In any piece of writing, there is always a main idea and many different literary devices put throughout the piece to enhance the idea and bring the book to its full potential. In the novella Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, the central idea that was most prominent in the story was the notion that our environment affects the decisions we make and this in turn shapes the life that we lead. An element in the story that magnifies this main idea is the setting of winter in a bleak town called Starkfield. Many of the choices Ethan makes are influenced by the isolating winter and because of this, he seems to always be looking for any possible way out of his miserable life. Our surroundings shape the way we think, the way we act, and the way we make our decisions. This is evident in many choices …show more content…
He feared the isolation, dreariness, and loneliness that was brought on by being alone in the oppressing winter after the death of his mother. Ultimately, this led to him asking Zeena to stay with him. Years later, unhappy and unsatisfied, Ethan looks back on that time and admits to himself, “It would not have happened if his mother had died in spring instead of winter…” This depressing quote proves the overwhelming effects that the bitter weather had on Ethan’s life. Another undeniable decision that was caused because of Ethan’s environment was to try and commit suicide with the girl he truly wanted to be with. This decision came about after his wife decided that she did not want Mattie staying with them anymore. Ethan dreaded the loss of companionship that he had finally found with Mattie and most of all he dreaded once again being alone with his cold, sickly, silent wife. On the way to the train station, Mattie and Ethan decide to stop and go sledding. They suddenly realized that they
Tale of the Living Dead Ethan Frome, by Edith Warton is truly a tale of the “living dead”. Don’t be confused by the way this term is used in movies, where the living dead are corpses that rise from the ground. In this case, the term “living dead” refers to a person who is physically alive but emotionally dead. In the novel, Ethan Frome, all three main characters are emotionally dead. The characters have been emotionally dead since the "smash-up" in which Ethan and Mattie crashed their sled into a tree.
He could not get away from Zeena, nor run away with the girl he felt drawn to. There was no way Ethan could afford to get away even if he tried. Ethan could not afford to pay for himself to leave town, nor could he provide for the woman he desired. He also imagines life as if he were suddenly resolved from all the issues going on in his life. All the issues that went on, Ethan brought upon himself due to the way he managed his life.
Ethan has dreams of leaving Starkfield and selling his plantation, however he views caring for his wife as a duty and main priority. One day, Zeena’s cousin, Mattie Silver, comes to assist the Frome’s with their daily tasks. Immediately, Mattie’s attractive and youthful energy resuscitates Ethan’s outlook on life. She brings a light to Starkfield and instantaneously steals Ethan’s heart; although, Ethan’s quiet demeanor and lack of expression causes his affection to be surreptitious. As Zeena’s health worsens, she becomes fearful and wishes to seek advice from a doctor in a town called Bettsbridge, giving Ethan and Mattie privacy for one night.
Ethan Frome, a novella written by Edith Wharton, communicates a story of Ethan and his life living with his ill wife, Zeena, when a new lover comes into his home. Ethan and Zeena live in a place called Starkfield, a cold and lonely location situated in the New England area. Mattie comes into Ethan’s life to help her cousin, Zeena, around the house as her sickness has obstructed her ability to do housework. This causes problems for Ethan because he starts to fall in love with Mattie as she stays with the Fromes. The isolation of Starkfield prevents Ethan from living his life the way he wanted to. That causes Ethan to abandon his dreams of college and moving away from Starkfield. Ethan becomes hindered by the isolation of Starkfield because of
The main theme of the book Ethan Frome is failure. It is shown in three ways throughout the story: Ethan's marriage, him not being able to stand up to Zeena, and his involvement in the "smash up".
Throughout “Ethan Frome,” Edith Wharton renders the idea that freedom is just out of reach from the protagonist, Ethan Frome. The presence of a doomed love affair and an unforgiving love triangle forces Ethan to choose between his duty and his personal desire. Wharton’s use of archetypes in the novella emphasizes how Ethan will make choices that will ultimately lead to his downfall. In Edith Wharton’s, “Ethan Frome.” Ethan is wedged between his duty as a husband and his desire for happiness; however, rather than choosing one or the other, Ethan’s indecisiveness makes not only himself, but Mattie and Zeena miserable.
