East of Eden: the birth scene really rubbed me the wrong way.
I've been marinating on the Netflix adaptation for a bit and one scene keeps bugging me. When Sam Hamilton is delivering Adam and Cathy's twins, the show has him reach in to Cathy's vagina to check how far along she is without asking her, and the show implies that it's a sexual assault. She's clearly not consenting and the director/show runner wants you to feel that. However, in the book it's framed as if Sam Hamilton is saving both Cathy and the twin's life by being the only person around that has experience delivering babies, 9 to be exact, the Hamilton's are a huge family.
I'm genuinely fine with the show reframing Cathy as a traumatized antihero. That's a valid reading to explore and Florence Pugh does a great job conveying that in the show. My problem is how they got there. In the book, Cathy bites Sam's hand to the bone during that delivery, and it's one of the first moments where Steinbeck lets you see what she really is. Sam is being kind and competent and she attacks him for no reason. If you turn the exam into a violation, the bite becomes self-defense, and suddenly the guilt in that room belongs to Sam.
Sam Hamilton is one of the best archetype of a good but real man, he works hard, he drinks, and he's a great father, in fact he's Steinbeck's own grandfather, written with so much love, and he's basically the moral anchor of the first half of the novel. He's the one who senses something off about Cathy before anyone else. He's in the room for the naming of the twins and the timshel conversation with Lee and Adam. If the audience has been primed to distrust him, all of those core moments lose weight.
And the show barely touches the Hamilton family anyway. We don't get Liza, the kids, the farm, the inventions, any of the stuff that shows who Sam is at home. So viewers who haven't read the book get one major impression of him and it's that he's a predator.
I get that the writers might have wanted to show how little control women had over their own bodies in that era but, pinning it on the one character Steinbeck built as a genuinely good man feels like it costs the story more than it gives back.
Curious whether people who read the book first had the same reaction.