East Of Eden Literary Analysis

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"East of Eden deals with the inexplicability of the emotion we call love" (Wyatt xxii). John Steinbeck’s East of Eden explores the enigma of love and attempts to explain the pernicious effects of love through the characters’ relationships. Proving very complicated, love takes many forms, spanning from a simple coquetry to deep romance. East of Eden explores three main types of love; romantic love, parental love, and sibling love. Romantic love, typically depicted as one-sided in the novel, has negative effects on the characters who fall for one another. All the men who adore Cathy have love that revolves around idealization and manipulation, this also appears true about Aron’s and Abra’s relationship. Parental love, or the lack of it, causes …show more content…

Adam and Charles, and Aron and Caleb do not have the opulence of experiencing a strong and affectionate brother relationship; they struggle with extreme sibling rivalry. In fact, the majority of the characters in this novel receive only tragic love, reflected from Steinbeck’s personal life. Steinbeck shows in East of Eden, by exploring different relationships, such as romantic love, parental love, and sibling love, that love is not purely positive and has negative effects. Romantic Love in East of Eden has a negative depiction and nearly always correlates with idealization. Cathy Ames uses manipulation in order to make men fall in love with her because she has a necessity of feeling in control. The men who fall for her, typically any man she confronts, view her as a paragon, idealizing her to the point of perfection. After burning her parents alive in her house leaves her with no family, she turns to prostitution and manipulates the first of the whoremasters she meets: Mr. Edwards. Cathy weakens the infamously strong Mr. Edwards and controls his emotions until, "He realized that he wanted this one for his own. 'I can't understand why a girl like you--' he began, and fell right into the oldest conviction in the world--that the girl you are in love with can't possibly be

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