Steinbeck’s Exploration of Good and Evil: Structural and Thematic Unity in East of Eden

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While reading Steinbeck’s Exploration of Good and Evil: Structural and Thematic Unity in East of Eden, consider:
1) Would you describe the novel as "sentimental"?  Why or why not?

2) Heavilin mentions Steinbeck's thesis.  What is his thesis?

3) Heavilin gives a number of examples of ways that Steinbeck portrays good and evil in his novel, from the physical location to the depiction of characters.  What other instances did you find?  Were there any symbols of good and evil?

“Steinbeck’s Exploration of Good and Evil: Structural and Thematic Unity in East of Eden”

In the following essay, Heavilin focuses on Steinbeck’s theme of humans being able to triumph over evil in East of Eden, and explores how Steinbeck develops characters and scenes to communicate this.

In the final scene of East of Eden, Steinbeck employs a cinematic device that he used in the ending of The Grapes of Wrath, where Rose of Sharon nurses a starving stranger, bringing to its epitome the theme of hospitality, or kindness to strangers, that has run throughout the novel. This scene has the effect of freezing characters in the enactment of theme. With similar effect, in the final scene of East of Eden, Adam lies paralyzed by a stroke. His friend Lee, his son Cal, and Abra, who will eventually marry Cal, stand around him. With Lee’s admonition and encouragement, Adam summons the strength to speak one final word of forgiveness, instruction, and inspiration to Cal: the Hebrew word Timshel, translated as “Thou mayest,” from God’s assurance to Cain in Genesis that he has the power to triumph over evil.

This final grouping of characters, like that in The Grapes of Wrath, symbolizes and affirms the theme that has run throughout East of Eden—that human beings can triumph over evil. This grouping serves also, however, to define Steinbeck’s own view of the nature of good and evil, a necessary and corollary theme, which has also run throughout the novel to reach its epitome in this final scene. The enormous wickedness of Cathy/Kate has not endured, for in Steinbeck’s view, overwhelming as evil may seem sometimes, it ultimately proves empty and transitory. Like Cathy/Kate’s life and suicide, evil lacks endurance and continuity. With his final word Adam has assured their son Cal that he is not bound by his mother’s evil nature, that he has the power to choose what is good.

Since the enduring strength of goodness lies in connections and continuity, this scene shows these characteristics, or qualities, in action. Adam’s Chinese friend, Lee, is by his side, faithful to the end. Concerned with both the peace of Adam’s own soul and the future of his troubled son Cal, Lee reminds Adam that “Cal will marry and his children will be the only remnant left of you.” Cal and his future wife Abra, therefore, show the continuity of generations. As Adam’s loving word Timshel sets Cal free to choose the good, by implication he and Abra will pass on to their own children the same freedom and power of choice, of transcendence.

In conversation with Cal and Abra before they enter Adam’s room, Lee reveals his own feeling of destitution when Samuel Hamilton died—“the world went out like a candle”—and his “stupidity” in thinking that “the good are destroyed while the evil survive and prosper.” With the analogy that the “craftsman” never loses “his hunger to make the perfect cup—thin, strong, translucent,” Lee affirms his belief that “whatever made us” never stops trying for perfection and that human beings have this same innate desire. They must, therefore, either keep striving to achieve their goals or else end up on “the slag heap.”

Like The Grapes of Wrath, then, the final scene of East of Eden ascends into the realm of the mythic, of the mysterious, of faith and religious belief in the human power of transcendence. The final scene is an accolade to the human spirit and to the human experience. Human beings need not be defeated by the evil they encounter, for there is greater strength in goodness than in evil. And they have the power of choice. These beliefs some critics label “Romantic,” or “sentimental.”

