Fantasy is an Escape from Fear in Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome

Fantasy is an Escape from Fear in Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome

Everyone, at some time in life, will experience fear. But, often fantasies are created in one's mind to escape that fear. Ethan Frome uses his fantasy as an escape to the entrapment of his marriage and the fear of public condemnation.

Ethan Frome lives in the winter town of Starkfield, Massachusetts where "the storms of February…pitched their white tents about the devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds…charged down to their support; and …Starkfield emerged from its six months' siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter" (Wharton, 5).

The narrator, upon meeting Ethan Frome for the first time, thought "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." He "had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, but had in it…the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters" (Wharton, 9).

Frome finds he is unable to escape the dreariness of the town of Starkfield. Each day while passing the headstones on his property he feels as if they are mocking him, claiming: "We never got away—how should you? 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.' "

(Wharton, 36).

Ethan Frome marries Zenobia (Zeena) after the death of his mother in "an unsuccessful attempt to escape the silence, isolation and loneliness of life" (Lawson, 71). But, after time, he finds his life again becoming silent, as it was with his mother. Their lack of communication is continually making the marriage more misera...

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...and an escape to his fears and reality, through his fantasies, now brought him more suffering. The former invalid, Zeena, was now forced to care for them both.

Perhaps Edith Wharton's reason for writing Ethan Frome, was that it so vividly reflected her own dreary life. Abandoned of any love as a child from her mother and trapped in a marriage similar to that of Zeena and Ethan, Wharton found herself relying on illicit love. This illicit love was also her favorite topic of writing, which helped her to escape her own tragedies. She spent many nights in the arms of other men searching desperately for the love she believed existed, but had never felt, which is evident in all of her writings.

Ethan Frome is not only an excellent piece of writing, and moving story, but also causes a reflection that we, too, create vivid fantasies and hopes to escape our fears.