“He talks about her having staged a rape as a child. And, when I read it, I read it differently,” says Kazan. “And when he gets to the end of the book and she’s close to death and she remembers being small and pretending that she could shrink like Alice in Wonderland, to me, when I read that, I see a picture of disassociation. And it seems like there’s a very clear line between those two things.”
Kazan’s East of Eden teases out the connection even more fully. Just before she overdoses, Pugh, as Cathy, says to an empty room, “Did I ever tell you about what happened to me when I was five years old? Something happened to me when I was five years old.” Instead of describing the assault, though, Cathy then says, “I read a book. Alice in Wonderland.” She talks about the concept of the “Drink Me” bottle and how she knew that if she had one, she could escape anything. Then she slugs down a bottle of morphine and waits for its effects to take hold.
As she does, there’s a rumbling sound from the fireplace in her room. Suddenly, an enormous rabbit hole appears—and out crawls young Cathy, wearing an Alice-like blue dress with a white apron and blue ribbons in her long, blonde hair. “Seeing that for the first time, seeing our little Cathy climb out of it—I’ll never forget that,” says Kazan.
Cathy stares in wonder as the girl runs to her, and they embrace. The next time we see Cathy, she’s dead in her chair.
Neither Kazan nor Pugh wants Cathy’s backstory to excuse the awful things she does in both the book and the limited series version of East of Eden. They do, though, think this interpretation of the story helps to explain why she is the way she is. “I want everybody to be able to understand that this woman was and has been abused from a very young age,” says Pugh. “When you do that to someone for a very long time, their whole brain makeup is going to be completely different. And the way that they approach life and the way that they see things is going to be black and white.
