Against Nature, Pt. 16

On Earth there’s simply not
a more congenial spot
for happy-ever-aftering than
here in Camelot.

– Broadway’s King Arthur, convincing Guinevere of the superiority of his kingdom in Camelot¹

Steinbeck and his sister (and Broadway) had, of course, been influenced by the Norman Arthurian “Romances,” the first of which was written around 1136. According to the Wikipedia entry on its author, Geoffrey of Monmouth (“Geoffrey”)²:

In 2017, Miles Russell published the initial results of the Lost Voices of Celtic Britain Project established at Bournemouth University.[24] The main conclusion of the study was that the Historia Regum Britanniae appears to contain significant demonstrable archaeological fact, despite being compiled many centuries after the period that it describes. Geoffrey seems to have brought together a disparate mass of source material, including folklore, chronicles, king-lists, dynastic tables, oral tales, and bardic praise poems, some of which was irrevocably garbled or corrupted. In doing so, Geoffrey exercised considerable editorial control, massaging the information and smoothing out apparent inconsistencies in order to create a single grand narrative which fed into the preferred narrative of the Norman rulers of Britain.

So Geoffrey cobbled these texts together for his “history” to promote the idea that Norman and English aristocracy were both descended from Trojan blood. Thus, for the propagandist, it was perfectly within Norman rights to conquer the island and reign over its inhabitants. Later “romances” embellished Geoffrey’s already dubious stories, making Arthur weaker but “nicer”.

Women, in Geoffrey’s text, are primarily vessels for transmitting this “blood” to new generations. Arthur, in these first stories, conquers Scandinavia and Gaul. Then, when the Roman Emperor demands tribute, he attempts to conquer this empire also. In the midst of this attempt, he finds that his queen, Guinevere, has betrayed him by “living out of wedlock”³ with his nephew, Mordred, who had taken his crown. In the ensuing battles, both Mordred and Arthur are killed, and Guinevere flees to a nunnery^3b. Since she has no children by either partner, she is a scapegoat to explain why there was no tangible evidence to validate the aforementioned Trojan “rights.” Nevertheless, Geoffrey chronicles a “history” of the kings that succeeded Arthur, one that still ties these kings in some way to their “Trojan” roots. Although their stories were less epic than Arthur’s, however, there is little to no more proof of his narratives regarding them than that regarding Arthur.

I’ve written about the Welsh book, The Mabinogion⁴. Although there seems a “controversy” about which texts precede which, wouldn’t it make more sense to credit these tales as having been written (or, at least, transmitted orally) before those promoting the “rights” of their conqueror?

Following my Conquest-v-Sublimation theory, I re-examined the Welsh heroines in their stories. As in Demons, these heroines are more well-realized than those in their later counterparts. Rhiannon, a princess from a supernatural kingdom, refuses a marriage her father had arranged for her in favor of the mortal Pwyll, king of Dyfed. Although Gwawl, the man she had refused, tricks Pwyll into promising her hand in marriage to this original suitor, she gives Pwyll the tools and strategy to regain his bride and get Gwal’s promise not to take revenge for his humiliation. Unfortunately, revenge is delegated to others in Rhiannon’s supernatural realm. Her son, Pryderi, is kidnapped on the day of his birth, and her maids smear puppy blood on her to frame her with eating him. The boy’s kidnappers leave him at another Welsh kingdom, and Rhiannon doesn’t know for several years that he is alive. This is not even the end of her people’s revenge, which we will see soon.

The next story in The Mabinogion also concerns retribution against a woman. This time, the heroine, Branwen, does marry in accordance with the wishes of her family patriarch, Bendigeid Vran (“Bran”). Her half-brother, however, angered at not having been “consulted” in this betrothal, mutilates the horses of the court of her new husband. To quote my earlier summary⁵ of this brother’s outrages:

After causing a rift – one that his half-brother could only partially mend with extravagant gifts – Evnissyen joins his brothers to rescue their sister from the subsequent cruelty of her adopted court. He kills 200 men before burning Branwen’s son to death. Ultimately, little is left of either the country who’s [sic] sovereign Branwen had married or the army that had come to rescue her.

Pryderi is one of the kings who join in Branwen’s rescue (and he is one of the very few who survive.) These survivors enter a magical place where they do not perceive the passage of time. Although this serves to heal them, it means that Rhiannon does not see her son until 80 years after the war. Pryderi, after placing Bran’s head where he can alert his countrymen to French (Norman) attacks, returns and proposes that his mother wed Manawyddan⁶, a fellow survivor of the Irish war. Rhiannon is fortunately willing. But darkness soon descends on their kingdom, and, when the darkness is lifted, Dyfed has been destroyed.^6b The survivors attempt to make a living through various trades, but their superior ability at these trades leads them to be threatened with murder – in four different places.^6c On returning to Dyfed, Both Pryderi and Rhiannon are kidnapped, and can only return due to Manawyddan’s cunning. 

Yet another woman in these legends is used and abused by her family. A magician, Gwydion, offers his sister, Arianrhod, as a laprest⁷ for a Welsh king. This offering is part of a bizarrely convoluted scheme, in which Gwydion manipulates the king using his fetishistic need to rest his feet on a young maiden’s lap. To prove her maidenhood, Arianrhod must jump over a magic wand, a jump which forces her to instantly give birth to twins, one of whom becomes the ruler of Wales after Gwydion tricks Pryderi into a battle in which Rhiannon’s son dies.

This blog’s “Power Bases and the New 8” entry connects Gwydion with Merlin.  Putting these stories together reveals that Guinevere was a twisting of the Welsh stories of Rhiannon, Branwen, and Arianrhod in a familiar way.

I’m about halfway through Eden, and I’ve just finished reading Demons. Since I’ve given ample proof that the former is a conquest propagandist appropriation of the latter, I see no reason for reading any more of it. (Most of the rest is in the movie, which I’ve already watched.) I highly recommend Demons for my readers, and don’t want to spoil any more of it for them. I’ll return in a couple weeks with a new series. Meanwhile, I’ll leave the below clip, which encapsulates the “romantic” dumbing down strategy.

⁸

¹ Alan Jay Lerner. Camelot (1960). You can find a clip of the Hollywood version of this song on this blog’s “Grower’s Kabbalah, Pt. 4,” an entry listing it as an “object of desire” used to appropriate the dreams of utopians.

² Accessed 7/2/2026, 11:15 EST:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_of_Monmouth#Historia_Regum_Britanniae
[24] Russell, Arthur and the Kings of Britain: The Historical Truth Behind the Myths pp. 297–300

³ Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Translated by Lewis Thorpe, Penguin Classics (1966). ^(a) p. 257, ^b p. 259; on Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/bwb_O8-BVO-980/page/256/mode/2up?q=wedlock
Accessed 6/30/2026.
Full disclosure: I used Google AI to access the summary of Arthur’s conquests in this text.
Accessed 6/30/2026.

⁴ The link is to the results of a search for “Mabinogion” on my blog.

⁵ The link is to this blog’s entry, “Alternatives to ‘Cancel Culture,’ Part 7.”

⁶ I take it Rhiannon’s magical nature allows her to keep youthful enough to marry, when she must be about 100 years old by now. ^b This devastation could refer to the Romans’ having burnt the groves of the Druids in their effort to conquer Wales. ^c The link is to this blog’s entry, “Alternatives to ‘Cancel Culture,’ Part 6.”

⁷ The link is to The Free Dictionary’s (Encyclopedia) entry for Gwydion. Accessed 7/17/2026, 3:44 pm EST.

⁸ Turner Classic Movies. “Harold Hill Sings ‘Marian the Librarian’ (Clip) / The Music Man (1962) TCM” YouTube. Posted 5/18/2025. Accessed 7/28/2026.

Against Nature, Pt. 15

ZOOT: Welcome gentle Sir knight, welcome to the Castle Anthrax.

GALAHAD: The Castle Anthrax?

ZOOT: Yes… oh, it’s not a very good name… Oh! but we are nice
and we shall attend to your every, every need!

Monty Python and the Holy Grail ¹

So far, we’ve seen elements of Demons’ Marya in three characters from Eden:

First, in Adam as the “good” sibling rival. He is the “Abel” to Lebyadkin’s/Charles’ “Cain” – I’ve written² of Adam as having been given the “holy fool” role in Eden that Marya has in Demons. Adam manifests this role in many ways: in not having fought his brother back when Charles beat him nearly to death twice; in not shooting at “Indians” when he is in the cavalry; in repaying a store from which, in order to escape a chain gang, he had stolen clothes; in his reasoning for escaping from the gang only three days before he would have been released³; in saving Cathy after being warned that he might get entangled in criminal affairs – Note her rewarding him by calling him a “fool” before shooting him, a shooting to “escape” to a life of prostitution.

More like the Cain and Abel story are two gift-giving anecdotes – one in which Adam gives his stepmother anonymous presents because he loves that she smiles to herself when she doesn’t think anyone is looking. She thinks these came from her own son, and he doesn’t correct her even after Charles has almost killed him with an axe. More importantly, he gives his father a puppy, a gift his father loves, when Charles had worked hard to earn money to present his father with a “pearlhandled German knife”^3b – a knife for which his father never showed real thanks, or ever even honed.