Steinbeck, however, is a kindred spirit of Viktor Frankl, whose work no responsible, thoughtful person would dare label sentimental. Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist imprisoned in Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps during World War II, emerged from his experiences with an optimistic belief in the capacity of human beings to withstand evil even in the face of the most monstrous evils in human history. Out of his own experience and from his own observations, Frankl declares that human beings have the potential to behave like “saints” or “swine,” that they have both potentials within themselves, but “which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.” This power of choice, Frankl writes, is “the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Enacting Steinbeck’s similar belief in the human powers of choice and of transcendence, the dying Adam whispers to his son Cal, “Timshel,” thus assuring him that his own decisions—not genetic predetermination, not his monstrously wicked mother, Cathy/Kate—will determine his destiny. As Frankl authenticates his pronouncement that human beings have the potential to behave like “saints” or “swine,” or to choose good or evil, so by his own observation and experience, Steinbeck must authenticate his own belief that human beings can overcome evil, that not all are destroyed. In doing so, through the lives of his characters, the Hamiltons and the Trasks, he carefully delineates and defines the nature of good and evil. Closely allied to the timshel theme, “Thou mayest rule over sin,” is this corollary and necessary metaphysical exploration that seeks to discover what goodness is and what evil is. This thematic exploration is closely allied to the novel’s structure, running from the opening pages describing the Salinas Valley to its dramatic enactment in the final scene. “pace,” “balance,” “proportion,” “necessity,” and “purpose.” About two months before the novel’s completion, he wrote to Pascal Covici: “This book which seems to sprawl actually does not at all. It is almost as tight as a short story.” A survey of his exploration of the nature of good and evil, a necessary corollary of the timshel theme, reveals that Steinbeck has an Aristotelian sense of wholeness in which the parts of the action fit together so that structure and theme in East of Eden melt into a unified, coherent whole. In “Outside of Paradise: Men and the Land in East of Eden,” John Ditsky points out the role of the opening setting in Stienbeck’s exploration of good and evil:

The dual possibilities of good and evil, life and death, which the Valley affords its onlookers, its potential settlers, are emphasized by the contrast of moods associated with the two opposed mountain ranges: the “light gay mountains” to the east, suggesting as they do a “brown grass love,” a maternal welcome, birth, and morning; and the “dark and brooding” peaks to the west, which intimate the “unfriendly and dangerous” sentiments, death and night.

Against this backdrop, symbolic of the good and evil poles between which human beings gravitate, Steinbeck sets the history of “the long Salinas Valley,” beginning with a nondescript tribe of Indians, then Spaniards who were greedy “for gold or God,” and finally Americans, who were even “more greedy because there were more of them”—who “took the lands, remade the laws to make their titles good.”

Into this valley Steinbeck’s grandfather, Samuel Hamilton, brought his wife Liza. In chapter 2, depending “on hearsay, on old photographs, on stories told, and on memories which are hazy and mixed with fable,” Steinbeck introduces the Hamiltons. In the second part of the chapter, he tells of the original settlers—some penniless and some wealthy, with Adam Trask among the latter. Steinbeck has thus set up two family strands that run through the novel to the end of Part 3, after which the Hamiltons are no longer present—at least not physically. Since Samuel has in a sense passed his patriarchal mantle of goodness on to Adam, however, this physical absence poses no structural problem—for both Lee and Adam are Samuel’s spiritual sons. Their relationship to Samuel is what Steinbeck calls “the continuing thing that bridges lives and ties the whole thing together” (JN, p. 116). He further elucidates what he means by “the continuing thing” in the next day’s letter: “I have the same reluctance you have to lose Samuel except that we won’t lose him. That is one of the theses” (JN, p. 117). Part of the power of goodness, then, lies in its continuity. Samuel has been a good man, he has lived a good life, and his goodness will survive. For both Adam and Lee take up his mantle: “Maybe both of us have got a piece of him,” said Lee . . . “I seemed to come out of a sleep,” said Adam. “In some strange way my eyes have cleared. A weight is off me.” “You even use words that sound like Mr. Hamilton,” said Lee.

