What Changes Were Made To Netflix’s East Of Eden Compared To The Book?

John Steinbeck’s classic 1952 novel East Of Eden has been adapted for the screen once again, this time in a miniseries for Netflix.

First brought to the screen in Elia Kazan’s 1955 film, and later adapted for a 1981 TV series, now creator Zoe Kazan is following in her grandfather’s footsteps as she brings the epic story of the Trask family to life.

Her new seven-part Netflix series makes some significant changes from the book, something noted by critics when reviewing the project.

And while Zoe said she set out with the goal of writing a “very faithful adaptation,” she told People: “There’s so much in this book, I couldn’t fit it all in, so I had to really kill some darlings.”

Here are the key differences between the book and the recent television show – as well as how this new adaptation differs from the iconic 1955 movie many of us already know and love…

When Zoe Kazan went to adapt East Of Eden, she felt it was important to shift the story’s antihero from the dark periphery to centre stage.

As a result, the malicious, cold Cathy Ames steps into the spotlight in this new adaptation, rather than focusing the story on the Trask brothers, as previous takes on the story have done.

“She’s so arresting, so shocking, singular, fascinating, and mysterious,” Zoe told W Magazine.

The showrunner used letters Steinbeck wrote to his editor about Cathy as a guidepost for expanding the character.

“Late in his writing process, he would say things like, ‘People will hate [Cathy] not because she is foreign, but because she is familiar’,” Zoe claimed.

“He was wrestling with the good and bad inside of himself, and I see that bifurcated into Cathy and Adam in the book.”

Zoe explained that she also approached writing Cathy from a different perspective from the book’s original author as a woman who “grew up in a body that was sexualised and targeted”.

“I read some of [Cathy’s] experiences differently than he does,” Zoe suggested. “And yet it was very important to me to find textual support for everything I was doing.

“Any places I imagined a little beyond the page, I needed a doorway to walk through that felt accurate to the book and its intentions.”

Seven decades after the book was written, Cathy stays a much-spoken about character in fiction.

Cathy was originally envisaged as a chilling characterisation on the author’s tumultuous relationship with his ex-wife, Carol Henning Steinbeck. In recent years, read through a modern length, audiences have humanised Cathy in their readings, with some theorising she may have mental health issues, and connecting her behaviour with trauma.

The new adaptation has taken more modern readings of Cathy to expand her character and backstory.

While Cathy is very much still the baddie of East Of Eden, Zoe Kazan felt the character’s malevolent ways needed more explanation than was given in the book.

The screenwriter told Tudum that she was “grateful” to “breathe some love and life into this woman who, yes, makes some awful choices, but also as a product of her time and a product of the trauma that she experienced”.

“It’s not as simple as calling her evil or bad. She is a full human that is dealing with an incredible lot from the moment that she’s born,” she continued.

Zoe added: “I think that really required me to do some unfolding rather than inventing. Basically, everything that’s in the series has at least a root in the book.”

Co-showrunner and executive producer Jeb Stuart also told TV Insider that with the Netflix version of Cathy, the team wanted to show the “lack of agency” women had in the time period and represent her “need to be free of a life defined by a man and the limited options available to obtain that freedom”.

The Telegraph declared the new East Of Eden an adaptation for the “feminist age” and they weren’t entirely wrong.

Zoe Kazan admits that while she is not creating something “explicitly feminist,” it’s almost impossible for her not to come from that “viewpoint”.

“That said, I don’t think Cathy Ames is a feminist,” she told W Magazine. “Maybe Lee is, but the way that we conceive of feminism now is completely different from how these characters would’ve thought it.”

While she called Steinbeck “profoundly humanist” she notes that he was writing in a “moment of great racism and misogyny”.

“I was trying to honour his impulse rather than the moment he was writing in,” Zoe added.

With more than 600 pages to adapt, East Of Eden is a large novel to bring to life, and the new retelling manages to get a decent chunk of the story into its seven episodes.

People who only know East Of Eden’s story through the 1955 film adaptation may be unaware that it’s predominantly about Adam and Charles.

This is because Elia Kazan’s film only covers the final third of Steinbeck’s novel. The movie omits Adam, Charles and Cathy’s origins and background, instead diving straight into Cal and Aron Trask as young adults.

The television series has more time to explore the character arcs and how Cal and Aron mirror the dynamic between their dad and uncle.

Because Cathy is placed centre stage in this adaptation of East Of Eden, less time is spent following Charles and Adam before she bulldozes their life.

In the book, readers spend more time with the brothers after their 13 years apart.

As Vulture’s critic noted in their episode two recap: “I’d particularly like to see Adam telling Charles about how he was imprisoned for robbing a store and then worked on a chain gang.

“That would have been good additional texture for the ‘Which brother is good; which brother is bad?’ question driving the series.”

