrative structure. It is quite another to appropriate an author's creation and fundamentally alter its meaning.
Netflix's recent adaptation of John Steinbeck's East of Eden provides a particularly egregious example.
In Steinbeck's novel, Cathy Ames is among the most disturbing characters in twentieth-century American literature. Her monstrosity lies not merely in her cruelty, deceit, or capacity for violence, but in the possibility that she was born without the moral faculties that ordinarily distinguish human beings from monsters.
Steinbeck introduces Cathy with an extraordinary meditation on the nature of evil. Just as a child might be born with a physical deformity, he proposes that a human being might enter the world without kindness or conscience. Cathy embodies this unsettling possibility. Her wickedness is not conveniently explained by an unhappy childhood. It is a condition of her being, and Steinbeck leaves us to contemplate its implications.
The creators of the Netflix adaptation have apparently found this conception unacceptable.
In the new series, Cathy, portrayed by Florence Pugh, is furnished with a traumatic childhood, including sexual abuse, that offers a psychological explanation for her subsequent behavior. The monster is transformed into a victim. What Steinbeck presented as a disturbing possibility about human nature becomes a familiar narrative of injury and its consequences.
This is no minor alteration. It strikes at the philosophical foundation of Steinbeck's characterization.
Indeed, the adaptation's creator, Zoe Kazan, has openly acknowledged that she interprets Cathy's childhood differently from Steinbeck. But surely there is a distinction between interpreting an author's work and rewriting it to accommodate one's own convictions.
The question is not whether Kazan's understanding of human psychology is more enlightened than Steinbeck's. Nor is it whether childhood trauma can produce monstrous behavior. The question is whether a filmmaker has the moral right to substitute an entirely different conception of a character while presenting the result under the author's name and the title of his celebrated novel.
Great literature endures precisely because it challenges the assumptions of successive generations. Its purpose is not to reassure us that our contemporary understanding of the world is superior to that of the past. Yet increasingly, adaptation seems to have become an exercise in correcting the dead, who are conveniently unavailable to defend themselves.
There is nothing objectionable about writing a new story in which a cruel and destructive woman is revealed to be the victim of childhood abuse. Such a story might be moving, psychologically persuasive, and artistically accomplished.
But it would not be Steinbeck's story.
The literary inheritance of civilization deserves something better than this casual appropriation. We owe great authors neither unquestioning reverence nor immunity from criticism. We do, however, owe them the integrity of their own ideas.
To change those ideas while retaining their names is not homage. It is a form of intellectual dishonesty.
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