Samuel’s presence and influence are felt, then, in the final scene when Lee recalls Samuel’s parting exultation—“like a bird song in the night”—in his affirmation that there are those “who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness.” Remembering, Lee acknowledges the “stupidity” of his previous belief that “the good are destroyed while the evil survive and prosper.” And Adam, also Samuel’s spiritual heir, whispers Timshel to his son Cal—freeing him from his fears that he is genetically predisposed to evil, enabling him to choose his own way.

As in character, deed, and word, Samuel is one of those who define the nature of goodness through their lives, he is also one who shows that goodness in this world always has some alloy, some stain. The alloy in Samuel’s goodness is a remembered love who comes to his mind “night after month after year, right to the very now. And I think I should have double-bolted my mind and sealed off my heart against her, but I did not. All of these years I’ve cheated Liza. I’ve given her an untruth, a counterfeit, and I’ve saved the best for those dark sweet hours,” he tells Adam.

This stain of one sort or another—this mark of Cain—all human beings share. Others in the novel share as well in this awareness of stain. John H. Timmerman points out, for example, that Horace Quinn “knows the evil that stands just on the other side of goodness; his response is to hold it communally in the delicate balance that brings peace.” Although goodness, then, has endurance and continuity and is not finally destroyed, at the same time it nevertheless has an alloy, or flaw—for nothing in this world achieves perfection. In this belief, as well as in his belief in the human power of transcendence, Steinbeck again reveals an affinity to Frankl. For, acknowledging his own stain, Frankl proclaims honestly of his Auschwitz experience that “the best of us”—those unwilling to sacrifice others to save themselves—did not come back.

Just as the continuing capacity of goodness is balanced by the diminishing quality of evil, so the alloy, or stain, inherent in all human goodness is balanced by at least a glimmer of a redeeming human quality even inthe most wicked. Even Cathy/Kate, in the midst of plotting Ethel’s murder— unaware that she is already dead—realizes that she does not want her son Aron “to know about her.” Daydreaming, she imagines his visiting her in New York:

He would think that she had always lived in an elegant little house on the East Side. She would take him to the theatre, to the opera, and people would see them together and wonder at their loveliness, and recognize that they were either brother and sister or mother and son. No one could fail to know.

Before committing suicide, she writes a note: “I leave everything I have to my son Aron Trask.” This slight glimmer of maternal protection and pride provides a glimpse of what might have been—connections she might have made, and affection she might have shared with her sons.

Here Steinbeck’s introduction of what to some has seemed contradictory and out of character stems from his observation that even the most evil may have a modicum of goodness. Steinbeck’s observation in this instance is similar to the Quaker tenet that along with the breath of life, God imparts a light that shines in every human being. That is, however wicked, a person may have some redeeming quality— even the Cathy/Kates of this world.

Despite this tiny speck showing the possibility of goodness—she is daydreaming after all—as Robert DeMott has pointed out, Cathy “embodies evil,” and she is written large purposefully in order to depict later the emptiness the nothingness, the void that is evil’s true nature. Thus, as the embodiment of evil she stands alone, her eventual diminution balanced by the continuity of goodness represented in Samuel, the Hamilton women, and Abra, who also participates in the legacy of Samuel because his mantle of goodness has passed to Adam and his heirs. From youth Cathy has followed a life of perversion, violence, and prostitution, corrupting young boys, instigating her Latin teacher’s suicide, burning her parents to death in their own home, shooting her husband Adam, forsaking her twin sons for a house of prostitution, and torturing and murdering Faye, the madam who loved her as a daughter and bequeathed her establishment to her.

