Ethan Frome Setting Analysis

Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome: Winter as a Stifling Force to Happiness

Emphasized by romanticism of the 18th century, the changing of the seasons has been associated with a shift in mood, emotion, and even perspective. Spring blooms and summer warmth can be resembled by life, flowers, and joy while cool autumn and stark winter symbolize slowing down, isolation, and bleakness. Setting can often affect how one perceives the world around them, so an eternal winter can have negative impacts on his awareness. In Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, the stagnation of Starkfield’s landscape suggests that those who have been in the town for “too many winters” are not uncommon, as the location acts as a prison for its inhabitants (Wharton 5). Ethan’s warped emotional

perception in Edith Wharton’s novel Ethan Frome helps to illustrate these effects of winter as a stifling force to happiness.
In the early 1900s, around the time of her developing of Ethan Frome, Wharton’s relationships with three pivotal men in her life-- her husband, lover, and best friend--were going downhill. The parallels seen between her life and her works during the time are uncanny as “the problems of Edith Wharton’s current life became the central issues of her two most famous New England novels” (Wolff 232). Historical New York, where Wharton grew up, was extremely strict in regards to sexuality and women; even the concept of having an active career was scandalous. Wharton’s pursuit of an affair with Morton Fullerton had to be kept in the utmost secrecy, making the conservative nature of her environment in New York comparable to the barren and reserved Starkfield. Keeping the affair a secret to the rest of the world was not only difficult to manage, but it tore her up inside with a sense of guilt and responsibility. In a letter to Morton Fullterton, Wharton wrote “to all intents and purposes, [my husband has been] perfectly well: a normal, reasonable, amiable person. But it is grotesque--and horribly tragic to me--to think that this result has been achieved simply by his being terrified to death by the thought that I meant to leave him” (“Edith Wharton’s Letters”). This sense of marital obligation and societal pressure is very similar to the internal conflict Ethan faces when dealing with his commitment to Zeena and his longing for Mattie; Edith Wharton draws an extremely close parallel between her husband and Zeena by saying “[if I say] I want to be left alone they will say that I deserted him when he was ill”, with “they” being the judgmental community of Old New York at the time of Wharton’s affair (“Edith Wharton’s Letters”). Considering the novella was written around a time when Edith was experiencing the end of a love affair as well as a troubling marriage, she may have felt like a prisoner of Starkfield too, and just as isolated in her relationship troubles as Ethan.
The setting of Starkfield exacerbates the conflict between Wharton’s three characters Zeena, Ethan, and Mattie. Ethan, a man at war with his own desires, is isolated literally and figuratively by the stark landscape surrounding his remote cottage, “one of those lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier” (Wharton 15). The elements directly play into his hardships and slowly-melting emotional sanity because Edith Wharton wanted to “reveal the truth about life in the derelict, half-deserted mountain villages she had glimpsed in her travels…[where] insanity, incest, and slow mental and moral starvation were hidden away behind the paintless wooden house-fronts” (Knights 6). Due to Wharton’s relationship struggles in an unforgiving early 20th century New York, her secrecy may have made her feel like a villager living in the deserted mountains she wrote about, where nothing is what it seems behind closed doors. Everything in Starkfield becomes a hardship because of the weather; cultivating a barren farmland, coping with hidden emotional struggles, or simply walking into town can become a battle in itself. Because of this, isolated incidents like the breaking of the pickle dish or Ethan and Mattie’s shared moments are intensified, leaving Ethan without a moment of mental peace.
With inner desires for Mattie combined with being burdened by Zeena’s illness, Ethan finds himself a prisoner in his own home. He reaches out to Mattie in hopes of escaping his isolated torment. His romanticization of Mattie’s relationship with him is sparked by Starkfield’s conditions, ultimately making him leap for any feeling of emotion that suggests there is warmth is such a cold, harsh environment. Furthermore, Mattie’s presence in Starkfield inspires Ethan to submit to a permanent residence there when he was initially anxious to leave, “but now all desire for change had vanished, and the sight of the little enclosure gave him a warm sense of continuance and stability” (Wharton 38). Mattie is a light spirit in Frome’s dark existence, the “bit of hopeful young life that has come to the Frome’s cold hearth” (Eggenschwiler 239). Warmth is a symbol in the novel that suggests hope, passion, and enjoyment. The engineering job Ethan was interested in was located in the sunny heat of Florida and “increased his faith in his ability to see the world” (Wharton 53). In fact, Ethan had often thought that marrying Zeena “would not have happened if his mother had died in spring instead of winter” (52). This suggests that had Starkfield been located in a pleasant climate, his decisions might have been different. He might have been able to survive Starkfield without his mother, and maybe even leave to pursue a career in sciences.
Ethan’s romanticized love for Mattie is very similar to his love for Zeena years prior to Mattie’s arrival.

While Mattie seems new and exciting at first, Ethan romanticizes the fulfillment she adds to his life and fails to see that she is basically the woman his wife once was. In present day, it is apparent that Ethan Frome’s fate has been frozen in time by the wintry power of Starkfield, Massachusetts when it is discovered that Mattie has become directly similar to Zeena with her “high, thin,” whiny voice and disability (Wharton 128). Ethan married Zeena because of Starkfield’s inherent loneliness, and from that same feeling desired a relationship with Mattie. In reality, “Mattie’s ostensible love for him is nothing more than her desire to exploit him refracted through his starved imagination”, suggesting that Ethan’s lack of stimulus from his environment led to a toxic relationship (Scharnhorst). His view of Mattie is so idealized that he does not understand the extent to which she is manipulating him. She puts a great deal of housework on Ethan, because she is too inadequate to do it herself and “Ethan is attracted by her deficiencies, for her weakness makes him feel strong” (Eggenschwiler 239). To maintain her position in the Frome household, she sees the vulnerability that Starkfield has on its inhabitants and uses Ethan’s emotional blindness to make him think that she loves him. Coming into Zeena and Ethan’s situation, Mattie could have seen through Ethan as easily as any other townsperson, Ethan being a man who’s simply “been in Starkfield [for] too many winters” (Wharton 5). Without any valuable skills or assets, Mattie needs Ethan for

stability.
While Mattie’s supposed reciprocation of feelings assists in boosting Ethan’s spirits, at the end of the day he is not exactly happy. Zeena’s face still haunts him with commitment hanging over his shoulders, and his own morality threatens his ideas of asking for money in advance to run away with Mattie. Meanwhile, the Starkfield village sits silently behind “paintless wooden house-fronts” in the blissful yet bleak eternal winter (Knights 6). Wharton captures the essence of nature’s power over man in her romantic novella, where frosty darkness actively hinders the physical and emotional capabilities of even the toughest men. If Ethan Frome had any chance at ultimate happiness, it was frozen in the snow along with the rest of the town, and he was doomed to a fate that Starkfield’s deprivation controlled.