east of eden literary criticism

That is one of the theses” (JN, p. 117). East of Eden is a jeremiad, but an infectiously hopeful one at that. The final scene is an accolade to the human spirit and to the human experience. unity in the work” (Owens 145). In the final scene of East of Eden, Steinbeck employs a cinematic device that he used in the ending of The Grapes of Wrath, where Rose of Sharon nurses a starving stranger, bringing to its epitome the theme of hospitality, or kindness to strangers, that has run throughout the novel. The question of naturalism and other strong disagreements with previous Steinbeck criticism figure prominently in Karen J. Hopkins’ “Steinbeck’s East of Eden: A Defense.” Hopkins echoes Ditsky’s commentary about “cookie cutter criticism” when she notes “that most critics who read East of Eden expect it to live up to some standard they’ve set, either for the novel as a genre, or for Steinbeck in particular, especially the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath” (63). Like Copek, Pizer believes that “the term is too encrusted with the clichés and polemics of past literary wars to serve as a guide to the complex individuality of either a major Steinbeck novel or Steinbeck’s work as a whole.” Clearly, both critics felt in 1974 that the term “naturalism” as it had come to be understood was “not particularly useful” when applied to Steinbeck. The path to the house is “overgrown.” The porch is “dark,” “sagging,” and “dilapidated,” and its steps “shaky.” “The paint had long disappeared from the clapboard walls and no work had ever been done on the garden. Steinbeck wrote one letter early each day from January to November 1951 as a way of limbering up for the writing task that lay ahead. 18). “pace,” “balance,” “proportion,” “necessity,” and “purpose.” About two months before the novel’s completion, he wrote to Pascal Covici: “This book which seems to sprawl actually does not at all. the heavy and obvious symbolism, and the unrealistic characterizations, all are prominent In the process of intently re-examining Genesis he suddenly discovered what he needed. In a manner of speaking, all three shaped the theme and structure of East of Eden, as will be seen in Steinbeck’s effort to explain the consequences of rejection with Cain and Abel as his frame. negate the possibility of She did not want her daughter to be a whore.” In his reductive statement, “A whore is a whore,” the sheriff denies their personhood—seeing them as objects to be used, not as human beings with intelligence, feelings, and potential for anything higher than prostitution. There was no picture on the wall, no photograph or personal thing of any kind. It is no accident that over and over in Journal of a Novel he concludes a letter to Covici with this phrase: “I will get to my knitting.” (211). “He doesn’t even want to know me.” Like father, like son, and the outcome is inevitable. Love and goodness, for both Steinbeck and Frankl, are inexorably intertwined, and that goodness, that love, endures—“the continuing thing,” “the thesis,” of which Steinbeck writes also in Journal of a Novel. melodramatics and much cheap sensationalism though it is, ‘East of Eden’ is a serious Abels handle rejection subtly—by isolation and withdrawal, for example; by compulsive behavior; or by submitting to manipulation. . I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. Their errors are failures of perception, knowledge, and imagination. Commenting on the behavior of Adam Trask, DeMott says the young Adam “foreshadows the separateness and isolation which characterizes Adam throughout the book.” DeMott’s “revisionary thesis” (his term) urges greater attention to three interests of Steinbeck—psychology, myth, and the processes of the creative imagination. In East of Eden by John Steinbeck, the individual family members earn their love only after struggling through loneliness, rejection, and sin caused by other family members. fans were very passionate in their response to his novel. It would be inaccurate to say that the naturalism they found missing had never been there, but it would not be incorrect to look at the comments of a Pizer or of a French and conclude that the naturalism Steinbeck displayed in East of Eden is not the naturalism the book’s reviewers expected to see. . particularly for lack of unity. Some readers may feel that there are so many cruelties, vices, and tragedies in this novel, culminating in Aron’s unnecessary death and Adam’s devastating stroke, that if it is “not insuperably far away” from Eden, it is not far away from hell either. The issue of whether or not Steinbeck “declined” is no longer argued and, while the question has never been resolved, it has been replaced by new and perhaps more productive studies which examine the wealth of the Steinbeck canon. my life. Good and Evil in East of Eden; Impotency of Money in East of Eden; Cathy Ames's Manipulative Power in East of Eden; The Usage of Language in East of Eden Hopkins echoes Ditsky’s commentary about “cookie cutter criticism” when she notes “that most critics who read East of Eden expect it to live up … I want her here. . Throughout the course of East of Eden, different members