katie’s Reviews > East of Eden > Status Update

and I already KNOWWWWW people are like "Cathy Ames isn't a badly or misogynistically written female character she's unapologetically evil and if anything that makes her super cool and feminist" shut up. the only thing that makes unapologetically evil female characters satisfying to read about is the misogyny that they live their lives surrounded by. we cheer for those characters because they are reacting against the bigotry by which they have lived their entire lives being controlled, or resisting being controlled. and I LOVE unapologetically evil female characters when they are written from that context and with that intention. male authors are capable of writing this kind of female character, and have been for centuries (Euripides' Medea is my all-time favorite example here). Cathy Ames is not one of these characters. Cathy Ames was written by a real-life misogynist as inexplicably evil, with direct parallels to Satan, from the moment of her BIRTH, for the single and sole purpose of fucking up the lives of the (morally upstanding) male characters. before she's four feet tall our narrator has decided that she is going to be evil for no reason at all. and surrounded by the "good" female characters in this novel, who are quiet, and obey their husbands, and strictly religious, etc., etc., etc., the fantasy that this could ever take on a feminist spin goes from unlikely to absurd. and I'm already pissed off about the rest of this book.

i just wish men would stop attempting to write women. I have no doubt whatsoever that if this book did not include Cathy Ames I would love it. can men just write yaoi only forever or something idk. i'm TIRED

i can't with this and can I just say as someone who has read a LOTTT of these books by a LOTTT of these dead guys and who sincerely does like a lot of them, that it gets really tiring as a woman and a lesbian and a feminist in the 21st century to constantly be asked by these old ass books and the people who hold them up as god's gift to humanity to put my morality and my own sense of SELF and my own respect and admiration and love for women aside because "things were different then". actually no. i'm tired of it and i'm going to go read bell hooks instead literally right now AGSFAHSFKAJG