The entire book East of Eden revolves around the idea of timshel “thou mayest”
But I think Cathy does not have a choice. Or at the very least her capacity to choose is fundamentally different from that of the other characters.
A lot of readers would agree that Cathy is a absolute sociopath . But even then they insist that she has a choice that she can simply choose to be different for example In contrast to Lee who after suffering from hate ,prejudice , trauma did not let the hate fester it soul and still chose to gentle , loving and forgiving like his father
There's a line from the book I'd like to quote:
“Some people can't see the colour green, but they don't know they can't.”
Telling Cathy that she has a choice is like telling a colour-blind person that they can choose to see green.
we are treating an incapacity as if it were a moral failure. we are assuming that everyone possesses the same internal capacities and the same freedom to exercise them.
I am not saying that every absolute sociopath is incapable of love, that all sociopath are born the same way or that a diagnosis automatically eliminates moral responmsibility.
The science is more complicated than that. But sociopathic traits can involve profound differences in emotional empathy, attachment and the capacity to experience other people's suffering in the way most people do.
I am not establishhing that every person with psychopathic traits is incapable of love or remorse. They do however challenge the assumption that everyone begins with the same emotional capacities and makes different moral choices
What if the things that make moral choice possible for other people are precisely the things Cathy lacks? What if she cannot simply will herself into experiencing emotions she has never been capable of experiencing in the same way?
What if Cathy does not expewrience the emotional world in the way that the other characters do?
What if her inability to form ordinary emotional attacvhments is not something she can simply overcome by deciding to be different?
I cannot prove that Cathy has no agency.
She is a fictional character not a clinical case, and her capacity for deliberate planning and manipulation makes the question more complicated. But I do think Steinbeck deliberately presents us with a character who challenges the moral framework through which we understand the other characters.
Perhaps Cathy is not an illustration of timshel. Perhaps she is the limit case against which we test it.
The other characters struggle with their inheritances, their desires, their capacity for cruelty, and their ability to choose differently. Cath by contrast appears to lack some of the ordinary emotional foundations through which those struggles become meaningful.
Perhaps her function in the novel is not to demonstrate that everyone can choose good or evil in the same way. Perhaps she makes us confront the possibility that the capacity for moral choice is not distributed equally even if moral responsibility remains a question we cannot simply abandon.
I actually feel a certain sympathy for Cathy in this respect. Not sympathy for the suffering she inflicts on other and certainly not an excuse for her actions. i mean sympathy for the fact that no one chooses the fundamental psychological constitution with which they begin life.
Had I been born with precisely the same psychological makeup Cathy, whould I have become the same person?
I cannot honestly say that I would not.
So when readers invoke timshel to insist that Cathy could simply have chosen another way, I want to ask them a question.
Are we defending the possibility of genuine moral choice or are we assuming that everyone possesses the capacities necessary to exercise it?
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