of the Trask family correspond to the biblical Cain and Abel at different times. In other words, in Part I, Charles, a Cain, did not struggle against evil, but Cal will; and because Lee intercedes for Cal, Adam will set Cal free to conquer “evil.” In a letter to Covici, Steinbeck calls Cal Trask his “baby”: “He is the Everyman, the battle ground between good and evil, the most human of all, the sorry man. Not possessive love, nor materialism, but love which affirms others as well as the self, is the sign of a healthy person. Steinbeck alerts his correspondent Covici to the importance of Aron, telling him to note the gradual, subtle development of Aron’s character. It was even criticized by some for inexpert biblical exegesis. They must, therefore, either keep striving to achieve their goals or else end up on “the slag heap.”, Like The Grapes of Wrath, then, the final scene of East of Eden ascends into the realm of the mythic, of the mysterious, of faith and religious belief in the human power of transcendence. Olive’s altruism and courage during the occasion leading up to her ride in the Army airplane further distances her from Cathy. reviewers criticized the novel for being melodramatic, for its unrealistic characters The false world in which he tried to wall himself off from the real one cannot stand the light of real experience. John Ditsky sought to explain the apparent change in Steinbeck’s style in the first chapter of his 1977 book Essays on East of Eden. Furthermore, as a part of nature, man often obscures his place and function and the true nature of his environment by putting on various kinds of blinders—whereas it is essential to both his happiness and his survival that he learn to see himself and his surroundings . For the Steinbeck of the 1930s, the role of the artist is to become “merely a recording consciousness, judging nothing, simply putting down the thing” (1); as a result the author “developed the device of the objective and dispassionate narrational voice.”. Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on East of Eden, in Novels for Students, Gale, 2004. Her goodness matches his. Believing that people follow patterns in their lives (JN, p. 151), Steinbeck wanted to show that to break out of destructive patterns begun by rejection, people must feel accepted by others. One day he wonders whether the novel will be interesting to anyone other than himself. Strength comes from love and weakness comes from loneliness. . As Jackson J. Benson writes in his definitive biography The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer: "[East of Eden] is a book that seems to grip the reader in a special way...Several of those aspects that had aroused the most criticism became, in an odd twist, the very that many readers found the most engaging: the intrusions of the first-person perspective, directly or indirectly, which told the author's … But they need to relate to the world without losing their individuality. .” (JN, p. 104). . But being free is a passage to knowledge—it is not knowledge itself. East of Eden, Penguin Classics Jan 1992 Calling the boys Caleb and Aaron (which he shortens to Cal and Aron), Steinbeck makes their initials match Cain’s and Abel’s. of Cathy (which, no matter how unbelievable, is unforgettable); and the blarney-philosophy Nevertheless, comparing the Journal and the published text can refine our understanding of the theme, for week by week Steinbeck commented on his theme and structure. is represented in the odd and despicable character of Cathy Ames. Whatever the critics ultimately conclude about it, the issue of what form of naturalism is present in Steinbeck’s writing will appear again and again in criticism which seeks to reevaluate the work. Steinbeck believed he had achieved this affirmative vision in his novel. What does the title East of Eden signify? He is too busy creating his Eden in the Salinas Valley. in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden Claire Warnick Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature, BYU Master of Arts In recent years, the concept of monstrosity has received renewed attention by literary critics. Two weeks later Steinbeck’s intentions remain firm; he says he has no sense of wandering from his purpose and he is about to reverse the “C-A theme” of the first section taking “the burden” from the Abel (Adam) and putting it on the Cain figure, Caleb, “my Cain principle.” “Charles was a dark principle who remained dark. Benson contends that Steinbeck was a naturalist, but differed from other American writers of this tradition: “he would become, to use a term more familiar to those involved in literature, the most thoroughgoing naturalist among modern writers” (236). Instead of being a small slice of life like Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, or Sweet Thursday, this work took on the whole life. Because the violent Cains are easiest to understand in East of Eden, people often see the Abel characters as simply “good.” Steinbeck shows their complexity in Adam. [. and on the whole successful effort to grapple with a major theme” (“Books of the Times” 21). Steinbeck might have pleased “the neurosis belt” (JN, p. 115) if he