“Adam discovered that his step-mother, Alice, had been walking around the house naked—and had been smiling. He wondered how she had dared such wantonness. And his longing (for a mother) was passionate and hot. He did not know what it was all about, but all the long lack of holding, of rocking, of caressing, the hunger for the breast and nipple, and the softness of a lap (from a mother).” Yet, he never spoke to anyone about what he witnessed or contended with any incidents “that can rip a house apart.”
Steinbeck wrote in his East of Eden Journal that he wanted to produce a book that reflected his beliefs and values. His stated theme in both publications is that “There is only one story: the human struggle over good and evil.” He wanted to develop this idea via a modern re-telling of the Bible stories of the Garden of Eden and Cain and Abel. He explained that his next challenge was to create characters, plots, and dialogue which reflected his beliefs. The passage above indicates that his first created character, Adam first struggled because he felt the lack of nurturance from a mother. Much of the rest of East Eden portrays an Adam in the Garden of Eden who sorely misses having a mother, and as a consequence, barely takes a stance in life’s struggles. Why did Steinbeck create such a character, and how will he react to life’s challenges as an adult?
With the above information about Steinbeck’s goals in writing East of Eden, I felt that, perhaps, we might be able to understand what he believed by following the actions, dialogue, and emotional inner workings of the books main character, Adam Trask. Adam was the first fictional character that Steinbeck created for East of Eden, and Steinbeck wrote that he thought deeply about how he wanted to portray this character. Once the author created his parameters, Steinbeck claimed that Adam virtually began to speak for himself. Adam is therefore ripe for a full analysis, as Steinbeck sustains Adam’s character from the beginning to the very last line of the novel. Consequentially, I will focus on several sections of the book that show us how Adam acts, and what he says or doesn’t say. Given that Steinbeck wanted his representatives on the page to speak for what he believed, it is ironic that Adam barely speaks for himself. In Steinbeck’s all-important struggle between good and evil, he appears to be less than human, and more like a “dead man” or a “ghost.” I will try to highlight where Steinbeck portrayed him as a human without reactions less than human, and consider why Steinbeck presented him like that.
With a name like Adam, he initially seems like a worthy symbol of the first man. Later in the story, he considers the importance of the names of his own two sons, rejecting the names of Cain and Abel because he thought it might bring them bad luck. Knowing that this is a modern re-telling of that Bible story indicates that his consideration was a bit of Foreshadowing.
We are first introduced to the Trasks of Connecticut, and to the themes of good and evil by the patriarch, Cyrus Trask, and his sons, Adam and Charles, who were conceived in that order by two wives. Cyrus earned a heroic reputation by shamelessly embellishing his Civil War record and profiting financially by this deception. In actuality, he only fought in one brief battle and got immediately wounded and become disqualified for additional combat roles. Yet, he wrote and bragged about fighting in Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, Bull Run, and Appomattox; sometimes his accounts happened at the same time.
At home, was the authoritarian and restrictive with his wives, manipulative, and overly demanding with his sons, Adam and Charles. He contracted gonorrhea as a wild soldier and passed it on to his first wife; she committed suicide rather than face the shame. “Cyrus mourned for his wife with a keg of whiskey and three old army friends. Steinbeck writes: “Baby Adam cried a good deal at the beginning of the wake, for the mourners not knowing about babies, had neglected to feed him.” Cyrus fed baby Adam “by stuffing whiskey rags in his mouth.”
In creating this dynamic, Steinbeck immediately establishes a case that Adam’s later behavior could have been affected by being mistreated early and deprived of a mother.
While Adam was still a very young infant, Cyrus quickly remarried to take care of the household duties. She immediately had his second son, Charles. Though younger, he quickly became more dominant and even highly physically and emotionally abusive toward Adam. Steinbeck writes:
“Young Adam was always an obedient child. Something in him shrank from violence, from contention, from the silent shrieking tensions that can rip at a house. Charles felt for his brother the affection one has for helpless things, for blind puppies and new babies.”
Steinbeck sees that Adam suppressed and internalized all his struggles rather than being able to express them or resolve them on a physical level. Adam’s emotional reaction to his seeing his step-mother in an Eve-like natural state demonstrates that he felt deprived by not having been nurtured by a mother, but could not express this frustration:
“Adam discovered that his step-mother, Alice, had been walking around the house naked—she had been smiling…He wondered how she had dared such wantonness. And he longed for her with a longing that was passionate and hot. He did not know what it was all about, but all the long lack of holding, of rocking, of caressing, the hunger for the breast and nipple, and the softness of a lap, and the voice-tone of love and compassion…were in his passion.”
Although Adam’s reaction demonstrated his maternal longings were also highly sensual, and that he was caught up in an Oedipus complex reaction of not being able to develop a natural bond with an opposite-sex parent. By presenting this situation, Steinbeck may be suggesting that such a significant deficit and their consequent deprivations might affect the way his character reacts to stress and social situations in the future. Steinbeck illustrates that Cyrus’ strict and abusive parenting did not help Adam to be nurtured.
“It was his little boys who really caught it.” Cyrus could not imagine any career for his sons except the army. “By the time they were in grade school, close order drill was as natural as breathing and as hateful as hell.” Even though Charles had more soldiering skills and was stronger, Cyrus seemed to favor Adam. Charles began to take out his frustrations by physically beating Adam. But Cyrus took no action no action to acknowledge or attempt to stop Charles’ physical and emotional abuse. Instead, he decided that Adam needed to join the army quickly to toughen him up.
“Adam feared the day he would be taken and enlisted in the army. His father never let him forget that such a time would come…It was Adam (Cyrus thought) who needed the army to make a man of him.”
Adam was both an obedient, and a very astute observer of his father. He understood, even before Charles, that their father had made up much of his heroic war story. Adam did not overtly react to this understanding, the narrator Steinbeck gives us a revealing insight into Adam’s emotional response:
“When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise…his world falls into panic…And there is one thing about the fall of gods; they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck.”
Steinbeck writes that Adam had found his father out and that his father’s methods had no reference to anything in the world. He understood that the training was not designed for the boys at all but only to make Cyrus a great man. With Adam’s silence on this observation, we can see that Adam cannot express what he sees or feels. In the next Litchatte, I will discuss how the sibling rivalry further weakened Adam’s psyche, and why he ultimately choose to join the army and drop communications with his brother and father.
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