East of Eden County: John Steinbeck, Joyce Carol Oates and the Afterlife of Cathy Trask

Gavin Cologne-Brookes

John Steinbeck and Joyce Carol Oates are united in diversity. The Steinbeck of Tortilla Flat is not the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath or the Steinbeck of The Log of the Sea of Cortez. The Oates of Bellefleur is not the Oates of On Boxing or the Oates of Blonde. No one book or theme defines either writer. But they do share a general concern with the causes and effects of social injustice and with the human capacity to perpetrate evil. More specifically, The Grapes of Wrath and especially East of Eden clearly inform Oates’s early work, and one character in particular, Cathy Trask, has provided Oates with a literary prototype for a certain sort of American that she has reshaped and re-examined throughout her career. This is not to overemphasize Steinbeck’s impact on Oates above or beyond many other writers, nor to ignore their differences. As Oates herself has noted, it is “dangerous to place too much emphasis upon influences” because writers are affected by so many other factors (Sjoberg 115). But it is also true that one of her many springboards for creativity has been explicit use of other’s works. Far from seeking to hide what Harold Bloom might see as anxieties of influence, Oates celebrates her communion with other writers. An early example is Marriages and Infidelities (1972), which includes rewritings of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” and Joyce’s “The Dead.” Equally, Childwold (1977) has been seen as a response to Lolita (Sage 190), and Oates called Foxfire (1993) her personal “‘Huck Finn’” (Johnson 396). More recently, she produced Wild Nights! Stories about the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway (2008), in which she loosely mimics the style of each writer to create imagined final episodes in their lives. “I absolutely don’t believe there is very much originality,” she says. “I just see myself as standing in a very strong tradition and my debt to other writers is very obvious. I couldn’t exist without them. I don’t have much autonomous existence, nor does anyone. We are interconnected—-it seems we are individual and separate, whereas in fact we’re not” (qtd. in Clemons 35). Indeed, an example of how Steinbeck and Oates are “interconnected” lies in the fact that in East of 184 Gavin Cologne-Brookes

Eden Steinbeck portrays Cathy as a reader of Alice in Wonderland, which she first encounters aged five but is still reading aged sixteen (though her mother tells her she’s “too big for that”) and alludes to moments before her suicide (84). Alice is a character on whom Oates has written, and one who clearly informs her fiction, and Alice in Wonderland, as I will show later, is a notable common factor between Oates’s writing and East of Eden.1 In her numerous essays about writers, Oates has rarely mentioned Steinbeck, but early reviewers made connections, and her first three novels, With Shuddering Fall (1964), A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), and them (1969), contain clear allusions.2 As a child of the Depression, born in 1938 to parents whose experiences of that era she has often written about, it is evident that she not only read Steinbeck at an impressionable age but made early use of his work to help feed her own. As one would expect of a first novel, With Shuddering Fall has many signs of literary influence. But it is the second and third novels that specifically echo East of Eden. That debt continues to reveal itself in many later novels, including Wonderland (1971), Do With Me What You Will (1973), Solstice (1985), Marya: A Life (1986), American Appetites (1989), Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990), Man Crazy (1997), Blonde (2000), I’ll Take You There (2002), The Falls (2004) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007). With Shuddering Fall shows that these seeds were sown early. This is the first of her many novels to take place in the mythical Eden County, a version of Niagara County in upstate New York where Oates grew up. Like East of Eden, With Shuddering Fall makes extensive use of Biblical allusions and the Edenic myth. A much briefer novel than Steinbeck’s, it involves Karen Herz, a farm girl who like Cal Trask suffers paternal rejection and eventual reconciliation. Abandoning a self- absorbed love affair that has alienated her family, Karen’s final sentiments contain a shift from “‘I’ to ‘we’” (GoW 206) that reveals her kinship with Tom Joad as much as Cal. At the same time, it illustrates Oates’s basic adherence to Steinbeck’s version of morality in East of Eden that rejects, in John Timmerman’s words, Cathy’s “narrowing isolation” in favor of a “life-loving principle,” an attitude that Cal’s reconciliation with his father confirms (233). Self-pity, reasons Karen, withers the heart, so it is “herself she must forget” (EoE 162). “When it came time to retrieve her life, identify herself,” she reflects, “she would