had offered mankind no hope, but if timshel weakens his art, it strengthens his value to more readers, which was more important to him. East of Eden was Steinbeck's magnum opus (which is Latin for "really big deal") after The Grapes of Wrath, and it is easily one of his most popular books. Robert DeMott’s view, which he himself labels “extremely revisionary,” stems from the proposition that “we have misread Steinbeck” who is “primarily a Romantic ironist, who experimented tirelessly with varying formal and technical elements in his fiction, and maintained an intense lifelong interest in psychology, myth, and the shaping processes of the creative imagination” (“The Interior Distances of John Steinbeck” 87–88). Although it was probably not apparent in 1975, the concluding sentence of French’s essay marks an important step forward both in Steinbeck criticism and in the reevaluation of East of Eden: Apparently from his observation during and after World War II, he reached the conclusion that man must take responsibility for his actions and that man is capable—however reluctantly—of taking this responsibility. Benson notes, overall, “[. Not only has she outgrown the story that she and Aron made up for themselves, she comments, “I don’t want to know how it comes out. This stain of one sort or another—this mark of Cain—all human beings share. flaws with: “But no one can doubt its merits as the work of a great storyteller. Rather, he feels that it was an “outgrowth” of Steinbeck’s naturalism, a further formulation or refinement of an idea he had worked out in his previous novels: Basic to his philosophy and carried over into East of Eden are the beliefs that man is but a small part of a large whole that is nature and that this whole is only imperfectly understood by man and does not conform to his schemes or wishes. Though Steinbeck wrote East of Eden, his “big book” (JN, p. 33), with a strong sense of purpose, critics have found it formless; and though he recorded his ideas about it daily, critics have been vague about his theme. On a later occasion when Adam goes to see Liza Hamilton “to pay [his] respects,” he walks up “wide veranda steps” to the “high white house of Ernest [and Olive] Steinbeck”—Steinbeck’s own parents. Instead, he “finds a supernatural power and presence observable in the natural, in the flora and the fauna and earth itself, and in humankind” (29). Most of DeMott’s premise hinges upon his discussion of the “interior life” of certain characters East of Eden and Winter of Our Discontent (a more detailed analysis of this argument follows here in discussion of changing critical reactions toward Steinbeck’s characters such as Kate/Cathy). I don’t think there is a single sentence in this whole book that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background” (JN, p. 153). Steinbeck irritated a generation of critics by violating these conventions, or, as Hopkins puts it, “there are certain things which can’t be done in a novel, and Steinbeck does them, QED” (63). extend” (JN, p. 154). Cyrus Trask, the first, is married to Alice, the first Abel. Tongue in cheek, Steinbeck tells of his mother’s reactions to the death of one of the neighborhood boys in Germany in World War I: If the Germans had known Olive and had been sensible they would have gone out of their way not to anger her. A dressing table near the bed had no bottle or vial on its ebony top, and its sheen was reflected in triple mirrors. Source: Barbara A. Heavilin, “Steinbeck’s Exploration of Good and Evil: Structural and Thematic Unity in East of Eden,” in Steinbeck Quarterly, Vol. . French continued to explore what he felt was a change on the part of Steinbeck from naturalistic to other forms of writing in “John Steinbeck: A Usable Concept of Naturalism,” originally published in 1975. The book was adapted as the 1955 film East of Eden by director Elia Kazan, starring James Dean and Julie Harris. Steinbeck’s Best” B6). He wrote that the opposites of good and evil, strength and weakness, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, are inseparable: “neither can exist without the other.” Out of the interaction of these opposites, “creativeness is born.”. . So it is that the mysterious processes of life place Charles (a Cain character) in close proximity to Adam (an Abel character) and through their stormy interaction Adam is forced to seek his own destiny, away from his brother. and been reviewed by over 6,100 people. But Copek is careful to emphasize a less often-quoted passage from Ross in which he notes that Steinbeck was “the first . work I have ever done. Another connection to the main theme appears in Chapter 34: “In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. . in Benson 732). He desperately needs (or thinks he needs) to shut out anything that seems to him impure. The stair treads seemed to crumple under his weight and the porch planks squealed as he crossed them.” As the front door opens, he sees “a dim figure holding the knob.” Images of darkness, decay, and the chaos of neglect provide a fitting backdrop for Cathy’s own psyche. “In some strange way my eyes have cleared. But this manmade Eden is not built on solid foundations, so it is no surprise (except to Adam) when it crumbles. No glimmer of light reduces the inevitability of her destruction—physically or psychically, or both. today, confirming a 1952 New York Times assertion that East of Eden is “a strange and original work of art” (“A Dark and Violent Steinbeck Novel” BR1). Word Count: 3454. “I think there is only one book to a man,” said John Steinbeck as he wrote East of Eden. But through Lee, Steinbeck presents a translation that sets man free—“thou mayest.” This translation gives man a choice. