Can we imagine American literature without Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath, and (my personal favorite) East of Eden? We can’t because our understanding of ourselves has been changed because Steinbeck wrote them. As our docent at the National Steinbeck Center focused briefly on how East of Eden replicates the story of Cain and Abel over generations, I wonder why we focus on the obvious in that novel to the exclusion of the subtle. Yes, it is a novel about brothers, but only so that Steinbeck can explore the source of their damaged brotherhood: the powerful father who prefers one over another. I remember the King James Bible’s translation of that story. Cain and Abel both offer God a gift. Each gift is the young man’s labor of love. Why is the gift of a lamb preferred to the gift of the harvest? I imagine Cain’s arms loaded with the fruits of the field and garden—the colors and textures and sharp scents of vegetables warm from the field flashing like jewels. I see the lamb in Abel’s. Both are offerings of love to their Father. Only one is acceptable to the Father.
The biblical narrative does not give us enough information to know why God preferred one gift above the other. As I have taught East of Eden over the years I have often been delighted by the student who with a fundamentalist’s resistance to biblical interpretation nevertheless assures me that one of the gifts is preferable. God’s choice looks particularly arbitrary to me in this narrative. I suspect it also did to Steinbeck. Mothers are absent from East of Eden. Fathers arbitrary and unjust. (Cathy does not count because the narrator places her outside human parameters; she’s an obstacle, an unnatural phenomenon.) The motive for the biblical, first murder is the Father’s approval of one and rejection of the other.
Are we inherently good? Inherently evil? Cathy is born with what the narrator describes as “something missing”? Is Cal, following his mother, born bereft of some essential human quality? Or is it the coldly perfect Aron who lacks humanity? Steinbeck will not let us come to a simple conclusion. Timshel he reminds us again and again, even on the final page as the dying, unrelenting patriarch refuses to provide his son with peace and love at the last. What are we to make of the fact that others must step in to provide the unconditional love that is the root of our humanity? That we can father others? That we can and must parent those who have been damaged? That it is our duty if not our choice. Timshel.
~Margaret Downs-Gamble
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