Of course, Marya is not only abused and bullied by her brother, she is also used by him – not only after he blackmails Nikolay for the contributions the protagonist had been sending to the “nunnery” for her care, but by her work that got the “captain” shelter before she met her benefactor.

I first mention my suspicion about Eden’s second character with which its author identifies Marya – Cathy/Kate – in “Against Nature, Pt. 12.”⁴ Here, Marya talks about having had a child, apparently with Nikolay (the character which we have primarily identified with Adam.) I mention elsewhere^4b that she is “crippled”⁵, and Eden compares Cathy to “a cripple”^3c when it introduces her. I recount that Marya’s brother whips her^4c and (at least ultimately)^4d “pimps” her – much as Cathy’s lover intended^3d (before losing control) early in her story. As early as Part 11, I mention the subtle identification of Marya with Water and Earth – positive in Demons, but inferior-to-evil – especially as related to Cathy – in Eden. Moreover, I show that both say cruel truths to their benefactors – if for vastly different reasons.^4e Finally, I should point out that one of the truths Cathy tells the whoremaster is how, before meeting him, she got her sexual experience from sailors who brought her “little tricks”.^3e My comment that Marya’s brother “at least ultimately ‘pimps’ her” points to the ambiguity of having to work in the “corners”^4f, work that likely included prostitution.

In Pt. 14, I link Marya with the third character, Steinbeck’s Aunt Dessie, by showing parallels between the former and her brother Lebyadkin and the latter and Steinbeck’s Uncle Tom. I’ll add here that there is a suggestion that the latter pair might have been inappropriately close⁶, a suggestion that leads to the most likely reason for the perverse transformation of this character from its original inspiration to the representative of pure evil in Steinbeck’s magnum opus⁷

Through the medium of a fourth, based on John Steinbeck’s own sister, Mary, we may see the reason behind how the other connections move all of Marya’s positive attributes to the male protagonist or twist them to help create the author’s “monster”. Since the author’s representative in the novel expresses no antagonism toward this sister, we need some more information.

Eden records that Mary wanted to be a boy.^3f In real life, Mary was a tomboy about three years younger than John, and biographies I’ve found⁸ record the pair as being very close. In his book, The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights^8b, Steinbeck writes the following dedication to this sister:

When I was nine, I took siege with King Arthur’s fellowship of Knights, most proud and worshipful as any alive. –In those days there was a great lack of hardy and noble-hearted squires to bear shield and sword, to buckle harness, and to succor wounded knights. — Then it chanced that squire-like duties fell to my siste of six yeas who for gentle prowess had no peer living. –It sometimes happens in sadness and pity that faithful service is not appreciated, so my fair and loyal sister remained unrecognised as a squire. –Wherefore this day I make amends within my power and raise her to knighthood and give her praise. –And from this hour she shall be called Sir Marie Steinbeck of Salinas Valley. —
God give her worship without peril.
John Steinbeck of Monterey
Knight

Part 13 of this series recounts Steinbeck’s narrator’s “recollection” of the first sign of Cathy’s psychopathology: At the age of 10, she meets two boys, of about 14 years old, in a barn. Her mother, looking for her, hears boy’s voices coming from there. When she enters, she finds her daughter laying “on the floor, her skirts pulled up. She was naked to the waist,”^3g and her wrists were tied. The boys later claim that she had been “playing with a rope”^3h when they were together, and that they did not tie her wrists. Cathy also mimics symptoms of shock that convince both her mother and her doctor, and she even manages to feign inability to speak for an extended period of time. Why would a 10-year-old, even if a psychopath, take the trouble to learn how to do all this to set up two older boys? We get none of the usual stories that we hear of children with conduct disorder – Cathy is well-behaved, and there is nothing said about damaging property, bullying others, or hurting animals.

I posed a question to Google AI (on 6/12/26, 11:12am EST) on whether the above was even possible, and the reply was:

In real life, a 10-year-old child's brain lacks the advanced cognitive development, spatial planning, and fine motor skills required to tie their own wrists into a convincing, tight knot and maintain a complex, malicious lie to authorities. When real children exhibit severe behavioral disorders (like Conduct Disorder), their violence is typically reactive, impulsive, and messy—such as arson or animal cruelty—rather than the chillingly premeditated, flawless frame-ups that Cathy pulls off.

Searching verification, I got results from the Lewis Nedas Law⁹ and Hodge Jones & Allen Solicitors websites¹⁰. Although these emphasize a child’s understanding of right and wrong, the brain-development evidence seems to also cover the self-control as well as the physical and intellectual ability needed to do what Cathy did.¹¹ If anyone knows differently, as usual, I would welcome the evidence.

In the early1950’s, Eden may have promoted rolling back some of the power that women had achieved when they helped the war effort. I have written about¹² some of the work that was done^12B in the 1970’s and 1980’s to erode progress made in the 1960’s. The below video is one of the more amusing manifestations of the latter effort:

¹³

Finding that Steinbeck was influenced by Arthurian legends, I remembered some blog entries on these tales – those in the Welsh Mabinogion¹⁴ and what I understand are French appropriations^14B of them. Before we proceed with our current texts, I think it would be a good idea for my next post to elaborate on the meaning of the sublimating legends and their “conqueror” appropriations.

¹ Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). Transcript from Internet Sacred Text Archive. Accessed 6/15/2026. The link is to Scene 11.

² There may be some significance in the difference between the Biblical Cain and Abel story and the siblings in Eden: Adam is the elder son here. In The Bible, the elder son, Cain, killed the younger one. The age difference would have made Charles “Abel.”

The link is to this blog’s “Against Nature, Pt. 10” entry, where we first posited Eden’s transferring the “Holy Fool” role to the victim of the only important female character in the novel.
(Note that the “parts” of this series are not all about the two novels we are comparing. We began this discussion in Part 7, so I will be creating a linked table of contents for this comparison soon.)

³ Steinbeck, John. East of Eden (1952). Published in Penguin Books 1979. On Internet Archive website, accessed 6/13/2026. ^(a) Chain Gang reasoning – he thought he owed the six months of work to his captors for having been a vagrant, p. 87;
_{. b} “pearlhandled German knife,” p. 24; ^c “cripple”, p. 58; ^d whoremaster’s intentions, p. 78; ^e “little tricks”, p. 77; ^f “wanted to be a boy”, p. 225; ^g “…to the waist,” p. 61; ^h “playing with a rope,” p 62.

⁴ The links are to this blog’s “Against Nature” entries in this paragraph: ^(a) Marya’s identification with Cathy, Pt. 14, ^b “crippled”, Pt. 13, ^c “whips her”, Pt. 12, ^d I use “pimping” here somewhat loosely, in that Lebdyadkin periodically extorts money from Nikolay for whatever value his sister had/has for our hero, Pt. 12. There is reason, based on what Lebdyadkin said (quoted in Part 14,) to believe that he quite literally pimped his sister earlier – i.e., What kind of work in the “corners” could this handicapped woman do to pay for both her and her brothers’ rent?; ^e I compare the cruel remarks of Marya to Cathy/Kate in Pt. 14; ^f work in the “corners”, ibid.

⁵ Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Demons (1871-72). In standardebooks.org. Accessed 6/14/2026. ^(a) Chapter 4 is titled, referring to Marya, “The Cripple”.

⁶ A participant on the Goodreads message board lists reasons for this interpretation:

...Dessie's first love that she never got over is not detailed but there is hint of scandal – as Dessie's joy was drained out of her, "Tom raged crazily through the hills like a lion in terrible pain". Will's attempt to stop Dessie moving back to the ranch to live with Tom and the unsaid thing he holds back from saying. Their elation when they reunite at the train station is pure romance! Chapter 33 [1], especially the conversation they have on their mainly silent summer evening walk up the hill, is full of aching and longing and confusion and awkwardness, then ultimately hope and fantasy in their plans to travel to Europe. - Posted by Eleanor (3/17/14)

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1744873-dessie-and-tom-hamilton
Accessed 6/16/26, 6:32am EST.

⁷ The link is to Wikipedia’s entry on “East of Eden,” an entry which cites:
. Ditsky, John (1977). Essays on East of Eden. Muncie, Indiana: Steinbeck Society of America, Ball State University. p. 3. Retrieved October 12, 2011…
… showing that this novel was Steinbeck’s intended “magnum opus.” Entry accessed 6/15/26, 4:18pm EST.

⁸ “John Steinbeck Bio.” steinbeck.org website. Accessed 6/16/2026
_. Further, on the Bonhams auction house web page promoting “John Steinbeck: The Mary Steinbeck Dekker Family Collection”: “Of all his sisters, John was closest to Mary… [I]t was Mary who makes a guest appearance in East of Eden, as the narrator reminisces about their gambols among the Salinas Valley while spinning his epic tale.”
_. ^b John Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, ed. Chase Horton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976)
_. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Acts_of_King_Arthur_and_His_Noble_Knights
_. Accessed 6/16/2026, 7:27am EST
_. Quoted dedication can be found, among other places, on the 1998 edition on: Internet Archive
_. https://archive.org/details/actsofkingarthur00stei_0/page/n9/mode/2up
_. (According to my Google AI search (6/17/26), the dedication was written in 1958.)

