24 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY NOVEMBER 5-11, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com simple villain or victim. Cathy has endured exploitation, and the series asks viewers to see the forces that helped shape her. But understanding her past does not excuse her choices. Her decision to kill Faye, the woman who had offered her shelter, reveals the limits of Cathy’s sympathy: care and loyalty matter only when they serve her. The brothel is both refuge and stage. It gives Cathy money and authority, but it also lets her disguise vulnerability. Her clothes, gestures and displays of mourning can persuade others that she feels what they feel. Yet, the performance cannot quiet what follows her; pain, fear and the consequences of her actions. Played decisively by Oscar nominee Pugh, the character gains complexity. “Zoe inviting me to help create this world with them was such an honor,” Pugh said in a statement to Netflix. “It really stepped off with Cathy’s point of view of the world.” Cathy’s story resists an easy verdict. The series invites empathy for the girl shaped by abuse and a society that treats women as property; the novel’s darker portrait insists that Cathy is responsible for the damage she inflicts. Together, those perspectives make the brothel more than a setting. It’s where Cathy’s survival, ambition and cruelty meet and where her power becomes hardest to separate from the harm it creates. Salinas When Cal and Aron became teenagers, Adam Trask decided to move the family to Salinas. He settles in Dessie’s Hamilton place. Dessie—Steinbeck’s real-life Aunt Dessie—doesn’t appear in the TV series at all, but plays a crucial role in the novel, the most beloved of the Hamilton girls and the one who never married and who opened a successful dressmaking business in Salinas—the big city, relatively speaking—instead. When ready-to-wear, store-bought clothes come to dominate the market, she decides to return to live back at the Hamilton ranch. Her house, set back in its little garden next to “Reynaud’s French Bakery,” becomes available, and that’s where the Trasks, including Lee, move later in the book. That creates an opportunity for Cal and Aron to reconnect with their mother, now a madam who goes by the name Kate. In the book, Steinbeck described the house as being on Main Street, but historical records show Dessie Hamilton’s place was on Castroville Street, the same one on which fictional Kate ran her brothel. Both places would be in Chinatown. Kate’s doctor, Dr. Wilde—from whom she steals drugs to poison her predecessor as madam—has his office upstairs in the Monterey County Bank building on Main. Among urban Salinas scenes, a school not far from the Steinbeck House on Central Avenue plays a role in the plot of the book. What is now Roosevelt Elementary School, was formerly West End School on Capitol Street, described in detail in the book. It stunned the boys by its size and grandeur because they only knew a Travel Story Can Salinas capitalize on a boost in attention and interest from the Netflix show? By Royvi Hernandez Even though the Netflix production was filmed in New Zealand, not the Salinas Valley, the miniseries may bring fresh attention to the places that shaped John Steinbeck’s story. In the first two weeks since its Oct. 1 debut, the show amassed 19.1 million views, according to Netflix, and the 1952 novel returned to bestseller lists. “It’s a really good opportunity to bring awareness and visibility to the Salinas Valley and to the local community around here,” says Michelle Fabian, administrative manager of the Steinbeck House, where Steinbeck was born in 1902 and lived until 1919 before leaving for college. At the Steinbeck House, that interest is already showing up in small ways. “Visitors have mentioned watching the series,” Fabian adds. “We have seen a little bit of an uptick.” The same is happening at the National Steinbeck Center. “Our front desk staff is hearing from visitors who are specifically coming because of the Netflix series. And though it is hard to predict, we’re preparing for the possibility of a holiday bump in attendance,” says Lisa Josephs, archivist at the National Steinbeck Center. One upcoming opportunity to connect visitors with the history is “Steinbeck Stories and Tea: Exploring East of Eden,” a collaborative program with the National Steinbeck Center and the Steinbeck House on Saturday, Nov. 14. The event is set to begin with a guided tour of the National Steinbeck Center, followed by afternoon tea at the Steinbeck House and a presentation by Josephs, who will share material from the center’s collections and explore the novel. At the King City History Center, Karen and John Jernigan prepared a 48-slide, 30-minute presentation about real places that appear (or seem to appear) in East of Eden. “Steinbeck is in the DNA of Salinas,” says Craig Kaufman, director of the Salinas Valley Tourism and Visitors Bureau and California Welcome Center in Salinas. “Most of his books are inspired from Salinas in the Salinas Valley. There’s the Steinbeck literary trails where people can go out and see the landscapes that formed opinions and shaped the way that Steinbeck described the valley.” Since the Netflix release, the National Steinbeck Center bookstore has stocked new edition covers of East of Eden based on the series. “It is becoming a very popular item,” Josephs adds. “Visitors have either seen the series and now want to read the book or they want to refresh themselves on the book before starting the series.” Josephs is also working on an exhibit called East of Eden: Beyond the Book, slated to open in late January 2027. “I’m hoping to be able to do a family tree of the Hamiltons,” she says, “so that people can see where the aunts and uncles were because they are mentioned so prominently throughout East of Eden. I’m also hoping to do a little deep dive into the word timshel, because that word is the moral center of the book.” Steinbeck Stories and Tea takes place at 12:30-2:45pm Saturday, Nov. 14. National Steinbeck Center, 1 Main St., Salinas. $75. (831) 424-2735, steinbeckhouse.com. one-room country school. Having a different teacher for each grade seemed such a luxury the family saw it as wasteful. The West End was a huge building of two stories, fronted with gnarled poplars. The only specific urban Salinas location shown in the TV series is the Abbott House, where Adam Trask drinks after his initial arrival to Salinas after Cathy leaves. This hotel on Main Street was named after one of the founders of the Monterey and Salinas Valley Railroad. The building still stands today. Salinas is Steinbeck’s hometown. He loved it with utter loyalty and hated it with utter fury, as Shillinglaw suggests in Steinbeck’s Landscapes. “Place is dipped in amber,” she wrote about the Salinas scenes in the book, even if Steinbeck detested the “bleakness” of it, “the feeling of violence just below the surface.” CELIA JIMÉNEZ CELIA JIMÉNEZ Dr. Wilde, who attended to Kate and other women at the brothel, had an office on the second floor at the Monterey County Bank Building on Main Street. Dr. Murphy’s home in Salinas. He treated Adam Trask after his stroke.
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