East of Eden

The narrator reflects on the changing nature of culture on the creative mind. Siding with the individual versus the collective, the narrator worries that mass production will bleed into the human mind and erase the individual’s creative capacities.

Adam buys out his half of the family farm and then departs for the Salinas Valley with Cathy. He’s more in love with her than ever, although her behavior signals that she doesn’t really want to leave. When they get to California, Adam begins carefully searching for farmland. One day, he goes back to Cathy to find her nearly dead of blood loss. He calls for a doctor, who discovers that Cathy is pregnant and that her blood loss is due to her own botched abortion. She convinces the doctor that she tried to abort the baby because epilepsy runs in the family. The doctor agrees not to tell Adam about the failed abortion.

Adam zeroes in on the 900-acre Bordoni ranch a few miles south of King City. His only concern with the land is whether it has sufficient water for good farming. He meets with Samuel Hamilton to scout out the potential for a well. Samuel is boisterous, comedic, and proud of his family in conversation with Adam. He’s happy to help Adam figure out the water situation on the Bordoni ranch, but he warns Adam of a blackness on the land, like a curse or a bad feeling.

Despite their poverty, the Hamilton family is rich in learning:

Samuel raised a distinctly superior breed. They were better read and better bred than most of their contemporaries. To all of them Samuel communicated his love of learning, and he set them apart from the prideful ignorance of their time (147).

Thus, Olive Hamilton, one of Samuel’s daughters (and the narrator’s mother) becomes a teacher. Teaching in country schools as a young woman is a difficult and busy job, but Olive enjoys the opportunity it gives her to live in Salinas. She decides to marry a man from King City so that she can be further away from ranches and closer to a metropolitan culture.

Later in life, Olive joins the patriotic movement against Germany during World War I after a neighbor’s son is killed in combat. She sells bonds so successful that the Department of the Treasury arranges an army airplane ride for her—a special and distinct honor at a time before commercial flight.

Adam sets out to make an Eden out of his new ranch and farm. He hires Lee, a Chinese cook, to help him run the home while Cathy awaits the birth of the baby. Adam wants his home to provide a stable future for his children, and he “was not alone in his preoccupation with the future. The whole valley, the whole West was that way. It was a time when the past had lost its sweetness and its sap” (155). While the anxieties of the valley multiply, Adam rests in his happiness. He has his wife, a child on the way, and a home that he’s cultivating into permanency. However, Cathy feels trapped by her marriage and pregnancy. She’s suspicious of Lee, the only person whose attitude and thoughts she can’t penetrate no matter how carefully she observes him.

Adam sends Lee to fetch Samuel Hamilton for a well. Samuel finds out from Lee that he’s American—born, raised, and educated in California. However, he dresses as a migrant newly from China and speaks English with a distinct Chinese accent. Lee explains to Samuel that white people don’t understand him when he speaks with his normal accent because when they see him, they expect a Chinese accent.

Samuel helps Adam find water and develop a well for his farm. When Adam tells Samuel about his plans to create an Eden, Samuel asks about his Eve (Cathy) and reminds Samuel that “Eves delight in apples” (167). Later, while the group sits down to eat, Samuel finds Cathy disturbing but can’t quite figure out why. He’s particularly put off by a scar on her forehead that continues to get darker as their conversation continues.

That night, Cathy tells Adam that she’ll leave him the moment the opportunity presents itself. Adam doesn’t take her seriously and blames her statement on homesickness.

On his way back home, Samuel Hamilton thinks over his discomfort with Cathy. He tries to figure out what exactly about her made him shudder but can’t pinpoint the source. Back home, he tells his wife, Liza, about it. Liza believes it’s Cathy’s idleness that makes her bad to be around. Although Samuel could be jealous of Adam’s rich land and potential to grow and accumulate more wealth, Samuel is happy not to be Adam, married to Cathy.

The narrator questions whether he’s right to judge Cathy as purely evil. He thinks, “It is easy to say she was bad, but there is little meaning unless we know why” (182). The narrator acknowledges that people are essentially unknowable and that Cathy was in a situation she never wanted.

While digging a well with his son, Samuel strikes a meteorite. Just as he and his son discuss what to do about it, Lee arrives and asks Samuel to follow him to Adam’s ranch. Cathy has gone into labor, and the situation is odd. On the way to Adam’s, Lee and Samuel discuss Cathy, and Lee suggests that she fits the Chinese description of a demon. At the Trask ranch, Samuel sends a fitful Adam out of the bedroom and helps Cathy give birth. She bites Samuel’s hand with ferocity, but he sticks through it. Cathy gives birth to twins, fraternal brothers. She refuses to hold them and says that she doesn’t want them.

Samuel leaves Adam with Cathy, and while Lee mends Samuel’s hand, Samuel tells Lee that he hasn’t been this afraid of something in many years. He still can’t quite articulate what that something is, but it’s coming from Cathy. In the following days, Cathy refuses to care for the babies, leaving everything to Liza Hamilton and Lee. One day, Cathy sends Lee away and packs her things. She tells Adam she’s leaving him, and when he tries to lock her in her room, she coaxes him inside and shoots him in the shoulder.

Deputy Horace Quinn visits Adam to question him about the rumors that he’s been shot. Although Adam deflects, eventually he acquiesces to part of the truth. He says that the shooting was an accident, and he doesn’t know where his wife is. Later, Horace hears about an odd new sex worker at a brothel in the town of Salinas. Although she’s excellent at her job, her new boss can’t figure out what’s so strange about her. She fits the description of Cathy based on her hair, eyes, and noticeable scar. The Salinas sheriff instructs Horace not to tell anyone because the two baby boys shouldn’t grow up knowing that their mother left them to be a sex worker nearby.