⁹ The link is to “10 Years Old: A Child, Not a Criminal” from Lewis Nedas Law website. Accessed 6/16/2026.

¹⁰ The link is to “Doli incapax: why do we hold our 10 year olds to have criminal responsibility?” from Hodge Jones & Allen Solicitors website. Accessed 6/16/2026.

¹¹ Steinbeck’s mentor, Ed Ricketts, was a biologist, and to some extent the author seems to have considered himself a “man of science.” However, while calling his “Monster” Kate an “accident” of nature, he creates her to very unscientific specifications – giving her – a child – supernatural abilities. Reading a bit ahead to his discussion of “timshel” (p. 246), could we say that Eden is essentially meant to justify scapegoating women so men can be “gods”?

¹² The links are to this blog’s entries:
. A) “The Prosperity Gospel and the Culture Wars, Part 5” entry. This discusses ritual child abuse and a coordinated effort to discredit those who claim to have been subjected to it. I had written the post using Wikipedia entries, and had been less fastidious about when I had accessed these texts than I subsequently became, and much of what I had linked has been altered. I still stand by my own experiences and what I had written in this entry; and
. B) “The Prosperity Gospel and the Culture Wars, Part 7,” which emphasizes the politics and some cultural repercussions from the mid-1970’s to the mid-1980’s.

¹³ Cliff Richard. “Cliff Richard – Devil Woman (Pop 77, 6th March, 1977)” YouTube. Uploaded Jul 11, 2025. Accessed 6/15/2026.

¹⁴ The links are to this blog’s entries:
. A) “Alternatives to ‘Cancel Culture,’ Part 5,” my first entry on The Mabinogion; and
. B) “Power Bases and The New 8,” where I discuss appropriations of Greek myths by their Roman conquerors and Celtic ones by French “Romances”.

Against Nature, Pt. 14

‘For three years,’ says Kirilov, ‘I sought the attribute of my divinity
and I have found it. The attribute of my divinity is independence.’
Now can be seen the meaning of Kirilov’s premise:
‘If God does not exist, I am god.’
To become god is merely to be free on this earth,
not to serve an immortal being.

― Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”
Quoting a character from Dostoevsky’s Demons¹

Both of our novels begin to set up for the climax by now, and it is harder to identify who in Eden is meant to represent whom in Demons. However, with what we have gathered over the past seven entries, we can roughly chart how Eden re-arranges elements of Demons to promote Steinbeck’s conquest ideas over Dostoevsky’s sublimation ones.

In the beginning of Part II of Demons (the section from which I found the “handkerchief parallel”,²) Stepan rants feverishly about his son, Petrusha’s, accusing him of shipping him, as a baby, to his sisters to raise. Admitting that he did so, Stepan protests, “my heart has been aching for you all my life.”³ He apparently had some literary argument with Petrusha involving a novel, Fathers and Sons⁴. (The jealousy here seems to do with ideas as much as with people – memes v. genes again⁵.) Note also that the boy is raised here by women, as opposed to Eden, where the mother abandons her children for men to raise – a much more rare occurrence.

To briefly finish our summary of Cathy’s (“Kate’s”) story to this point, after she joins the newest whore-house in King City⁶, the Sheriff interviews her, directing her to make sure that her husband and children never know she is there. Our last entry described Kate’s relationship with her madam and how quickly alcohol almost destroyed it. Kate, fearing she revealed too much to Faye when they had been drinking to celebrate Kate’s “adoption”, slowly poisons her to death, implanting, in her coworkers’ minds, the idea (an idea that she convinces others came from another employee)⁷ that she is the madam’s designated heir.

The next chapter covers the baby-naming mentioned in our last entry. I’ll summarize the next couple chapters of Demons with emphasis on some interesting parallels with Eden, starting with this chapter.

Nikolay, like Adam in Eden, “drew into himself”^6b after having been injured, and worried those around him. An old family servant, Alexey Yegorytch, “who had been like a nurse to Nikolay” gives him a note, and subsequently helps him leave unnoticed from the house and grounds. At the end of their property, he says, “May God’s blessing rest on you, sir, but only in your righteous undertakings,” then gives his master the housekey.^3b Nikolay proceeds to the old house in which Marya and her brother had rented apartments until recently, and there is an eighteen-months-old baby there. (Contrary to the reader’s natural assumptions, however, the child is not Nikolay’s.) Kirillov, a previous follower of the protagonist, is currently helping the girl’s grandmother care for her, and we get a fun description of him playing “baw” with the child. He expresses the idea used as this entry’s quote, and says he is going to kill himself to overcome his fear of death, thereby achieving the complete independence to which the quote refers.^3c (I should say here that Kirillov appeared much earlier in the novel, but I had not thought he would be very important, so had not mentioned him.) Here, taking care of a small child and discussing philosophy with Nikolay puts Kirillov in the role of Lee. This role is shared with Alexey – the aforementioned servant “had never before ventured to express himself in such language”^3d as his elegantly qualified blessing in his master’s presence: This self-expression recalls that Lee, in the baby-naming scene, drops his affected Chinese-English pidgin when speaking to Adam.

Nikolay then goes up to Shatov’s apartment. The two both “belong” to a powerful radical society, a society which will not let them leave. Nikolay tells him that he is married to Marya (but denies circulating rumors and her own assertion that she had a child – in fact, he claims she is a virgin) He further says^3e that that he intends to tell the whole town about his marriage. Shatov, in a frantic, disconnected way, then repeats previous philosophical musings of Nikolay’s. Jealousy, a key theme of Eden, is implicit in Shatov’s rant – He says that great nations each have their own gods, and only one of them can be true. (Although he got this idea from Nikolay, it is one in which Nikolay no longer believes – if he ever did.) Shatov himself then expresses jealousy of the protagonist. Of course, we’ve already mentioned Demons’ key sibling rivalry – that between Lebyadkin and his sister, Marya, and Nikolay next visits these siblings.

Captain^3f Lebyadkin, who has been sober for the most extended length of time since he had appropriated the money meant for his sister’s care, tells him that Marya is preparing for him, and while Nikolay waits, the “captain” tries to wheedle more money out of him. Among other tactics, he plays for sympathy: “In old days we used to get free quarters, anyway, for the work [Marya] did in the ‘corners.’ But what will happen now if you throw me over altogether?”^3g He further attempts to amuse Nikolay, since he had often played the fool for him in the past. The novel had already presented Lebyadkin as a bad poet, and here we get an example, entitled, “ In Case She Were to Break Her Leg.”^3h, a poem to honor Liza, a woman known for her horseback riding.

This section and the next track more with later chapters in Eden, so I’ll turn to them:

The first chapter of Eden’s Part III updates us on the Hamiltons. Una, the narrator’s studious aunt, marries Anderson, the inventor of color photography. Anderson hates her family and takes her far away from them. When she dies, he unaccountably ships her corpse to them, so they can see how living with him ruined her physically. The sight drastically ages her father, Samuel. In this section of the chapter, Steinbeck also writes of his sister, Mary, who “was braver and more ruthless than most,” excelled at sports, and wanted to be a boy. This desire is lampooned, except insofar as it motivates the girl to hurt her uncle’s feelings. We are told that she lost this desire when she discovered the (unnamed) “compensations for” being female.^6c

Tom, Samuel’s only unsuccessful son, writes poetry. To the narrator, “Poetry was a secret vice, and properly so.”^6d Tom loves his sister “Dessie” best. She is Samuel’s only unmarried daughter, and she owns her own store. Dessie loves to laugh, and this store becomes a refuge for the women of Salinas, allowing them to “be themselves”^6e (i.e., human). Dessie then has a tragic affair, a tragedy that “drained all the joy”^6f out of the woman, and apparently destroyed Tom. At the above-described section of Eden, Tom narrates one of the rare instances of his being drunk (“jolly”)^6g.

So, in place of Lebyadkin, a would-be poet and the brother of a woman who has a mysterious tragic affair, a brother who only now has become sober, Eden presents us with Tom, a would-be poet and brother of a woman who has a mysterious tragic affair, a brother who describes this rare instance of being drunk. Being sensitized to such details by now, I looked ahead. I then discovered that Tom, blaming himself for his sister’s death^6h, writes to their brother, instructing him to tell their mother, Liza, that he had been kicked by a horse, and then shoots himself in the head. Could these details be meant to call attention to Kirillov’s planned suicide? Adam’s mother and Cathy both kill themselves also, so suicide is a main theme in Eden.

Putting everything we know so far about Eden together, it seems, according to Steinbeck, that women who value anything above producing and/or supporting Aryan heirs are likely to hurt their fathers, uncles, and brothers, if not their husbands.

Finishing with Demons for now: Nikolay finally sees Marya, who lives in a much better-furnished place than when she was introduced. She says, “You’ve grown much fatter.”³ⁱ Then she briefly expresses terror, believing he is an impostor. She is not convinced by his telling her he will announce their marriage and take her to Switzerland. She further points out the superficial elitism of the people she had met at his family estate, and laughs as he runs away.

