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Ethan Frome

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Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton tells the tragic tale of Ethan Frome, a farmer living in Starkfield, Massachusetts, who struggles with his unproductive farm and his difficult wife, Zeena. When Zeena's cousin, Mattie, comes to live with them, Ethan becomes obsessed with her, leading to a heartbreaking story of unconsummated love and the struggle between passion and duty.

The novella is set in a bleak New England environment, with evocative descriptions of the winter landscapes adding to the melancholy tone of the story. Through Wharton's powerful characterizations and descriptive prowess, the narrative explores themes of poverty, unfulfilled desires, and the consequences of forbidden love, culminating in a tragic and haunting denouement.

Characters:

The main characters are complex: Ethan is trapped and compassionate, Zeena is bitter and controlling, while Mattie embodies hope and desire.

Writing/Prose:

Wharton's writing style is descriptive and poignant, using symbolism to mirror the bleak emotions of the characters.

Plot/Storyline:

The narrative follows a tragic love triangle surrounding Ethan Frome, highlighting unfulfilled desires and the consequences of societal constraints.

Setting:

The story is set in wintry Starkfield, Massachusetts, with the cold and desolate landscape reflecting the characters' despair.

Pacing:

The pacing is deliberate and slow, reflecting the tension and eventual tragedy, with moments providing character depth.
THE VILLAGE lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy corners. In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires. The moon had set, but the night ...

Notes:

Ethan Frome is set in Starkfield, Massachusetts and depicts bleak winter landscapes.
The story revolves around Ethan, his hypochondriac wife Zeena, and her cousin Mattie.
Ethan marries Zeena out of duty after she cares for his ailing mother, not out of love.
Mattie Silver enters Ethan's life as a breath of fresh air, igniting feelings of hope.
The novella explores themes of duty, love, and the constraints imposed by society.
Wharton's own struggles with depression resonated through the character of Zeena.
The book's tragic love triangle leads to a disastrous suicide pact between Ethan and Mattie.
Wharton uses vivid imagery to reflect the characters' emotional states, particularly the oppressive New England winters.
The story unfolds through a framing narrative, where a nameless narrator learns about Ethan's past during a visit to Starkfield.
Ethan Frome represents the theme of ill-fated aspirations, contrasting dreams with harsh realities.

Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings

Content warnings for Ethan Frome include themes of depression, hopelessness, and the physical and emotional effects of a tragic accident.

Has Romance?

The romantic elements, primarily concerning the love between Ethan and Mattie, play a significant role, though the romance is intertwined with tragedy and societal constraints.

From The Publisher:

Edith Wharton's most widely read work is a tightly constructed and almost unbearably heartbreaking story of forbidden love in a snowbound New England village.

This brilliantly wrought, tragic novella explores the repressed emotions and destructive passions of working-class people far removed from the elevated social milieu usually inhabited by Wharton's characters. Ethan Frome is a poor farmer, trapped in a marriage to a demanding and controlling wife, Zeena. When Zeena's young cousin Mattie enters their household she opens a window of hope in Ethan's bleak life, but his wife's reaction prompts a desperate attempt to escape fate that goes horribly wrong. Ethan Frome is an unforgettable story with the force of myth, featuring realistic and haunting characters as vivid as any Wharton ever conjured.

Ratings (28)

Incredible (3)
Loved It (9)
Liked It (8)
It Was OK (3)
Did Not Like (3)
Hated It (2)

Reader Stats (55):

Read It (31)
Currently Reading (1)
Want To Read (16)
Not Interested (7)

2 comment(s)

Loved It
4 months

Edith Wharton’s laughing at me from the grave, and, to be honest, she definitely deserves to do so.

Ethan Frome is like a twisted version of

Age of Innocence that focuses on the working class instead of New York high society. I was certain that

Mattie would die at the end, BUT SHE DIDN’T. I was shocked.

The character Ethan Frome desperately wants freedom from his exhausting, passionless life. He mistakenly pins his freedom on Mattie Silver, his wife’s cousin who has come to stay with them to help around the house. So too does Mattie view Ethan as her way out from an unwanted marriage or destitution. Ultimately, the two characters decide to

die by suicide, but the attempt goes awry and Mattie ends up disabled and her personality completely changes. Ethan is now obligated to take care of his wife

and Mattie, neither of whom he really likes. I blame the situation entirely on Ethan as he had some influence on Mattie; He should have just let Mattie go. His selfish desire for her ruined her life.

Though written beautifully,

Ethan Frome is harrowing. I’m unsure whether I can recommend it to others.

