Review of 'Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
SPOILERS
There seems to be a lot of negative, saucy reviews of Ethan Frome on Goodreads. “The characters are boring.” “What’s the point.” “Gosh…a sledding accident?? AS IF!” You are MISSING THE POINT PEOPLE.
Alright, rant over. Let’s see if we can understand the point of Edith Wharton’s novella, Ethan Frome, as a projection of her own personal life into fiction. Wharton was a prominent author whose writings straddled the Gilded and Progressive Ages of American History. She was the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Literature in 1921, for her book The Age of Innocence. All of her writings focused on the dog-eat-dog world of Northeastern elite culture and the nouveau riche. Ethan Frome is unique because it represents her only substantial work that looks at a) the lives of the poor and b) rural life in America.
This novella is about the eponymous protagonist, Ethan Frome, …
SPOILERS
There seems to be a lot of negative, saucy reviews of Ethan Frome on Goodreads. “The characters are boring.” “What’s the point.” “Gosh…a sledding accident?? AS IF!” You are MISSING THE POINT PEOPLE.
Alright, rant over. Let’s see if we can understand the point of Edith Wharton’s novella, Ethan Frome, as a projection of her own personal life into fiction. Wharton was a prominent author whose writings straddled the Gilded and Progressive Ages of American History. She was the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Literature in 1921, for her book The Age of Innocence. All of her writings focused on the dog-eat-dog world of Northeastern elite culture and the nouveau riche. Ethan Frome is unique because it represents her only substantial work that looks at a) the lives of the poor and b) rural life in America.
This novella is about the eponymous protagonist, Ethan Frome, a rural New England farmer who conveys a tale of his sad, miserable life to an unknown intermediary visiting the town. Frome’s parents either died or became extremely ill with “the complication” when he was a young adult. When his mother took ill, she was cared for by young Zeena. After his mother dies, Frome feels a compulsion to marry Zeena so that he is not alone in the world. As it turns out, this is a poor reason for making a major life decision. Seven years have passed and Frome is still a strapping young man at twenty-eight. His wife, seven years his senior, has succumbed to the siren of hypochondria. Zeena is self-absorbed, infinitely obsessed with every twinge and tweak of her aging body, and placing an enormous financial burden on Ethan by seeking out “miracle cures,” “tonics,” and quack doctors to cure her various ailments and complications. Reading between the lines, one can discern that Ethan feels neglected. He is utterly alone in the world despite being married. Yet, at the same time, he remains handsome enough in the rural context to attract the attention of other women. To borrow a phrase from Sylvia Plath (another author who dealt with severe marital issues), Ethan was viewing life from within the distorting bell jar of his marriage to Zeena.
The particular woman who holds Ethan’s regard is Zeena’s cousin, Mattie, who was brought into the Frome household to care for an ailing Zeena. I think it’s significant that both of Ethan’s love interests were caregivers who eased his burdens. Mattie represents the antithesis of Zeena—vivacious, young, optimistic, and self-effacing. Of course, Zeena once represented similar qualities in juxtaposition with his dying mother. Ethan relates that he felt a strange, nebulous connection with Mattie that, over time, progressed into infatuation or perhaps a budding love. Of course, Ethan has no idea if his feelings are reciprocated by Mattie.
Zeena falls extremely ill midway through the novella and she requires the immediate attention of a distant doctor promising miracle cures and advice. She is taken by train to a nearby town, providing Ethan with a rare respite from her presence and an ability to make-believe that he is now married to Mattie. The two sit down for a dinner together in his home after returning from a long day of physical toil and he begins to increasingly realize that his suspicions of her affection for him are warranted. Yet he is torn by a variety of complex emotions—he believes he is in love with Mattie, but bound by fate and duty to his ailing wife. He is so close to this woman, yet he cannot ever be with her in a meaningful sense. Wharton presents this scene with an enormous amount of angst and tension. Ethan places his hand on the knitting that Mattie works on in a symbol of how close, yet how far, he is from being able to touch her hand.
As the story proceeds, Zeena decides to remove Mattie from the household and replace her with a “hired woman” that the quack doctor from afar has proscribed. Zeena’s illness is supposedly caused by her “doing too much” around the household, and she requires absolute rest for months. Ethan now feels his world being upended and overthrown. Mattie fares much worse as she is a young woman of no financial means and limited familial contacts. She will likely have to labor in a sweatshop, work in a store, or more eerily prostitute herself in a nearby town. Ethan escorts Mattie to the train station envisioning that this will be their last sojourn together. He has also taken on responsibility for Mattie’s plight in life, feeling guilty for her being “put out” by his wife (again, a similarity here with the responsibility he felt for Zeena seven years prior). The two briefly embrace on a hillside, confess their feelings, and then in a moment of pure despair, attempt double suicide by sleighing down a steep incline directly into an elm tree. Their suicide attempt fails, leaving Ethan with a permanent limp and Mattie paralyzed. The novella ends with Ethan taking care now of both an ailing Zeena and the paralyzed (and now extremely bitter) Mattie.
The novella closes with the following line: “And I say, if she’d ha’ died, Ethan might ha’ lived; 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.”
So…what is the point? Wharton’s Ethan Frome falls into the same thematic category as several other works: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, and George Eliot’s short-story The Lifted Veil all induce the reader to contemplate the potential loneliest of a mismatched marriage, or a toxic relationship. One has to empathize with the protagonist’s feelings of despair, entrapment, and the crushing weight of fate and past decisions on their current psyches and imagined visions of the future. In light of these taxing stressors their actions begin to make more sense.
Wharton also presents us with another conundrum. Can we be deceived by our emotions? Ethan was clearly misled into his decision to marry because of guilt and self-pity which made Zeena appear a suitable match. In the context of this wretched marriage, Mattie suddenly appeared to represent the qualities that Ethan always dreamed of having in a mate. However, his perceptions of Mattie were viewed entirely through the prism of his marriage and a dogged determination to undo past mistakes. In reality, Mattie suffered from the same foibles as Zeena and, after her accident, became yet another weight bearing down on Ethan’s shoulders for the remainder of his life.
Wharton wrote this novel mostly as an autobiographical projection of her own despairing years in a depressing and isolating marriage. Viewing in light of Wharton’s own personal life, Ethan Frome makes more sense. She is trying to convey how marriage (or relationships in general) can either fuel lifelong elation or impose utter isolation. And, in a more pessimistic sense, she argues implicitly that there is no escape sometimes for the emotionally traumatized and exhausted spouse.
This is a piece of complex fiction that is deceptively simple. One can read through the hundred odd pages of this novella and walk away with merely the plot outline. Man marries woman. Woman is terrible. Man wants to have an affair. He pays the price. But the clarity of her writing easily misleads some into thinking the themes, plot, and moral problems posed here are shallow.