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love.” But the theme is stated specifically in the middle of the book, Chapter 22; Steinbeck corroborates this fact (JN, p. 104). The words "cut off " … They become ashamed of their nakedness (yeah, apparently Eden was like a nude beach). DeMott backs away from his somewhat radical suggestion in the last sentence of his essay by saying, “It is time, I suggest, to recognize Steinbeck’s adherence not only to the tradition of mimetic or empirical writing, but to the larger and infinitely more exciting tradition of Romantic fictionalizing” (99); apparently Steinbeck used not only naturalistic elements but other elements as well. East of Eden - Literary Analysis - Part Three. The focus of the book then shifted to Cal. To examine the destructive cycle seems to have been Steinbeck’s plan from the start. techniques. Here he brings up, separately, the Garden of Eden, the classic symbol for themes of good and evil; he had used the Cain story because his theme was different. The structural imbalance between the Trask and the Hamilton sections, the shifting identity of … success. Closely allied to the timshel theme, “Thou mayest rule over sin,” is this corollary and necessary metaphysical exploration that seeks to discover what goodness is and what evil is. Enacting Steinbeck’s similar belief in the human powers of choice and of transcendence, the dying Adam whispers to his son Cal, “Timshel,” thus assuring him that his own decisions—not genetic predetermination, not his monstrously wicked mother, Cathy/Kate—will determine his destiny. John Steinbeck had been envisioning his plan for East of Eden well before he began work on it. “I seemed to come out of a sleep,” said Adam. Word Count: 4669. One of his primary goals for the highly ambitious He had made Samuel confront Adam with the truth of Cathy’s perversion; and Adam had proved his strength. In his “Introduction,” Warren French divides Steinbeck’s work into two distinctive categories: the “Naturalistic” works and the “Dramas of Consciousness,” placing both The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden in the latter category. John Steinbeck John Ernst Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California, the only son of John Ernst Steinbeck Sr. and Olive Hamilton. East of Eden. Although Timmerman’s view is unique, it presents a plausible synthesis of other views. . Put another way, “Man, enjoying a narrow and therefore false security in his ability to decipher and understand his surroundings, is suddenly destroyed or nearly destroyed by the intrusion of facts that imagination has refused to acknowledge” (68). But Abra’s attitude is different. is that the universe of the novel is as fiercely deterministic as even the most determined naturalist could want, more deterministic and much less pleasant, in fact, than exterior nature in some of Steinbeck’s other novels” (67). His first idea for the title of the novel was “Canable.” Then he thought of “Cain Sign” before settling on East of Eden, which is itself taken from the Cain and Abel story. Unlike Cathy, then, Liza is like the ideal woman portrayed in Proverbs 31, for the “heart of her husband” could safely trust in her. These beliefs some critics label “Romantic,” or “sentimental.”, Steinbeck, however, is a kindred spirit of Viktor Frankl, whose work no responsible, thoughtful person would dare label sentimental. And when he goes off to Stanford, he shuts himself off from the life around him. saying, “I am getting flocks of letters [ . His worst offense was belaboring the words that “lift up . Other reviewers were not so gracious. She devotes herself, therefore, to the sale of Liberty bonds even though “she had never sold anything in her life beyond an occasional angel cake for the Altar Guild in the basement of the Episcopal church.” Whereas Olive, therefore, increases the size of her personal world to take on moral combat with the international enemy, Cathy’s world shrinks finally to her suicide in “the gray room” where in the end she grows “smaller and smaller and then disappeared—and she had never been.”. French concludes that in 1938 Steinbeck “was shaken out of the pessimistic viewpoint undergirding [his naturalistic novels]” (78) and points to Lee’s speech explaining the significance of the “thou mayest” translation of timshel to show that “Steinbeck’s post–World War II novels . Steinbeck’s first two works exhibited no naturalism, the works from Pastures of Heaven to Chapter 14 of The Grapes of Wrath are decidedly naturalistic, and everything from that chapter on is neither naturalistic nor post-naturalistic.
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