I’ve identified Cathy as Eden’s degradation of Marya. In the two instances when alcohol reveals Cathy’s cruel psychopathology to her benefactors, she calls them “fat”⁶ⁱ. Here, Steinbeck thus twists Marya’s insightful truth-telling into mere sadism. The hatred that such perversion of this character betrays requires its own entry. Meanwhile, I’ll leave a video from Better Call Saul, a text which offers a much more subtle depiction of sibling rivalry than I’ve seen in Steinbeck’s novel so far:

⁸

¹ Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. (1955), Tr. by O’ Brien, Justin. p. 108.
https://archive.org/details/the-myth-of-sisyphus-and-other-essays-camus-albert-1913-1960-o-brien-justin-1906/page/108/mode/2up?q=premise
Accessed from Internet Archive 6/7/2026
Note: This book spells Kirillov with one “l”. Since my copy of Demons spells the name with two, I am using that spelling for any other references to the character.

² For “handkerchief connection”, see this blog’s last post.

³ Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Demons (1871-72). In standardebooks.org. Accessed 6/6/2026.
^(a) “…all my life” Part 2 Chapter 1 Section 1.
_. ^b “…nurse to Nikolay”, .. righteous undertakings.” Part 2 Chapter 1 Section 4.
_. ^c “baw” (the toddler’s pronunciation of “ball”.) Part 2 Chapter 1 Section 5.
Note: I realize the above treatment of the character’s argument is rushed – more about it later, as suicide is an important theme in Eden. Further, although the actions in the body of this entry link Kirillov with Lee, like Samuel, he is very poor, though “he never noticed”.
_. ^d “…in such language” Part 2 Chapter 1 Section 4.
_. ^e Part 2 Chapter 1 Section 6. He had also just told this to Kirillov – This revelation comes as a shock to both. (As I’ve mentioned in Part 12 of this series, this relation will set Marya up as a scapegoat) I’ll also note here the ambiguity of whether Marya has had a child.
_. ^f Lebdyadkin had previously called himself a lieutenant, and “was caught with forged papers.” He began to call himself “captain” when he returned to town after blackmailing Nikolay.
– Part 2 Chapter 2 Section 2. This recalls the pretensions of Adam’s and Charles’ father to which I alluded in part 9 of this series.
. ^g “…throw me over altogether?” ibid, ^h “…Break a Leg” ibid.
. ⁱ “You’ve grown much fatter.”. Part 2 Chapter 2 Section 3

⁴ The link is to the Wikipedia entry for the novel by Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons. Accessed 6/6/26, 4:07pm EST.

⁵ The link is to this blog’s post, “Against Nature, Pt. 10”, which first mentions my hypotheses about Eden’s three main arguments, chiefly the “memes vs. genes” argument.

⁶ Steinbeck, John. East of Eden (1952). Published in Penguin Books 1979. On Internet Archive website, accessed 6/6/2026.
. ^(a) Chapter 19, Part 1 describes the city whorehouses. These descriptions align with the white supremacy theme we’ve discovered – Each has its own style based on a racial stereotype: The first house is run by a madam they actually call, “The Nigger” (giving it a “somber” style, not surprising for an establishment run by someone of a recently enslaved “breed”.) The second, for “a good laugh and a poke in the ribs,” is run by a woman nicknamed “Fartin’ Jenny” (summoning images of a rollicking Celt.) The new house, “the refuge of young men puling in puberty, mourning over lost virtue, and aching to lose some more,” is run by Faye (a “Jewish mother” type.)
_. Note: I should say here that the philosophical/theological discussion among Lee, Samuel, and Adam in the baby-naming scene may be an attempt to rival/answer the philosophical musings in Demons in the upcoming section, with Kirillov (Meaning “Son of Cyril”, one of the Eastern Orthodox brothers who invented the Cyrillic alphabet – Could this be why Steinbeck seems to reference the kabbalistic aspect of using Hebrew in his story, a reference posited in the “Second Samhain” entry of this blog?)
^{. b} “drew into himself”, p.203,
_. ^c “compensations for”, p. 225 This is the first appearance of the author/narrator in the story,)
. ^d “… properly so.”, p. 229, ^e “be themselves”, p. 229, ^f “…all the joy”, p. 230. ^g “jolly”, p. 232,
_. ^h Dessie has abdominal pains due to an illness she has kept from Tom, and he gives her salts. When she is near death he contacts the doctor, who calls him a “goddamn fool,
. ⁱ “fat” pp. 77 (Here, the narrator also describes Cathy laughing as her whoremaster runs out of the house he had bought for her.) and 190.

⁷ In addition to the similarities between Petrusha and Cathy/Kate listed in my last post, the former reveals a type of manipulation he uses that resembles one that Eden’s narrator tells us about Cathy. Petrusha confides to Nikolay, “There is no better dodge than one’s own character, because no one believes in it.” – Part 2, Chapter 1, Section 3. Eden’s narrator says that one of Cathy’s effective methods in lying is: “to tell a truth as though it were a lie. If one is accused of a lie and it turns out to be the truth, there is a backlog that will last a long time and protect a number of untruths.” – p. 59. It also seems telling that Kate, after drugging her new “mother”, revives her with an ammonia-soaked handkerchief at around the same point of Eden’s story (p. 191) as Stepan keeps a vinegar-soaked handkerchief on his head when recovering from talking to his recently-arrived son in Demons. (Pt 2 Ch 1 Sec 2.)

⁸ XCEntertainment. “Better Call Saul – Jimmy tells Chuck how he is going to die.” (from “Sunk Costs” episode, aired Apr 24, 2017) YouTube, loaded May 5, 2017. Accessed 6/11/2026.

Against Nature, Pt. 13

VILLAGER #1: We have found a witch, might we burn her?

CROWD: Burn her! Burn!

BEDEMIR: How do you know she is a witch?

VILLAGER #2: She looks like one.

BEDEMIR: Bring her forward.

WITCH: I’m not a witch. I’m not a witch!

BEDEMIR: But you are dressed as one.

WITCH: They dressed me up like this.

CROWD: No, we didn’t… no.

WITCH: And this isn’t my nose, it’s a false one.

BEDEMIR: Well?

VILLAGER #1: Well, we did do the nose.

BEDEMIR: The nose?

VILLAGER #1: And the hat — but she is a witch!

CROWD: Burn her! Witch! Witch! Burn her!

BEDEMIR: Did you dress her up like this?

CROWD: No, no… no … yes. Yes, yes, a bit, a bit.

VILLAGER #1: She has got a wart…

Monty Python and the Holy Grail¹

About a third of the way through our texts, we have arrived at what seems the last necessary background for each: Eden introduces us to Adam and Cathy’s infant twins – one of whom, Caleb, will become the novel’s main protagonist, and Demons introduces us to its chief antagonist – Caleb’s counterpart,² Petrusha.

Petrusha, the leader of a powerful radical society, is a ruthless man of great cunning. The scene that introduces him³ shows him smoothing over a potential scandal when letters are circulating that Nikolay had impregnated Marya; he portrays Nikolay as instead chivalrously trying to protect the abused, handicapped young woman. This positive vision of Nikolay remains with most of the witnesses even after Shatov, seeing through the deception (if only vaguely), punches Nikolay in the face – more about Shatov later.

I mentioned earlier that Cathy is intended to represent Marya⁴ and that Eden introduced her as a “monster”.⁵ Now that Demons has introduced its charming psychopath, Petrusha, I should fill in a little background I had skipped earlier. The first anecdote Eden’s narrator tells about the antagonist starts with her, at 10 years old, going out to the barn with two boys. After seducing them, she manages to tie her own wrists together before her mother arrives. Then, for a long time afterwards, she displays signs of shock and does not speak, making her mother and doctor believe she was just saved from being raped. The second tells of her, at the age of 14, killing her Latin teacher, making the death look like a suicide (and implanting the idea that he had “trouble in Boston.”) The third tells of how, at 16, she refuses to go to school to finish earning the teaching degree toward which she has been working. She makes her father angry enough to threaten her, and she runs away. After he found and whipped her, she “opened up,”⁶, cleaning the house without being asked. Some other ways in which she helped were:

She … stuffed papers all around the edges of the foundation to block the draft. When the kitchen door squeaked she oiled the hinges and then the lock that turned too hard, and while she had the oil can out she oiled the front-door hinges too. She made it her duty to keep the lamps filled and their chimneys clean. She invented a way of dipping the chimneys in a big can of kerosene she had in the basement.6b

She also learns from her father how to run his tanning business and the combination to his safe. The house soon burns down with her parents in it, and she leaves clues that she has been kidnapped or killed.

She runs away to Boston and becomes a whoremaster’s courtesan, controlling the “master” until he gets her drunk. She is then unable to control her own fundamental ugliness, and he threatens her into taking “a little trip” ^6c with him – He plans to take her from town to town, whipping and pimping her until she is “of no use anymore.”^6d He is too angry to control himself, however, and beats her savagely with a rock. He then abandons her body, believing he has killed her. She then revives enough to drag herself to the doorstep of Charles and Adam, who save her.

