East Of Eden Literary Analysis

"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

sibling rivalry, which spurs jealousy and hatred. Cyrus loving Adam and Charles unequally, and Adam favoring Aron over Caleb demonstrates how parental love affects the characters. Sibling love focuses on how love does not exist without hatred and gives the characters feelings of inferiority.

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

anything but true and honest" (Steinbeck 92). Mr. Edwards refuses to let Cathy become a whore and takes her for his own. Throughout their relationship, Mr. Edwards, an cold-hearted whoremaster, falls deeply in love with Cathy. His infatuation with Cathy causes him great misery; as a whoremaster he learns not to trust women, but he trusts Cathy because of love’s effects on him. Once Cathy realizes she has complete control of him, she abuses her powers with impunity, so that she can obtain the money that she has wanted from the beginning. The exploitation of Mr. Edwards’ emotions causes his destruction; it weakens him and almost kills him (Steinbeck 94). After his horrible encounter with Cathy and love, “He went back to business and never again let the insanity of love come near him” (Steinbeck 98). Although Mr. Edwards idealizes Cathy, Adam Trask takes his idealization of Cathy to an extreme. From the moment Cathy appears on his doorstep, Adam views all of her manipulative actions as irreproachable. Cathy knows that she needs protection so by living with and controlling Adam, she persuades him to marry her. Throughout the entirety their marriage, Adam only views the Cathy he imagines in his head, “Perhaps Adam did not see Cathy at all, so lighted was she by his eyes. Burned in his mind was an image of beauty and tenderness, a sweet and holy girl, precious beyond thinking, clean and loving, and that image was Cathy to her husband, and nothing Cathy did or said could warp Adam’s Cathy” (Steinbeck 133). When Cathy shoots and leaves Adam with the twins, he does not have the ability to imagine that his perfect Cathy would commit such a horrendous crime, and views the twins as reminders of his loss. When reflecting on Cathy’s abandonment of the family, Adam realizes that he does not know whether or not Cathy has beautiful characteristics; Samuel discerns Adam’s idealization of Cathy and explains, “‘To you she was [beautiful] because you built her. I don’t think you ever saw her--only your own creation’” (Steinbeck 262). Even though Adam knows to an extent that Cathy differs from what he thought, her suicide affects him harshly and he experiences great agony. Aron’s romantic relationship displays a reflection from Adam’s relationship and his eminent view of his Cathy. From a young age, Adam develops an avid interest in Abra and has a strong determination to marry her. As they grow older and farther apart, especially when Aron goes to college, Aron makes up that distance with a fantasy of Abra; “Abra--well, of Abra he made his immaculate dream and, having created her, fell in love with her” (Steinbeck 524). Most of the romantic love in the novel focuses on men idealizing the woman they love. The idealization reflects Steinbeck’s own failing marriage with his wife Gwyn; "The marriage fell apart in a way that allowed Steinbeck to project onto Adam and Cathy a sense that men are passive and women are angry. And the parallels between fiction and experience were drawn by him. 'I'm afraid I built a person who wasn't there,' he wrote of Gwyn" (Wyatt xi). By making this character who differs from the personality of his wife, Steinbeck relates to Adam, Aron, and Mr. Edwards. Formed from idealization and manipulation, romantic love abysmally affects the characters who fall in love.
Parental love majorly causes jealousy among children; Cyrus and Adam demonstrate this point through how they favor one of their sons over the other. Cyrus neglects Adam after his wife commits suicide and this proves to be the first of many actions affecting Adam’s view of Cyrus. Cyrus’s actions escalate later in the novel when he treats Adam differently than Charles; he reveals that he loves Adam better while including several disparaging comments explaining how he would not have hurt Adam if he did not love him. When Charles learns how Cyrus favors Adam, he beats up Adam in an inimical manner due to jealousy. The effects of Charles’ love for Cyrus appear increasingly stronger after Cyrus’s death. Charles admits how much he loves Cyrus to Adam and for the first time he cries, displaying an unusual exudation of emotion. Astoundingly, Adam’s reaction to Cyrus’s death extremely contrasts Charles’ reaction; Adam’s response appears quite similar to hearing the news of a complete stranger’s death. The fact that Adam remains unharmed by his father’s death regards Charles’s emotions in a sardonic way, Adam rubs theses feelings in by admitting, “'Maybe it's wrong to feel good when our father's just died, but you know, Charles, I never felt better in my whole life'" (Steinbeck 64). Because Cyrus loved Adam more than Charles, Charles feels great jealousy from that lack of love, which explains the opposition in the reactions of the brothers. Adam goes on later in life to repeat the actions of his father and favor one of his sons over the other. Since their birth, he neglected the twins due to the fact that they were symbols of his loss of Cathy. Adam ignores them when they are young in age, but as they grow up he loves Aron more than Caleb. At one point, Caleb feels the lack of his father’s love so strongly that, "Cal wanted to throw his arms about his father, to hug him and to be hugged by him. He wanted some wild demonstration of sympathy and love" (Steinbeck 454). In contrast, Aron does not want to associate with his father, so he graduates high school early and leaves for college as soon as possible. Because of Aron’s absence, Adam constantly boasts about Aron’s achievements and success, while uttering no positive statements of Caleb. Adam bragging about Aron increases Caleb’s jealousy and Caleb desires to gain Adam’s love. Caleb configures a plan where he will acquire all of the money that his father lost previously and compile the earnings into a gift. Though Caleb did not know this at the time, the present was his attempt to buy his father’s love. Ultimately, Adam harshly rejects Caleb’s gift, unknowingly rejecting Caleb in the process. Adam goes as far as saying that a better gift than money would be the same gift Aron gives Adam: pride (Steinbeck 544). Afterwards, Caleb lights all of the bills on fire, watches them burn to ashes, and wallows in his jealousy of not having the paternal love his brother has, "His [Adam’s] rejection of Cal's gift was brutal, unfeeling, and this after he had begun a cordial relationship with his son" (Fontenrose). All of the rejection and lack of love from parental figures causes jealousy and sibling rivalry between the brothers in East of Eden. The lack of love causing sibling rivalry proves true for both Adam and Charles, and Aron and Caleb; without the unequal favoring from their fathers, Charles and Caleb would have a better relationship not only with their fathers, but also with their brothers. Parental love, or rather the lack of it, from Cyrus and Adam causes jealousy between their sons leading to sibling rivalry and the negative effects of love between brothers.