 
Loved It
6 months

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

Ethan Frome is gorgeously written, but I didn’t care for the story itself very much, which makes rating a challenge. After waffling between three and four stars, I’ve rounded up to four because I did really like reading it.

The ending was inadvertently spoiled for me by an episode of

The Good Wife—but only kind of as it turns out

The Good Wife got a lot wrong—and so the foreshadowing absolutely leapt off the page. Even though I didn’t

like the ending (it felt ridiculously melodramatic), I appreciate Wharton’s careful structure. That includes the somewhat, though not altogether, unnecessary framing device that technically places the novella in first person, though the majority is in third.

What I really loved about this novella is how Wharton uses imagery and atmosphere. This is a perfect book to read during winter: it’s cold and bleak and icy. In a gray and white landscape of snow and barren trees, some of the only bits of color come from a red scarf that Matt wears and a ruby red pickle dish, which plays an important role in the story and symbolically serves to represent Ethan’s marriage. Looking at the covers for the popular editions of this book, almost all of them do a perfect job capturing the tone and feel—though I will say that among a sea of white

Bickford-Smith’s design of the shattered dish stands out beautifully, while on the opposite end of the spectrum I find

this Dover Thrift edition to be unintentionally hilarious with its giant, looming tree (subtle!).

Unfortunately, along with the ending, what really brought this novella down for me was the characterization. I’m all about flawed characters, but Ethan was

so weak and spineless and

such a heartsick puppy dog that it just seemed over the top. It didn’t help that his love interest, Matt, doesn’t feel like a real three-dimensional person either, making it difficult to believe that he could be so absolutely infatuated with her.

I will definitely be reading more from Wharton, even if I don’t expect to be rereading this particular book any time soon.

Some favorite passages:

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

Day by day, after the December snows were over, a blazing blue sky poured down torrents of light and air on the white landscape, which gave them back in an intenser glitter.

When I had been there a little longer, and had seen this phase of crystal clearness followed by long stretches of sunless cold; when the storms of February had pitched their white tents about the devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their support; I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its six months' siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter.

The snow had ceased, and a flash of watery sunlight exposed the house on the slope above us in all its plaintive ugliness. The black wraith of a deciduous creeper flapped from the porch, and the thin wooden walls, under their worn coat of paint, seemed to shiver in the wind that had risen with the ceasing of the snow.

The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy corners. In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires. The moon had set, but the night was so transparent that the white house-fronts between the elms looked gray against the snow, clumps of bushes made black stains on it, and the basement windows of the church sent shafts of yellow light far across the endless undulations.

to-night not a sled darkened the whiteness of the long declivity.

He had always been more sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty.

at his side, living under his roof and eating his bread, was a creature to whom he could say: “That's Orion down yonder; the big fellow to the right is Aldebaran, and the bunch of little ones—like bees swarming—they're the Pleiades...” or whom he could hold entranced before a ledge of granite thrusting up through the fern while he unrolled the huge panorama of the ice age, and the long dim stretches of succeeding time.

They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and grey under the stars.

The night was so still that they heard the frozen snow crackle under their feet.

They turned in at the gate and passed under the shaded knoll where, enclosed in a low fence, the Frome grave-stones slanted at crazy angles through the snow. Ethan looked at them curiously. For years that quiet company had mocked his restlessness, his desire for change and freedom. “We never got away—how should you?” seemed to be written on every headstone; and whenever he went in or out of his gate he thought with a shiver: “I shall just go on living here till I join them.” But now all desire for change had vanished, and the sight of the little enclosure gave him a warm sense of continuance and stability.

Then she recrossed the floor and lifted two of the geranium pots in her arms, moving them away from the cold window. He followed her and brought the other geraniums, the hyacinth bulbs in a cracked custard bowl and the German ivy trained over an old croquet hoop.

Through the obscurity which hid their faces their thoughts seemed to dart at each other like serpents shooting venom.

He looked out at the slopes bathed in lustre, the silver-edged darkness of the woods, the spectral purple of the hills against the sky, and it seemed as though all the beauty of the night had been poured out to mock his wretchedness...

With a sudden movement she tore the letter in shreds and sent them fluttering off into the snow.

The spruces swathed them in blackness and silence. They might have been in their coffins underground. He said to himself: “Perhaps it'll feel like this...” and then again: “After this I sha'n't feel anything...”

and the way they are now, I don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.”

 

About the Author:

The upper stratum of New York society into which Edith Wharton was born in 1862 provided her with an abundance of material as a novelist but did not encourage her growth as an artist. Educated by tutors and governesses, she…

 
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