Skipping to the chapters I have read lately, after she escapes Adam, Cathy (now “Kate”), joins a whorehouse. The madam, Faye, quickly comes to see Kate as a daughter. She soon invites her to her room for a “surprise”, and shows her she has left everything in her will to Kate. Pressuring her “daughter” to drink champagne with her, Faye tells Kate she doesn’t want her to work anymore. Kate’s reaction to alcohol again brings out all her ugliness, and she talks cruelly to Faye and reveals plans she has for the house. Faye balks, and Kate drugs her.

Besides both Cathy and Petrusha being psychopaths, I found an interesting parallel between them that got me curious. After each interview with his son, Petrusha, Stepan “spent the whole day lying on the sofa with a handkerchief soaked in vinegar on his head.”⁷ He also exhibits a marked personality change at these times. Kate, after having drugged Faye, soaks a handkerchief in ammonia and holds it over Fay’s nose and mouth.^6e

This parallel motivated me to ask Google AI if there were any others. I’ll post the reply as is:

...Critics and literary scholars have drawn multiple striking thematic parallels between the two figures.

Several key narrative devices and character traits signify this conceptual link:

+ Destructive Masterminds: Both Pyotr Verkhovensky and Cathy Ames function as brilliant, hyper-rational manipulators who orchestrate the psychological and physical destruction of those around them simply to prove their power or satisfy their intrinsic sadism.

+ The "Soaked Handkerchief" & Sadistic Exertion: In Demons, Pyotr Stepanovich uses a moistened handkerchief to disorient, poison, or control his victims. Similarly, in East of Eden, Cathy utilizes manipulation, extortion, and secret substances to control men and destroy their lives.

+ Engineering Chaos and Rumor: Both characters rely heavily on spreading rumors, lies, and paranoia to control the masses. Pyotr manipulates the fragile psychology of the townspeople to incite a radical, nihilistic uprising, while Cathy weaponizes local gossip to blackmail people and ruin reputations.

+ Emblematic of Pure Evil: Both authors created these characters to embody the concept of pure, unadulterated evil. Cathy Ames is frequently analyzed as a representation of innate malevolence, just as Pyotr Verkhovensky represents the destructive, godless nature of 19th-century Russian nihilism.

+ Isolation from Humanity: Neither character possesses normal human empathy. Cathy views ordinary human beings as things to be used, and Pyotr treats his followers as pawns in a grand geopolitical chess game.8

In the last section of Eden’s part 2, Samuel has struck the protagonist, and in this case⁹ awakened him to his duty as father to his – until then – unnamed boys. The three men discuss the Biblical story of Cain and Abel philosophically and work to undo the damage that love for a bad woman has caused.

The information in this entry would lend further support to two of my theories: Steinbeck, in transferring all the evil of Dostoevsky’s male character to a “crippled” woman (in Eden, of course, a spiritual cripple), promotes the “genes over memes” argument (here, innate malevolence vs. philosophical nihilism) as well as the idea that a woman is only worthy of love to the extent she supports the continuance of (Arian) succession.¹⁰

I thought the below clip would lighten the mood:

¹¹

¹ Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) Transcript from Internet Sacred Text Archive. Accessed 6/5/2026.

² The link is to this blog’s “Against Nature, Pt. 9”, that hypothesizes which main characters in the older novel are meant to represent the newer one.

³ The link is to this blog’s “Against Nature, Pt. 12”, that summarizes Petrusha’s narration of this event.

⁴ The link is to this blog’s “Against Nature, Pt. 10”, that first mentions this suspicion.

⁵ The link is to this blog’s “Against Nature, Pt. 8”, that first discusses Cathy as the only major female character in East of Eden.

⁶ Steinbeck, John. East of Eden (1952). Published in Penguin Books 1979. On Internet Archive website, accessed 6/6/2026. ^(a) p. 67 (I should note here that, in Chapter 25, Cathy/Kate says that she made the Latin teacher commit suicide. – Viola 7/17/2026)
_. ^b “…basement” ibid, p. 68; ^c “a little trip” ibid, p. 78; ^d “of no use anymore.” ibid; ^e “nose and mouth.” ibid, p. 191.

⁷ Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Demons (1871-72). In standardebooks.org. Part 2 Chapter 1 Section 2. Accessed 6/5/2026.

⁸ Google AI answer accessed 6/4/2026, 2:22pm, EST. (I should note here, after having read all of Demons, that I don’t recall Petrusha using a soaked handkerchief to disorient anyone. If any of my readers find one, I’d appreciate a citation. – Viola 8/8/26.)

⁹ The other case of striking the protagonist was Shatov’s expression of disappointment in Nikolay in Demons. (See above.)

¹⁰ I know the Hamiltons are “Irish”, but it seems clear that Presbyterian Liza is Scotch-Irish, a nationality which is the chief enabler of the “supreme” Anglo/Aryan race. This blog has an entry on this relationship here.

¹¹ overkill2overdrive. “The Be-Sharps – Baby On Board” (The Simpsons) YouTube. Loaded Feb 18, 2011. Accessed 6/5/2026.

Against Nature, Pt. 12

[I]f the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment
when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

– William James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”¹

The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked;
and nobody will come.

– Ursula LeGuin “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”²

Returning to Demons’ “fool”, Marya Timofyevna, whom my last entry quoted, my first impression of the description of her home is that it reminds me of the “Omelas” quote above. Wouldn’t you know it, the next chapter of Eden I read brought up William James, whose above-quoted example inspired the idea for that very story. (This example, in fact, was taken from another novel by Dostoevsky.)

Chapter 17 of Eden mentions James as the author of a book that Samuel tells his son to find – Principles of Psychology.³ (Oddly, a word search for “psychology” in our Internet Archive copy of the text brings up only one other page where this word appears – over 300 pages later – and has nothing to do with the James classic.) Samuel then delivers Cathy’s twins, for which she bites his hand. An infection from this bite makes him very sick, but he tells everyone but Lee that he got hurt “in the tackle” “at the well head”^3b – another of the novel’s references to the evil that water represents (women).

Demons, meanwhile, soon hints at Marya becoming a scapegoat – she apparently had had a child by the “Adam” of Dostoevsky’s novel⁴, Nikolay. He is not only the son of the most prominent woman in town, who wants him to marry the daughter of a wealthy family friend, but is personally charismatic (charisma which my preliminary research on the novel reveals will make townspeople pin their revolutionary hopes on him – hopes which such a connection with a poor, handicapped woman would crush.)

Demons further narrates more of Marya’s background – Nikolay’s (admittedly unreliable) friend, Petrusha, recounts, “She wasn’t quite right in her head” even when they first saw her, but was “very different from what she is now. There’s reason to believe that in her childhood she received something like an education through the kindness of a benevolent lady.”⁵ She had long been abused by her brother, Lebyadkin, who whips her at least daily, abuse from which she apparently suffered much emotional and mental damage. While Nikolay had been living like a tramp, he encountered the young woman and protected her from abuse from one of her roommates. The young woman became enamored of him, and he arranged for her to be cared for in a “nunnery”^5b. Her brother found out the source of this arrangement, took her from her caregivers, and blackmailed Nikolay with scandal if he did not give the money directly to him. He now squanders the funds meant for her care on alcohol, and keeps his sister in the a squalid room where he does not feed her properly, while continuing to abuse and bully her.

I had read earlier that one thing that enrages Lebyadkin is that Marya calls him a “footman”, and “orders” items from him, orders that are only met with blows. Reading now of her youthful education alongside her brother’s sensitivity to being thought uneducated himself, I can infer sibling rivalry on the level of Charles for Adam in our other text. Together with what we have found so far⁶, it appears that Steinbeck took this sibling rivalry theme for his novel and removed all sympathy from the “holy fool”, transferring it to his two jealous brothers.

I thought the below poster might put across Steinbeck’s message more clearly than he would have wanted:

⁷

¹ The link is to this board’s main entry on this 1891 William James essay. For the curious, I’m linking one with additional commentary here. I later found that “Moral Philosopher” is not James’ first philosophical essay, since he had written one, ‘The Sentiment of Rationality”, in 1874 (good thing I had used the word, “perhaps” before that statement.) I link this blog’s analysis of the older essay here. Anyway, I did want to point out here that James seems a bit disingenuous in referencing “Tolstoi” right after raising this dilemma, and never mentioning Dostoevsky.

² The link is to this board’s entry, “Third August Speculation Day,” which entry is a brief appreciation of LeGuin’s short story.

³ Steinbeck, John. East of Eden (1952). Published in Penguin Books 1979. p. 151. On the Internet Archive website. Accessed 5/26/2026. This direction is a bribe to get Samuel’s unwilling son, Joe, to stay and look after things at a worksite while he delivers Adams’ children. Samuel claims that Joe’s mother would be furious if she knew he had spent money on the two-volume text, thus enticing Samuel to consider this a fair exchange. I can also find no further reference to William James in the novel.
_. ^b “…in the tackle” “at the well head” pp. 158-159

⁴ The link is to Part 9 of this series, which tells who in Eden is meant to represent whom in Demons.

⁵ Dostoevsky, Fyodr. Demons. Part 1, Chapter 5, Section 6 in StandardBooks.org. Accessed 5/26/2026.
_. ^b ibid.

