ABSTRACT
John Steinbeck’s East of Eden records several entwined generations of the Hamilton and Trask families and their lives in California’s Salinas Valley in the early twentieth century. The biblical story of Cain and Abel is retold in various ways throughout East of Eden, as various twin brothers born to the Trask family – Charles and Adam, Caleb and Aron – are fated to carry out the role of the wicked brother and innocent sibling. Steinbeck has his narrator inform us that “there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us” continually: the story of human beings “caught…in a net of good and evil.”1 It is this same narrator who countenances the possibility of
human monsters in the quotation that opens this chapter: human beings plagued by malformed souls, misshapen and horrible in their own way. But while Charles and Caleb are both fiercely jealous of their respective brother, neither is really credibly viewed as evil insofar as there is something morally redeeming about each. Charles is quite fond of Adam and deeply misses him when he is away; Caleb is reflective enough to acknowledge his wickedness and the novel’s final scene suggests that he may yet be redeemed. If there is a “psychic monster” in East of Eden, it is Cathy Ames, wife
of Adam and mother of Aron and Caleb. Cathy (also called ‘Catherine’ and ‘Kate’ in the novel) is responsible for all manner of evildoing: she murders her parents and fakes her own death; she shoots Adam and abandons her sons; while working as a prostitute, she poisons the owner of her brothel and turns it into “the most vicious and depraved in the whole end of this country”; she blackmails a host of local men after degrading and abusing them sexually, showing other characters the photographs she compiles over the years; she demonstrates a proclivity for corrupting the “fresh and young and beautiful”2; and so forth. Throughout East of Eden we see nothing redeemable about her and can only hope that her progeny do not follow in her stead. Cathy is a frustrating character if only because she is difficult to
understand. The narrator of East of Eden acknowledges that we don’t really know why she acts as she does, adding “there is little meaning unless we know why.”3 Lee, the Chinese cook and caregiver for the Trask family (and one of the more philosophically astute characters in the novel) regards Cathy as “a mystery,” noting that she lacks “kindness maybe, or conscience.”4 Adam is baffled by her, but he does suggest that she blackmails her johns just because she hates “the good in them,” the good that she “can’t get at all.”5 We are told that the tendencies that move Cathy have been with her since birth and she has never been like other people.6 In earlier times, she would have been subjected to exorcism and burned at the stake for the good of the community.7 What else to do with a monster? It is hardly uncommon to find putative evil people described as monsters;
apparently, “The monster has always been with us. … a rich source of human anxiety.”8 But what is a monster? What makes someone monstrous? Empedocles’ example of an ox with a human face is surely a monstrosity, a beast pretty close to the Minotaur, the monster of Greek mythology killed by Theseus. Aristotle seems to think that while such creatures “did not happen purposefully, but came about by accident” they are nomically possible – that is, possible given the laws of nature that govern the actual world – and thus explicable by science, at least in
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principle.9 By contrast, Noël Carroll denies that monsters are nomically possible insofar as he takes a monster to be “a being in violation of the natural order, where the perimeter of the natural order is determined by contemporary science.”10 There might be an equivocation in play here: sometimes our use of the term ‘monster’ suggests that we are utilizing the term in supernatural sense and sometimes in a purely natural sense. When ‘monster’ is used in the supernatural sense, it denotes beings that do not take up residence in any nearby possible world, beings like Voldemort and the vampires of Gothic horror novels and jinni and such. When ‘monster’ is used in the natural sense, it more likely refers to creatures like the shark from Jaws and perhaps Godzilla and Rodan and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Aren’t they just weirdly mutated beasties? Strange fruit fallen from the branches of the tree of life? Keeping these two senses of ‘monster’ separate might matter. Stephen
Asma notes that “the label of monster… is usually reserved for a person whose actions have placed him outside the range of humanity.”11 But what is it to be “outside the range of humanity”? Does that mean we tend to regard people as monsters if they are merely inhumane – that is, lacking in the kind of sentiment and sympathy that we expect from morally decent people? That suggests that ‘monster’ is being used in the natural sense. Or does it mean that we tend to regard people as monsters if they are literally inhuman – that is, not a human being? That suggests that ‘monster’ is being used in the supernatural sense. Attending to these two senses of ‘monster’ matters presently partly
because there is a tendency of the folk to describe putative evil people as monsters, but also because some philosophers suggest that evil and monstrosity are linked. For example, Asma suggests that monsters are both unnatural and evil.12 Dan Haybron intimates that evil people fall on a continuum somewhere between a full human being and something less human, someone rightly regarded as a monster.13 How does one understand these claims? Asma’s claim that evil monsters are unnatural makes sense only given the supernatural sense of ‘monster’. So understood, the existence of evil people implies the existence of supernatural beings. Can there be evil beings even if there are no supernatural beings? Can there be evil people only if there are monsters? Consider Haybron’s assertion that evil people are monsters and less than fully human. If that claim is read utilizing the natural sense of ‘monster’ I doubt that there will be much protest and the presumption will be that Haybron is speaking figuratively. If the claim is read utilizing the supernatural sense of ‘monster’ Haybron is committed to a fantastic ontology if he also supposes that evil people exist.