Cathy Ames is the first face and voice audiences hear in Netflix’s East Of Eden, arriving into the lives of the Trask brothers bloody and beaten.

This automatically places Florence Pugh’s character in a more sympathetic light with viewers.

However, the book opens with a flowery description of the Salinas Valley in Northern California. In fact, Cathy isn’t introduced until the eighth chapter of Steinbeck’s classic, which instead takes more time to set up the Cain and Abel allegory between Charles and Adam Trask.

Steinbeck leaves no room for readers to garner sympathy for the character, either, introducing her with the line: “I believe there are some monsters born in the world to human parents”.

“The first thing that really grabbed me about it was Cathy Ames’s introduction. He goes hard.” Zoe told Gold Derby about the award-winning novel, admiring the “profound clarity of [Cathy’s] selfishness”.

In Steinbeck’s novel, Cathy has early sexual encounters and subsequently becomes a sex worker, although this is always portrayed as a voluntary and self-serving act. Symbolic of the era it was written in, Cathy’s sexuality is portrayed as something she uses to manipulate, not as something which has been abused by others.

Zoe Kazan’s new retelling focuses more on the violence, trauma and abuse Cathy endures at a young age.

“Does [Cathy] do some terrible things? Absolutely,” Florence Pugh told the LA Times. “Is she a product of the situation that she grew up in? Totally. You can’t get raped as a child and and you be totally fine for the rest of your life.”

Florence added that the creative team felt it was important to explicitly add this detail to the TV show, despite it not being in the source material.

“That little girl is so tiny you can’t even imagine anything bad happening to her, and the fact that she’s holding Alice In Wonderland, [in her mind], there’s so many through lines through Cathy and Kate’s life that all come back to that moment,” Florence explained.

She praised the showrunner for making Cathy human and for giving her “a cause”.

“That moment that is alluded [to in the book ] – if Cathy asked the boys to tie her down, and whatever it is that they were doing to her – it’s no longer alluded [in the series],” the Oscar nominee added. “That [assault] happened, but maybe people didn’t believe her.”

One of the biggest differences between John Steinbeck’s book and Zoe Kazan’s series is the exclusion of the Hamilton family.

In the book, the Hamiltons are introduced as a friendly, ambitious family who raise nine children in an infertile plot of land. Throughout the novel they act as the moral centre to the story.

Samuel Hamilton even acts as the main narrator for a good chunk of Steinbek’s novel, as he takes Adam out of his stupor after Cathy leaves him with two newborns.

In the show, Samuel – played by Ciarán Hinds – is still depicted as a wise character, albeit a supporting one.

After Samuel’s death, in the book the Hamiltons continue to play a key role in the story, but the only other Hamilton to appear in the show is Will, who Cal takes under his wing.

Producer Jeb Stuart admitted to People that this change was “risky”, but producers knew they could not adapt all of Steinbeck’s 600-page novel.

“We get little pieces of the Hamilton family, but if you’ve read the novel, one of the things that I loved about it was Steinbeck’s maternal part of his story, is in [the Hamiltons’ storyline], so that’s not there,” he shared.

“So it’s risky, the choice to do that, but the storyline carries itself better.”

Zoe Kazan admitted to People it “pained” her to get rid of the Hamilton family storyline, as well as telling The Independent: “There are things I had to leave behind that hurt my heart – there’s so much of the Hamiltons’ storyline that’s not in there, and the Hamiltons are some of my favourite characters in the book.”

The original East Of Eden film notably left out the character of Lee, Adam’s loyal housekeeper and close friend.

However, this new series brings him back into the Trask home where he belongs, with Hoon Lee portraying Lee this time around.

Lee’s absence from the James Dean film is predominantly because the movie focuses tightly on teenage Cal and Aron Traks, ignoring the backstory which includes details of Adam and Lee’s relationship.

The Netflix series’ version of Lee is loyal to the book. He helps Adam raise Cal and Aron, acting like a nanny as much as a housekeeper.

Lee is also the source of insightful discussions about cultural differences and the immigrant experience in America with Samuel Hamilton.

Zoe Kazan does still take some creative liberties with the character, though. In both the novel and show, Lee leaves the family, intending to open a bookstore in San Francisco, in the former, he gives up on this due to loneliness, while in the latter, he surrenders his dream due to racist exclusion.

Much of the episode where he leaves his position with the Trasks is devised by the writer, who imagined it to be like “a Wong Kar-wai movie”.

“I thought, ‘This character is so private; I felt like he was even keeping secrets from Steinbeck. I wanted to get to know him better’,” Zoe told Vuture.

And while the part of the series when Lee code-switches between a thick Chinese accent and perfect American English may feel like a contemporary addition, but it was directly taken from the book.

“That moment felt so incredibly modern,” Hoon Lee, who plays Lee in the new adaptation, claimed.

All seven episodes of East Of Eden are streaming on Netflix now