The balance between the enormity of Cathy’s wickedness, which finally diminishes into nothingness, and the goodness of the Hamilton women, which extends in a long, continuing line, is probably best illustrated in two contrasting scenes: one depicting Kate’s house and her room and the other depicting the house of Olive, Steinbeck’s own mother, and his grandmother Liza’s room in that house. For the character of human beings and their attributes of good or evil may be discerned in their surroundings and their possessions. Having learned from Samuel that Cathy is in Salinas and that she is now a madam notorious for wickedness, after Samuel’s funeral Adam gathers the courage to encounter her for the first time since she shot him and deserted her family. He finds her house a picture of an anti-Eden. The path to the house is “overgrown.” The porch is “dark,” “sagging,” and “dilapidated,” and its steps “shaky.” “The paint had long disappeared from the clapboard walls and no work had ever been done on the garden. . . . The stair treads seemed to crumple under his weight and the porch planks squealed as he crossed them.” As the front door opens, he sees “a dim figure holding the knob.” Images of darkness, decay, and the chaos of neglect provide a fitting backdrop for Cathy’s own psyche.

Inside the house, however, Adam finds “richness and order,” and “Kate’s private room was comfort and efficiency”:

The walls were clad in saffron silk, and the drapes were apple green. It was a silken room—deep chairs with silk-upholstered cushions, lamps with silken shades, a broad bed at the far end of the room with a gleaming white satin cover on which were piled gigantic pillows. There was no picture on the wall, no photograph or personal thing of any kind. A dressing table near the bed had no bottle or vial on its ebony top, and its sheen was reflected in triple mirrors. The rug was old and deep and Chinese, an apple-green dragon on saffron. Luxurious as a showroom in a furniture store or the bedroom in a house decorated for display, Kate’s room mirrors the emptiness of her life—“no picture on the wall, no photograph or personal thing of any kind,” “no bottle or vial” on the ebony top of her dressing table The “apple-green dragon” on the deeppiled, saffron Chinese rug symbolizes her only connection— probably intended here to be “the dragon, the serpent of old, who is the devil and Satan” described in the Revelation of the Apostle John.

On a later occasion when Adam goes to see Liza Hamilton “to pay [his] respects,” he walks up “wide veranda steps” to the “high white house of Ernest [and Olive] Steinbeck”—Steinbeck’s own parents. “It was an immaculate and friendly house, grand enough but not pretentious, and it sat inside its white fence, surrounded by its clipped lawn, and roses and catoneasters lapped against its white walls.” When Olive opens the door, John and his sister, Mary, peek “around the edges of her.” Images of whiteness, neatness, and cultivated vegetation connect this house and the continuation of the Hamilton family living there—Liza, Olive, and her children, John and Mary—to the Edenic vision of goodness.

Liza’s “pleasant little bed-sitting room” is the polar opposite of Kate’s luxurious room, which has neither photographs nor knick-knacks. It is “crowded with photographs, bottles of toilet water, lace pin-cushions, brushes and combs, and the china and silver bureau-knacks of many birthdays and Christmases.” On the wall hangs “a huge tinted photograph of Samuel.” With her pet, an irreverent Polly parrot, who, despite all her efforts, refuses to “substitute psalms for the picturesque vocabulary of his youth,” Liza, who is new “old and old,” faces the end of her life with “iron gallantry.” Her room mirrors a life full of connections to loved ones, of affections and fulfillment, of celebrations and losses. She has been a fitting mate for Samuel. Her goodness matches his. Confident of her goodness and sure of her insights, when he and Lee have dreadful forebodings after the birth of Cathy’s twins, Samuel cries:

“I want my wife. . . . I want her here. They say miners take canaries into the pits to test the air. Liza has no truck with foolishness. And, Lee, if Liza sees a ghost, it’s a ghost and not a fragment of a dream. If Liza feels trouble, we’ll bar the doors.” Unlike Cathy, then, Liza is like the ideal woman portrayed in Proverbs 31, for the “heart of her husband” could safely trust in her. And as Samuel’s portrait is Liza’s counterpart to Cathy’s satanic “apple-green dragon,” so their lives have run opposing courses—Liza’s as a giver and nurturer of life and Cathy’s as a destroyer of lives.