⁶ The link is to this blog’s post, “Second Samhain”, which discusses the later rivalry between Adam’s sons, Aron and Cal. It seems that Steinbeck saw this antagonism in Demons and made this idea, an idea recently coined “sibling rivalry” by psychologist David Levy in his 1941 studies, the primary driving force for the action of his novel.

Incidentally, Levy also coined the term, “maternal overprotection” in 1943, not long before the “nuclear family” became prominent in American life; then television became the “babysitter” for most families.

⁷ The Illustration is a poster found in the Wikipedia entry for Aktion T4 propaganda.
_. Accessed 5/26/26, 7:29am EST.

Against Nature, Pt. 11

“I don’t know that it’s a good idea for you to go over there.
Riches and idleness, devil’s tools, and you’ve not a very sturdy resistance.”

– Presbyterian Liza Hamilton to her more Irish¹ husband in East of Eden²

Steinbeck devotes a large portion of Eden’s Chapter 14 to his mother (all members of the narrator’s family are actual members of Steinbeck’s, and, it must be assumed, have the qualities that the author perceived in – or heard about – each of them,) Olive. This character, however, is irrelevant to the plot; her sole purpose could seem to be to contrast her qualities against those of Cathy, the main antagonist of the novel. Looking at the rest of this analysis, though, we can see Olive’s usefulness in warding off the criticism of misogyny. Lastly, she can be seen as an attempt to rival Dostoevsky’s character from Demons – Liza.

Liza enters the narrative warmly greeting the protagonist and inviting him, the narrator, and Shatov³ to her family’s house. Here, she asks for Shatov’s help with a project she had conceived. She wants to publish a series of yearbooks⁴ out of Russian newspapers, yearbooks that would gather important information of its ongoing history into texts that would be interesting to the common reader.

Steinbeck, to set his vision of what women should be against what he perceives is Dostoevsky’s, details the extraordinary challenges Olive must meet as a teacher in a rural county and the qualities that allowed her to overcome them. He also points out her determination to live in a town, to continue to get access to its cultural benefits. In addition to these fairly abstract observations, he offers some cute anecdotes to demonstrate that “her acts were based on feelings rather than thoughts,” but that these feelings were inherently correct (according to the Protestant work ethic.) I would hypothesize that Steinbeck is saying that the proper use of a woman’s talents (which talents he would not think include cultural ideas that would raise an entire country’s awareness of its history) would be to benefit those in her own family – or at least in her gene pool.⁵

Speaking of gene “pools”, after Adam finds that his wife is pregnant, his story, in Chapter 15, turns to preparations for his new dynasty. These preparations include digging enough wells to grow alfalfa and wheat to sell as well as personal flower and vegetable gardens and an orchard of some kind (but not apples – “that would be looking for accidents.”^5b) Learning that Samuel Hamilton (the narrator’s Irish grandfather,) is very good at finding water, our hero sends his inscrutable Chinese servant, Lee, to bring him to the estate to contract for the job. Samuel meets Cathy and instantly knows that something is wrong with her – as if his sense of evil were like his divining rod.

In fact, in addition to water, the other original classical elements⁶ figure prominently in this portion of the book, putting us in mind of Milton’s ordering of them in Paradise Lost⁷. Adam and Samuel discuss the strong wind (air) in their part of the country and how windmills can harness it to power the wells. When Adam describes how meeting Cathy changed his outlook on life from one of shades of grey into one of full color, Samuel says that, as a friend, “‘it is my duty to … kick [this outlook] in the face, then raise it up and spread slime on it thick enough to blot out its dangerous light.’ His voice grew strong with vehemence. ‘I should hold it up to you muck-covered and show you its dirt and danger…’”⁸ (earth). Lastly, when Samuel breakfasts with his own family the next morning, we get a vivid description of his wife’s pancakes being cooked on a griddle as we hear the stern woman’s (fiery) reproaches, reproaches that make Samuel laugh with pleasure.

The symbolism can easily be seen as an answer to a passage of Demons, in which the narrator meets this novel’s holy fool, an abused handicapped woman who discusses the “Mother of God”:

‘... the great mother — the damp earth, and therein lies great joy for men. And every earthly woe and every earthly tear is a joy for us; and when you water the earth with your tears a foot deep, you will rejoice at everything at once, and your sorrow will be no more, such is the prophecy.’ That word sank into my heart at the time. Since then when I bow down to the ground at my prayers, I’ve taken to kissing the earth. I kiss it and weep.9

That Eden’s Chapter 15 hints that Lee also senses that Cathy is evil leads to my final observations of the novel to this point: During Chapter 14, Steinbeck compares three people to cats: Olivia, Adam, and Cathy. While I was reading the next one, it occurred to me that, according to his novel, women, foreigners, and those with birth defects (like Cathy and, in his “holy fool” aspect, Adam) have an extra (animalistic) sense that allows them to live together with his superior breed. Could this be because World War II and fascism was still so fresh in his readers’ minds?

¹⁰

¹ The Link is to this blog’s entry “Organic Movements v. Astroturfing, Part 2”, which describes the role of the Scotch-“Irish” in colonizing Ireland, then America.

² Steinbeck, John. East of Eden (1952). Published in Penguin Books 1979. p. 146. On the Internet Archive website. Accessed 5/18/2026.

³ The link is to Pt. 9 of this series, which covers this character as far as I had gotten until now.

⁴ Dostoevsky, Fyodr. Demons. Chapter 4, Part 2 in StandardBooks.org. Accessed 5/18/2026: “…a presentation of the spiritual, moral, inner life of Russia for a whole year.”

⁵ Eden. p. 121. Olive’s “first border was the geography of her family, second her town, Salinas, and finally there was a dotted line, not clearly defined, which was the county line.”
_. ^b p. 136.

⁶ The link is to the Wikipedia entry, “Classical Element”. Accessed 5/18/2026.

⁷ The link is to this blog’s second entry on Paradise Lost, which discuss Milton’s ordering of the elements – with earth on the bottom and fire on top.

⁸ Eden. p. 137.

⁹ Demons. Chapter 4, Part 5.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/fyodor-dostoevsky/demons/constance-garnett/text/chapter-1-4#chapter-1-4-1
Note again the reproach of the later authors, Milton and Steinbeck, to the earlier ones, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky – the feminine elements are inferior-to-evil.

¹⁰ From University at Albany “Film Notes” Webpage: poster of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935).
https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/filmnotes/fns07n6.html
Accessed 5/18/26

Against Nature, Pt. 10

LOKAI: …Were we free to be men? Free to be husbands and fathers?
Free to live our lives in equality and dignity?

BELE: Yes, you were free, if you knew how to use your freedom.
You were free enough to slaughter
and to burn all the things that had been built!

LOKAI: I tried to break the chains of a hundred million people.
My only crime is that I failed. To that I do plead guilty.

BELE: There is an order in things.
He asked for utopia in a day. It can’t be done.

LOKAI: Not in a day. And not in ten times ten thousand years by your thinking.
To you, we are a loathsome breed who will never be ready.
Genocide for my people is the plan for your utopia.

– “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”¹

Demons’ plot centers around the murder of a handicapped young woman, a “holy fool”. The trajectory of the two novels we are comparing² makes me suspect that Eden’s main female character, Cathy, is intended to represent this character.

In the first entry of this series, I mentioned Eden’s reference to the displaced (if not decimated) inhabitants of Salinas Valley with the term, “inferior breed”. In Chapter 14, Eden’s narrator says that his grandfather “raised a distinctly superior breed.” Our introduction to Cathy starts with a discussion of “monsters” – describing birth defects and saying they are “accidents and no one’s fault…”

The identification of the two characters thus would suggest that Eden’s main argument against Demons is between what we would call the “genes vs. memes” points of view – For Steinbeck, then, evil in individuals and societies is caused by the former – either by breeding or by a genetic accident; trouble would primarily come from those born physically, mentally, or spiritually inferior. Pulling this opinion together with his “conquest” narrative, his god would be the “survival of the fittest” “principle”.

Eden makes a second argument clear in the beginning of Part 2: “Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music³, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy.” Thus he was another propagandist against the Russians (Soviets) in the second red scare.

Perhaps a third argument can be found in that Steinbeck transferred the role of “holy fool” to Adam⁴. Steinbeck seems to believe that women’s only legitimate purpose is to transfer their husband’s genetic material into heirs, so, with few exceptions⁵, they are a burden when not conceiving, carrying, bearing, feeding, and keeping young children out of trouble – and out of their fathers’ way. Thus, women can only be considered “saintly” if their whole lives are organized around fulfilling these functions for members of a superior breed. Maybe, also, this “holy fool” role is meant to cover Adam’s inability even to hear Cathy’s reasonable disagreements with his wishes, such as when she says she doesn’t want to go to California.

I want to end this post with a qualified retraction. Having gotten an impression through a perusal of the book earlier⁶, I commented on the lack of important positive female characters there. I found, later in the chapter about our narrator’s family, that he does describe the career of his mother, Olive. This subject requires a separate entry. For now I’ll just say that, given what I have found so far, Steinbeck wanted to be seen as fighter for the underdog, thus (subtly – unlike, say, Rush Limbaugh) maintained plausible deniability.

