There’s a way deeper meaning behind Cathy and Charles’ matching scars in East of Eden

There are a lot of biblical references in East of Eden, but one that isn’t explicitly mentioned in the Netflix adaptation is the matching scars of Charles and Cathy. It ties back to the darkness within them both – as Charles puts it, “Kind recognises kind.”

In John Steinbeck’s original East of Eden novel, Charles (Mike Faist) gets his scar while working on the Trask family farm. A few years after his brother Adam (Christopher Abbott) joins the army, Charles is angry and lonely, and grows frustrated with a boulder that proves hard to move.

“Suddenly he lost his temper. The little smile came on his face, and he fought the stone as though it were a man, in silent fury. He drove his bar deep behind it and threw his whole weight back,” the text reads. 

The bar slips and smashes him in the face, leaving him with a “long and crinkled scar” on his “forehead from hairline to a point between his eyebrows.”

Much like the novel, the Netflix series shows how Cathy (Florence Pugh) gets hers under much darker circumstances. After her relationship with a brothel owner turns violent, he brutally beats her before leaving her for dead.

It’s actually the injury that eventually brings Cathy into Charles and Adam’s lives. After crawling to the Trask farm, she’s taken in by Adam, who cares for her while she recovers.

Charles is far more suspicious of their new guest, but Cathy appears fascinated by him. On the night of her wedding to Adam, she drugs her new husband before going to Charles’ room, where she touches the scar on his forehead shortly before the pair sleep together.

It’s an easy detail to write off as another sign of their strange connection, but those matching scars have a much deeper meaning. They come directly from Steinbeck’s novel and tie both characters into the biblical story the entire book is built around.

The meaning behind Charles and Cathy’s matching scars in East of Eden

Charles and Cathy’s scars are generally interpreted as versions of the biblical Mark of Cain, and Netflix itself has confirmed the connection.

In its official East of Eden ending explainer, Netflix describes Cathy and Charles as kindred spirits, noting that they “both even bear a forehead scar that binds them together as children of Cain.”

If you’re now wondering who on earth Cain is and what any of this has to do with East of Eden, we need to briefly head back to the Book of Genesis.

Cain and Abel are the sons of Adam and Eve. Cain works the land while Abel is a shepherd, and the brothers each make an offering to God. God favours Abel’s offering over Cain’s, causing Cain to become jealous and murder his brother.

As punishment, Cain is forced into exile. But God also places a mark on him so that anyone who finds him won’t kill him. And if some of those names and details are starting to sound suspiciously familiar, that’s very much the point.

Steinbeck deliberately built East of Eden around the story of Cain and Abel, with the Trask family essentially repeating it across two generations.

Charles takes on the role of Cain, while his brother Adam represents Abel. Just as Cain becomes jealous when God favours his brother’s offering, Charles is devastated when their father Cyrus (Tracy Letts) prefers Adam’s birthday gift of a stray puppy to the expensive knife Charles worked to buy him.

And Charles later attacks Adam and comes close to killing him. The parallel then repeats with Adam’s own sons, Cal (Joseph Zada) and Aron (Joe Anders). Cal is the Cain figure, while Aron takes Abel’s place. Once again, jealousy over a father’s approval ultimately ends in tragedy.

Even their names give it away: Charles and Adam, then Cal and Aron – both beginning with C and A each time.

So while Charles and Cathy’s scars have very different origins, placing the same mark on both characters visually connects them to the darker side of Steinbeck’s story. And it adds to the fact that Charles clearly recognises the darkness in Cathy unlike his brother, because he knows it within himself. 

East of Eden’s title is another Cain and Abel reference

The Cain connection goes even further than the scars – it connects directly to the title. In the Bible, after Cain kills Abel, it says he leaves God’s presence and settles in the land of Nod, “east of Eden.”

In other words, Steinbeck wasn’t being subtle about how important this story was to his novel. Cain and Abel are also discussed multiple times by the characters, with Samuel Hamilton declaring in the book: “We are Cain’s children.”

The Netflix adaptation keeps the biblical connection too. Lee (Hoon Lee) and Samuel (Ciarán Hinds) discuss Cain and Abel while exploring the meaning of timshel, the Hebrew word that ultimately becomes crucial to the entire story. 

As Lee explains, timshel means “thou mayest”. “You may triumph over sin… It offers a choice,” he says. “Our future isn’t determined by God or by our past. Even Cain, in his weakness and filth, and the murder of his brother, can still choose his course because timshel. Thou mayest.”

Showrunner Zoe Kazan has explained that keeping this idea was important to her adaptation. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times about bringing the book’s lengthy discussions of Genesis to the screen, she said, “I had to find a way to make it emotional and personal and about character. 

“I worked really hard on the portion where they discuss Cain and Abel in the naming scene that happens in episode 3. And then when to return to it in episode 5, when they discuss timshel. That went through many, many, many revisions to make it as emotional as possible, as connected to character as possible. And honestly, as brief as possible.”

This is what makes those scars even more interesting than simply marking Cathy and Charles as the show’s “bad” characters. East of Eden repeatedly asks whether people are destined to inherit the sins and darkness of the people who came before them, or whether they can choose to become something different.

Charles and Cathy might carry the Mark of Cain, and Cal might find himself repeating many of his uncle’s mistakes decades later. But the entire point of timshel is that being one of “Cain’s children” doesn’t necessarily predetermine your life – you have the choice between good and evil. 

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Featured image credit: Netflix