In the voice of the narrator, Steinbeck broadens the scope of this exploration of the nature of good in the setting and in the two families, the Hamiltons and the Trasks, to include anecdotes and observations that further elucidate this theme. In one of these anecdotes, he tells at length about his own mother— briefly of her teaching experiences and marriage and then in great detail the events leading up to the United States Treasury Department’s awarding her the prize of “a ride in an army airplane.” Some critics of Steinbeck’s structuring of East of Eden have found this particular incident a diversion from the main story line, unnecessary to the novel’s thematic design. But, like her mother, Liza, Olive is one of those Hamilton women who, in the continuity of their goodness, serve to give balance to Cathy who, though written large, stands alone as an evil monstrosity.

Like Liza, Olive furnishes an antithesis to Cathy. As Olive is associated with the “light and beauty” that her son humorously describes her as forcing “down the throats of her reluctant pupils,” so Kate is associated with the darkness and grayness with which she surrounds herself, claiming that “light hurts [her] eyes.” As Olive has the “great courage” it takes “to raise children,” so Kate has attempted to abort hers. As Olive spared no effort in trying to save her son John from death from pleural pneumonia when he was sixteen—asking for the prayers of the Episcopalian minister” and the “Mother Superior and nuns,” and the “thought” of a distant Christian Science relative, as well as seeking out “every incantation, magic, and herbal formula, . . . two good nurses and the town’s best doctors”—so Kate has heartlessly shot her husband and abandoned hungry twin sons. As Olive is known for her love and courage, so Cathy is noted for her self-absorption and wickedness. Olive’s altruism and courage during the occasion leading up to her ride in the Army airplane further distances her from Cathy. Even though the anecdote is humorous, it nevertheless shows Olive’s love and courage in action. Tongue in cheek, Steinbeck tells of his mother’s reactions to the death of one of the neighborhood boys in Germany in World War I:

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 out after them. She had liked Martin Hopps. He had never hurt anyone.
When they killed him Olive declared war on the German empire.

She devotes herself, therefore, to the sale of Liberty bonds even though “she had never sold anything in her life beyond an occasional angel cake for the Altar Guild in the basement of the Episcopal church.” Whereas Olive, therefore, increases the size of her personal world to take on moral combat with the international enemy, Cathy’s world shrinks finally to her suicide in “the gray room” where in the end she grows “smaller and smaller and then disappeared—and she had never been.”

First awarded “a German Helmet,” then “a bayonet” and “a jagged piece of shrapnel set on an ebony base,” when Olive quadruples her sales record, she is “awarded the fairest prize of all—a ride in an army airplane.” Although she is terrified, she is courageously courteous and considerate of the pilot as he “barrel-rolled, made Immelmann turns, inside and outside loops, and turned over and flew over the field upside down” because he thinks she has consented to a “stunt,” a word which, distorted by his “goggled face and the slip stream,” Liza has interpreted as meaning that the throttle is “stuck.” Swallowing her terror because she believes that she must “encourage” him in a difficult situation, she keeps nodding and smiling brightly to “give him courage.” In contrast, when she is in labor, Cathy savagely bites the hand of the gentle Samuel who is trying to help her. Thus, this anecdote in the narrator’s voice is an essential part of the intricate “balance” for which Steinbeck expresses concern in Journal of a Novel. Furthermore, for Steinbeck’s own two sons, it endorses their own proud, continuing heritage of familial goodness.