⁷

¹ Lee Cronin, Oliver Crawford, writers. “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (1969). Star Trek: The Original Series. Quote from The Star Trek Transcripts website. Accessed 5/14/2026.

² An interesting coincidence when researching Eden is that Steinbeck’s grandmother, Liza, has the same name as an uptight young woman in Demons. The latter Liza, however, is very attractive and complex, while the uptight teetotaler of Eden, though based on the author’s own grandmother, is a stock character. (The link is to the enotes webpage for Chapter 2 of Eden, accessed 5/15/2026.)

³ Lennon-McCartney, anyone?

⁴ At least, everyone in the book treats Adam as if he is a “holy fool”.

⁵ The link is to the first entry of this series, a post which lists the roles that patriarchs want to ultimately allow females.

⁶ The link is to Part 8 of this series, where I wrote a footnote which contains this comment. See also Steinbeck’s 1966 book/photo essay, America and Americans here in Internet Archive, where he complains of women meeting for lunch in restaurants. It almost seems as if the author thinks that widows are useless and have no business spending their money in public places.

⁷ sapatilha sanjo. “Nudge Nudge Monty Python” (1969). YouTube (Posted 2/17/2008). Accessed 5/14/2026.

Against Nature, Pt. 9

Hedley Lamarr: Now raise your right hand for the pledge.
[Evil Posse members raise their left hands]
Right! [Posse switches hands.]
Now repeat after me. “I…

Posse I…

Lamarr: “…Your Name…

Posse …your name…

Lamarr: [under his breath] Schmucks. [to Posse] “…pledge allegiance…

Posse …pledge allegiance…

Lamarr: “…to Hedley Lamarr…

Posse …to Hedy Lamarr…

Lamarr: That’s “Hedley”!

Posse That’s Hedley!

Lamarr: “… and to the evil…

Posse …and to the evil…

Lamarr: “…for which he stands.”

Posse …for which he stands.

Lamarr: Now go do that voodoo that you do so well! [Cheering and gunshots]

– Blazing Saddles¹

My first entries on these two novels have said almost nothing so far about Demons’ plot (Again, even in this allegorical story, Dostoevsky spends a great deal of time on characterizations.) Now, after finishing a couple chapters, I can at least supply the background.

The narrator and Stepan, his protagonist, are both writers supported by widow/heiress Varvara Petrovna. Varvara had, in a sense, “created” Stepan – who had only ever been a second-rate, liberal poet (who also affects being a man of science.) She gives her attractive beneficiary clothes to make him resemble a famous author she had worshiped in her youth, and she brings him into fashionable and intellectual circles to buttress Stepan’s (and her own) reputation. After trying, and failing, to insinuate him into the literary world of Saint Petersburg, she sends him abroad to “recruit”.² He makes a brief attempt to work in Berlin, then returns to his patron’s estate. Eventually, Varvara gives him his own house, and he gathers a circle of “higher liberals” around him. (One of these is Ivan Pavlovich Shatov, who is key to the plot.) Dostoevsky ends the chapter, through the Narrator’s somewhat partial view, with vividly illustrated descriptions of each member of this circle, and the reputation and dynamics of it.

Chapter II introduces the character Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch Stavrogin, Varvara Petrovna’s son and one of Stepan’s former students³. Although handsome and well-mannered, he has a streak of nihilism which moves him to outrageous offenses, including pulling an elderly gentleman by the nose and biting the ear of the governor. He feigns temporary mental illness, and is forgiven by the townspeople. His mother then sends him abroad.

Stepan, in addition to having been like both brother and father to his patron’s son, has a son of his own, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky (“Petrusha”). We find that Petrusha meets Nikolay during the latter’s excursion abroad.

Further, Nikolay becomes intimate with a childhood friend of his mother’s, Praskovya Ivanovna Drozdov, who lives in Paris. He is welcomed as a member of the family, and he and Praskovya’s daughter, Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushin (“Liza”, a former student of Stepan) form a bond. Varvara then visits Paris with her her protégée, Dasha (Shatov’s sister, another former student of our hero.) After Varvara and Dasha return, we find that Liza had flirted with Petrusha to get Nikolay jealous. Since Nikolay did not react as Liza expected – instead making friends with Petrusha – the couple have a slight falling out.

Varvara, apparently fearing that Nikolay had become enamored of Dasha, asks her to marry Stepan, then gets Stepan to agree to marry Dasha – causing him to fear that Varvara suspects he might try to seduce Liza.

By the end of the chapter, we find that Petrusha is expected to come to town to sell his property – property his father had mismanaged, squandering its resources to pay gambling debts. Stepan thus feels that he must marry Dasha so Varvara will rescue him.

I think it’s time to return to Eden before concluding this entry.⁴ Through research, I found that Petrusha, using the ideas his father represents, philosophical ideals made more dangerous by the worsening conditions that these ideas have brought about, will corrupt the town. My guess is that Stepan, as the father/brother of our protagonist, will be the Cyrus/Charles of Demons; Varvara’s son, whose mind Stepan has already affected, will be “Adam”; Shatov, who resists Stepan’s demoralizing liberalism, will be Aaron, Adam’s good son; and Petrusha will be the bad son, Caleb.

My last entry skipped Chapters 6 and 7 of Eden, so I’ll briefly summarize them: We find that Charles misses the brother whose silent endurance of his abuse had “earned” him a place in the cavalry. Charles never married (Despite having been good at everything as a boy, Charles is so shy around girls that he can only interact with women whose services he buys,) his mother dies, and his father moves to Washington, DC. Adam, however, can’t bring himself to return home when through with his tour, and re-enlists. His father then arranges to have him come to Washington – He wants to get him into West Point or to work for him, but Adam says he would rather go back to his regiment. His father therefore ensures he “rots” there for the rest of this tour. When finished, Adam sends word to his brother that he will now come home. Instead, however, he wanders as a tramp⁵ for a few years, then gets arrested in Georgia and put on a chain gang – twice. Finally, he escapes, getting clothes by breaking into a store after hours. Around this time, Charles gets news that their father died, and that he and his brother have inherited a fortune. Meanwhile, Adam telegrams him, asking for money. Charles obliges,⁶ and his brother comes home. In addition to finding out about the money, Adam realizes that he is no longer afraid of Charles. Charles first invites Adam to go to an inn to visit the prostitutes there, then, after his brother declines, tells him suspicions about their father. Although Adam confesses that he had never loved their father, he dismisses his brother’s suspicion that their father had stolen the money he left them, and, despite evidence to the contrary, that their father had lied about his military service. The elder brother then suggests they both move to California. Chapter 7 ends with Charles saying he couldn’t ever leave his home, and Adam saying they should see how it goes.

I’ll leave with a video that gives a sense of my hypothesis about these two novels:

⁷

¹ Mel Brooks, Norman Steinberg and Andrew Bergman, writers. Blazing Saddles (1974).

² I think this means gathering more followers to reclaim some prestige, at least in the provincial town where Varvara resides.

³ Nikolay was, of course, Stepan’s main student, but the poet also taught Shatov and others, whom I name further down.

⁴ I feel a bit hasty in stopping here, and encourage my readers to explore this novel themselves. I especially want to point out a great example of effective character development of the narrator here in regard to Karmazinov, a writer of whom he had been a fan in childhood and youth. This section’s discussion of the town gossip, Liputin, is also fun. – Viola

⁵ I should point out here that Adam’s journey is reminiscent (although Steinbeck’s character is more peaceful) of that of Nikolay’s between leaving the army and entering his hometown.

⁶ A nice touch in this section is that, to ensure that the money gets to the right person, Charles must use a password question. He asks what the last birthday gift Adam gave his father was – This gift, a dog, is what had made him so jealous over their father favoring it that he almost murdered Adam.

⁷ beepboopfukcyou “Stock Character Scene – Shaun of the Dead (2004).” YouTube. uploaded Feb 28, 2013. Accessed 5/12/2026.

Against Nature, Pt. 8

Andreev… was nothing more or less than our local shopkeeper, a very eccentric fellow,
a self-taught archaeologist who had a passion for collecting Russian antiquities and
sometimes tried to outshine Stepan Trofimovitch in erudition and in the progressiveness of his opinions. This worthy shopkeeper, with a grey beard and silver-rimmed spectacles, still
owed Stepan Trofimovitch four hundred roubles for some acres of timber he had bought on the latter’s little estate (near Skvoreshniki). Though Varvara Petrovna had liberally provided her friend with funds when she sent him to Berlin, yet Stepan Trofimovitch had, before starting, particularly reckoned on getting that four hundred roubles, probably for his secret expenditure, and was ready to cry when Andreev asked leave to defer payment for a month, which he had a right to do, since he had brought the first installments of the money almost six months in advance to meet Stepan Trofimovitch’s special need at the time.

