Cathy Ames Does Not Need Our Sympathy

I love Florence Pugh, and I can easily imagine her being magnificent as Cathy Ames. What worries me is the way her new East of Eden is being sold. At an Atlantic Festival appearance , Pugh described it as her job to get viewers to sympathize with Cathy and “maybe fall in love with her a little bit.” Netflix calls Cathy an “antihero.” Why are we so determined to fall in love with the villain? In John Steinbeck’s novel, Cathy burns down her family home with her parents trapped inside. She later marries Adam Trask, gives birth to Cal and Aron, shoots Adam when he tries to stop her leaving, and poisons Faye, the woman who takes her in and leaves her the brothel. Cathy becomes a prostitute and then its proprietor. Why are we so determined to fall in love with the villain? Steinbeck makes Cathy frightening because she knows how to exploit goodness. Adam sees an innocent woman he can rescue, and his idealized picture of Cathy keeps him from seeing the person in front of him. Steinbeck even called Kate a “total representative of Satan” in a letter to a friend. He did not give her a tragic backstory to make her actions admirable. The 1955 film directed by Elia Kazan, Zoe Kazan’s grandfather, tells a much narrower story. James Dean plays Cal, a son desperate for the love of a father who favors his brother Aron. Jo Van Fleet’s Kate is already living in Monterey when the film begins. Dean’s Cal follows her through the street, trying to understand the mother he was told was dead. The movie cuts away much of Cathy’s earlier life and much of the novel’s philosophy, but it leaves us with a devastating question: If Cal came from her, is he doomed to be like her? The answer, in the book’s deepest moral argument, is no. Cal can be hurt, jealous, and capable of doing harm, yet still choose differently. That is why I find a Cathy-centered appeal for sympathy so uneasy. If every destructive choice is explained away as the inevitable product of somebody’s pain, what becomes of the possibility that anyone can choose good? I understand that every actress who plays the villain doesn’t think of him or herself as evil. Obviously a villain thinks they’re doing the right thing in their own demented way, so I only hope that the writing showcases her as evil while Pugh tries to prove her sympathetic because she’s an actress and she has to love her character to play her well. The series premieres October 1 , so we do not yet know whether it will uphold Kazan’s distinction of proving her humanity. The instinct to rehabilitate every villain has become its own sort of cliché. The instinct to rehabilitate every villain has become its own sort of cliché. From Maleficent to the upcoming Steps . Stories once trusted us to recognize wrongdoing, recoil from it, and see why courage and truth mattered. If we treat morality as a matter of whose perspective gets the most screen time, we lose that clarity. Cathy does not need our sympathy. She burns her parents alive, abandons her children, shoots their father, and poisons a woman who trusted her. If a storyteller wants us to forgive a villain, show us repentance. Show us what she sacrifices to repair the harm. Without a redemption arc, asking us to love Cathy is asking us to look past the people she destroyed.