Besides anecdotes, the narrator’s voice introduces also some of the personal observations that give authenticity to Steinbeck’s exploration of the nature of good and evil. One such observation is that in which the narrator muses on the attributes and contributions of “the church and the whorehouse,” which “arrived in the Far West simultaneously.” Although the narrator ironically relates the two, asserting that both accomplish “a different facet of the same thing”—to take “a man out of his bleakness for a time,” Steinbeck’s overall view of churches and whorehouses is not this simplistic or reductive. Rather, in the fuller context of the novel, the comments on churches and whorehouses serve to corroborate his observations of the alloy in goodness and the glimmer of light, or goodness, in evil. For the churches brought with them the Scripture on which our ethics, our art and poetry, and our relationships are built. . . . And they brought music. . . . And they brought conscience, or, rather nudged the dozing conscience. They were not pure, but they had a potential of purity, like a soiled white shirt. Though stained, the church has the potential for purity—its goodness flawed but not destroyed. The brothels, “the sister evangelism,” brought “release and joy for the body,” and their “celebrated madams,” who each combine “the brains of a businessman, the toughness of a prize fighter, the warmth of a companion, the humor of a tragedian,” are remembered by customers as “philanthropist, medical authority, bouncer, and poetess of the bodily emotions without being involved with them.” Despite this very male view of brothels, Steinbeck is not blind to the very dark, reductive, and destructive life of the whore, whose life lacks the sweet connections and continuity he associates with the life of the Hamilton women and Abra. To illustrate, in the narrator’s guidelines for being a madam, he notes, “You have to keep suicide at an absolute minimum, and whores, particularly the ones getting along in years, are flighty with a razor; and that gets your house a bad name.”

And even a madam does not want her daughter to become a whore, for when Faye begins “to think of Kate as her daughter, . . . her natural morality took hold. She did not want her daughter to be a whore.” In his reductive statement, “A whore is a whore,” the sheriff denies their personhood—seeing them as objects to be used, not as human beings with intelligence, feelings, and potential for anything higher than prostitution. Connected with this view of whores as non-persons, Steinbeck portrays them also as being among the lost ones, the drug addicts, who find solace in oblivion, in escape from the reality of their surroundings. For instance, in a conversation with Kate, a whore named Eva becomes so jittery that “her mind went to the box in her dresser drawer where her hypodermic needle lay.”

Although he recognizes the momentary “release and joy for the body” for the male frequenter of brothels, Steinbeck also faithfully portrays the isolation, loneliness, darkness, and sorrow of the life of the whore. No glimmer of light reduces the inevitability of her destruction—physically or psychically, or both. After all, even Kate herself, who glories in her brothel, is finally reduced to suicide and nothingness, as though “she had never been.”

In the end Kate is notable only because Adam must set Cal free of his fear that he is like his mother, that because of her he may be genetically predisposed to evil. Choosing her own isolation, she has left both husband and son to exult in their freedom from her as Adam whispers his parting word, Timshel. The cinematic freezing of this final scene brings to a fitting finale Steinbeck’s exploration of the nature of good and evil.

In Kate is also shown the possibility of goodness in her daydream of what life might be like with her son, Aron. And the continuity of goodness is portrayed in Adam and Lee, who carry the mantle of Samuel’s goodness, to be passed on in continuity to Cal and Abra’s children. The alloy of goodness, the impossibility of human perfection, has been illustrated in all of their lives. Representative of Steinbeck’s optimistic belief in the human power of transcendence, Lee, Cal, and Abra surround the dying Adam.

The scene is not one of defeat, but rather of triumph. In Adam’s courage to speak through his paralysis, in Lee’s faithful encouragement and support, in Cal and Abra’s love for each other and for Adam and Lee, the sting has been taken from death. For in this final scene Steinbeck once more shares a vision with the psychiatrist Frankl, who tells of its experience of communing with his wife during his imprisonment in the Nazi death camps, not knowing whether she was alive or dead:

Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. “Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.”

Love and goodness, for both Steinbeck and Frankl, are inexorably intertwined, and that goodness, that love, endures—“the continuing thing,” “the thesis,” of which Steinbeck writes also in Journal of a Novel. Adam, like Samuel, will continue.

Works Cited

Barbara A. Heavilin, “Steinbeck’s Exploration of Good and Evil: Structural and Thematic Unity in East of Eden,” in Steinbeck Quarterly, Vol. 26, Nos. 3–4, Summer/Fall 1993, pp. 90–100.