– Demons’ narrator, explaining Stepan’s lament at how far he has fallen that
“our orthodox clown with a beard, peut briser mon existence en deux”
(“can break [his] existence in two”.)¹

The Narrators of both Demons and East of Eden (“Eden”) are friends of the protagonists, with their own personalities, and both confess ignorance of some aspects of the story. Eden however, from Chapter 2 on, conveys sympathy for its narrator and, from Chapter 3 on, its main characters. Demons, from the beginning, mocks its narrator as well as its protagonist, Stepan Trofimovitch (who, it soon becomes clear, roundly deserves it.) Further, Demons, by Part 3 of the Introductory, presents us with the well-realized, if neurotic and controlling, female character, Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin. The only female character of any importance in Eden² is introduced in Chapter 8 as a “monster” – a psychopath whose highest professional achievement is to become – through murder – the madam of a brothel.

Chapter 3 of Eden does offer some ameliorating facets to the novel’s generally negative portrayal of women, however. First, Adam, eldest son of the Trask family’s “devilish” patriarch, discovers that his stepmother, Alice, can smile, although she hides this expression whenever she thinks anyone is watching. This gives her more dimension than this blog’s previous entry revealed. Second, we discover that Adam’s stepbrother, Charles, is something of a monster himself. However, the aforementioned patriarch, finding that his younger son had, out of petty jealousy, beaten Adam nearly to death, suddenly shows some “wisdom”. Later, Alice, after Charles attacks Adam even more savagely (Adam barely saves himself from his brother killing him with an axe,) is revealed to be almost as dim as she had seemed at her introduction.

Chapter 4 gives us two pieces of information that again made me believe that the author is mocking an unreliable narrator. First, with no sign of disapproval, this narrator says that this second attack, and Adam’s lack of resistance to it, mobilized Cyrus Trask to enroll him in the cavalry – while his son was still in bed, “so stiff and aching that he could not move without a groan.” Second is his reaction to Adam’s pacifism, which pacifism becomes even stronger after having twice been almost killed – We learn that this “pressed” soldier purposefully missed when ordered to fire on “Indians”. The narrator calls this misfiring treasonous and expresses the opinion that the decimation of indigenous populations was necessary for the good of the country.

However, Steinbeck seems too faithful in his portrayal of the narrator’s good feelings toward Adam to mock him.³ Further, the next chapter, one which examines the narrator’s family, reminds us that its patriarch is well-read and inventive – intelligent to the point of arousing suspicion from his neighbors. Lastly, there is too much conspicuous irony⁴ throughout the book to believe Steinbeck would be so subtle in criticizing his narrator’s judgment of Adam.

Another difference I’ve found so far in reading these two novels is that Dostoevsky, even in what I understand is an allegorical story, is more apt to “show” us his characters rather than tell us about them. Even when making judgments, the narrator of Demons begins with examples, and says that these are part of a pattern, so we first hear that Stepan had been so hurt by an audience he had tried to impress that he spent a long train ride compulsively muttering a phrase made from an Uzbek word and, from different nationalities, some proper names.⁵ Our narrator then tells us of his friend’s bizarre mistranslation of a Russian saying into French, but adds that the protagonist was no doubt able to understand and translate it better, and explains that Stepan “did it from a feeling that it was chic, and thought it witty.” We thus learn that the narrator can call some of Stephan’s traits “stupid”, while showing understanding and empathy for his friend.

I thought my readers would enjoy the below clip of Kazakh tourist Borat traveling America with “young scholars,” who display empathy for his grief over the impurity of the woman he had planned to marry.

⁶

¹ Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Demons (1871-72). In standardebooks.org. Chapter 1-1-7. Accessed 5/5/26.

² Having read up to Chapter 8, I should disclose what might be seen as an exception. In Chapter 5, after describing his uncles, the narrator mentions his grandfather’s daughters, including his own mother. Although most of these descriptions are favorable, these are very brief – the longest is of one whom “he didn’t know much about” except for her “capacity for hatred and bitterness.” Later in that chapter the narrator tells us the careers that his aunts, uncles, and mother follow, but nothing these daughters say is quoted, so we get no sense of their points of view.

³ In contrast to the Eden narrator’s fidelity, The narrator of Demons repeatedly second-guesses his own judgment of his protagonist – to hilarious effect.

⁴ Although unreliable narrators in Atlas Shrugged use irony crudely, the targets in that novel are clearly ones such narrators would mock. As my last entry noted, Eden’s only narrator already expressed his belief that “Indians” were an inferior “breed”, due to lacking the Protestant work ethic. Since this belief matches that of the author’s classic, The Grapes of Wrath, I see no reason not to take his opinion as reflecting that of Steinbeck.
The above link is to this blog’s “Roots and Stems, Pt. 7”, which discusses a scene in which this irony is frequently employed against cultural elites.

⁵ The phrase is, “Vyek, and vyek, and Lyov Kambek, Lyov Kambek and vyek, and vyek.” Kambek is Uzbek for “come back,” Lyov is a slavic proper name meaning “lion”, and Vyek is a surname from Eastern Europe and the Austro-Hungarian region.

⁶ JoBlo Movie Clips (Apr 1, 2025). “Frat Boys Scene | BORAT (2006) Movie CLIP HD” Accessed 5/5/26.

Against Nature, Pt. 7

[T]he Hebrew word, the word timshel – ‘Thou mayest’ – that gives a choice.
It might be the most important word in the world.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden¹

My last entry discussed the use of the term “free will” in Paradise Lost (“Paradise”), a concept that the text only considered relevant to one’s ability to disobey. This concept reminded me of the above quote, which I had used in an entry² comparing Better Call Saul to East of Eden (“Eden”). Since I had only read the Wikipedia entry on that novel, I started to read the original text to write this analysis.

After describing the beauty and savagery of the Salinas Valley, Eden’s narrator tells us of the inferiority of the “breed” who first lived there^1a. Then he describes the increasing greed of the subsequent, white, settlers. This begged the question – Does “greed” make one truly human, or is Steinbeck being ironic here? The story actually begins with the narrator’s grandparents, from Northern Ireland. They don’t seem greedy (not in the usual sense of the word,) and it’s hard to believe that the author of The Grapes of Wrath would define humanity this way. However, Chapter 19 in that book begins with a similar philosophy of history to Eden’s introduction, with the original (Mexican) owners getting “weak and fed”, thus losing the right to their rich farmland to “tattered feverish” (greedy) American conquerors. Wrath’s narrator threatens the descendants of these conquerors, who have come to see land as only a commodity, with losing the source of their wealth to the starving (“greedy”) dustbowl refugees – refugees who have been tricked into moving to California to pick the landowners’ crops to their own further impoverishment, then threatened when they make any attempt to unionize – refugees whom Steinbeck claims view the land as a way to exercise their Protestant work ethic. Thus, neither Mexicans or “Oakies” in Wrath nor “Indians” in Eden come across as anything but fables³ to illustrate the superiority of this ethic. It almost seems as if Steinbeck believes that only white, middle-to-upper-class, male Protestants deserve sympathy.

After the narrator discusses his own family and other scrappy (not-quite-poor) California settlers, he begins the story of the Trask family, who become the core protagonists of the text. We are told that the first of these protagonists, Adam, came west “with money to start a new life.” We then get the history of his New England upbringing. Adam’s father, Cyrus, comes off as ridiculous – although I feel a disavowed sense that we should admire him (as opposed to his wife, whose suicide after he infects her with venereal disease is written as a farce,)⁴ for all his bragging. That the narrator calls him a “devil” raised a suspicion that had been already mounting in me, from the use of “Eden” in the title of the book and the long description of the beautiful flowers of its setting – Could the author be suggesting that members of this family are covert heroes like Satan from Paradise? Could there have been a previous sublimation text which Steinbeck wants to appropriate into his conquest narrative?

I had read The Brothers Karamazov several years ago. It occurred to me that Eden’s family drama, starting with its clownish patriarch, could have been inspired by it. I soon found that Dostoevsky was a main influence⁵ of Steinbeck, and a little more research led to the suspicion that Eden’s “free will” theme may have been inspired by Demons. Unfortunately, this is the only major Dostoevsky work that I have never read.

While I remedy this situation, I thought the below Monty Python sketch would pair well with Steinbeck’s idea of “greed”

⁶

¹ Steinbeck, John. East of Eden (1952). Published in Penguin Books 1979. The linked copy is on Internet Archive. Accessed 4/29/26.
^a Chapter 2, Part 1.

² The link is to this blog’s entry, “Second Samhain.”

³ I thought I should say here that this is the second depression-era text mentioned in this series – The first is Disney’s “Three Little Pigs” (1934).

⁴ Two of the three women we meet by Chapter Three are both described as comically humorless. The third, a 17 year old whom Cyrus marries after his first wife kills herself, is described as having…

... a number of admirable qualities. She was a deep scrubber and a corner-cleaner in the house. She was not very pretty, so there was no need to watch her. Her eyes were pale, her complexion sallow, and her teeth crooked, but she was extremely healthy and never complained during her pregnancy. Whether she liked children or not no one ever knew. She was not asked, and she never said anything unless she was asked. From Cyrus’s point of view this was possibly the greatest of her virtues. She never offered any opinion or statement, and when a man was talking she gave a vague impression of listening while she went about doing the housework

⁵ The link is to the CliffsNotes entry for Steinbeck’s biography.

⁶ Y1MT. “Monty Python – Lifeboat sketch” (first broadcast 22 December 1970.) YouTube (posted May 2, 2011.) Accessed 4/29/26.