Several Years after their marriage, cousin Mattie Silver is asked to relieve Zeena, who is constantly ill, of her house hold duties. Ethan finds himself falling in love with Mattie, drawn to her youthful energy, as, “ The pure air, and the long summer hours in the open, gave life and elasticity to Mattie.” Ethan is attracted to Mattie because she is the opposite of Zeena, while Mattie is young, happy, healthy, and beautiful like the summer, Zeena is seven years older than Ethan, bitter, ugly and sickly cold like the winter. Zeena’s strong dominating personality undermines Ethan, while Mattie’s feminine, lively youth makes Ethan fell like a “real man.” Ethan and Mattie finally express their feeling for each other while Zeena is visiting the doctor, and are forced to face the painful reality that their dreams of being together can not come true.
...ss for yourself because in the end, one will regret it. Ethan’s morals prevent him from leaving Starkfield to pursue and achieve his dreams. He cannot baffle the traditions of his town. After Zeena tries to "foist on him the cost of a servant", forcing Ethan to let go of Mattie, he chooses to “leave with Mattie”. However, he cannot go through with the plan because he cannot bear to leave Zeena alone with her sickness. He knows she would not be able to take care of herself and cannot afford her own medicine. It is inappropriate to leave his wife in this bad condition. Therefore Ethan chooses to live an unhappy life instead of deceive his family and friends. Wharton portrays that by following society’s standards they will lose their hope and end up living in misery. Ethan chose to embark the obstacles and in the end it ruined him to a life of unhappiness and failure.
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).
He is physically isolated from the world and is also cut off from the possibility of any relationship. Due to his new situation, he looks for an outlet in order to relieve himself from this isolation. Luckily enough for him, Mattie comes around in order to help Zeena out due to her illness. Wharton writes, “...the coming to his house of a bit hopeful young life was like the lighting of a fire under a cold heart” (Wharton 33). As Smith recognizes in this comparison, he says that “His (Ethan) life of isolation changes, however, when Mattie Silver comes to stay with him and his wife” (Smith 96). Smith correctly analyzes Ethan’s situation, labeling Mattie as this outlet of hope that he can turn to in order to cope with his isolation. Wharton herself shows that Ethan truly did view Mattie as his outlet for hope, mainly due to his love for her, which Mattie shares equally for him. This love sprouts from many things including attractiveness, conversation, understanding, and listening, many of which he lacks for his whole life and where most of his isolation roots itself. Wharton writes, “She had an eye to see and an ear to hear: he could show her things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of feeling that all he imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at will” (Wharton 28). This is a fancy way of saying that they Mattie not only listened to Ethan, but also
In Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, there is a prevalent conflict of class struggles. Ethan Frome, his wife Zeena, and their maid Mattie all live in extreme poverty. Wharton portrays them as miserable beings, seemingly always encompassed in misfortune. Wharton herself, however, lived a near opposite life compared to that of her characters. She was born into fortune; money was rarely a concern for her (Lee). Through a Marxist lens, one could argue that Edith Wharton, a woman of extreme wealth and privilege, would characterize lower, working class people such as the ones in Ethan Frome in an inaccurately dismal light. The consistent image of winter and coldness, typically associated with misery, in Ethan Frome foreshadows an unhappy ending for the
Ethan’s love for Mattie creates a major conflict within the story, as Ethan is still married to Zeena. Although it is a loveless marriage, divorce was not looked upon kindly at that time. Also, it would have left both Ethan and Zeena in a bad position because Ethan would have no money and Zeena would have no way to take care of the farm.
One tragic flaw of Ethan is the town of Starkfield. "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.” (Wharton 13) The small town of Starkfield doesn’t let Ethan grow and slowly makes him more isolated. However unlike Willy, Ethan had choices and free will. Ethan could have made the decision to move out of the town of Starkfield, unlike Ethan who lost his job and grows old. Also Ethan lives in moral isolation and loneliness because of his wife Zeena. Edith Wharton writes "Ethan looked at her with loathing. She was no longer the listless creature who had lied at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption, but a mysterious alien presence, and evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding" (Wharton 103). This passage is taken from a time when Ethan is looking at his wife Zeena and the audience sees how much pain Zeena caused Ethan. However the reader has no sympathy for Ethan because he could have changed this by moving away with Mattie, or getting away from Starkfield and Zeena all together. It is easy to see the pain and loneliness that Ethan is in
Similarly, Ethan Frome is unable to generate affection from or toward his wife, causing him to consider Mattie as a more romantically exciting partner. The bleak winter backdrop of this novel evokes the sense that Ethan’s love life is just as sparse and dead as the snow-laden world around him. His only source of heat during these months is Mattie, but he cannot succumb to his desires to relish in her warmth and love because he is trapped by his inability to escape from his tragic circumstances. In both works of literature, the speaker and Ethan long for a warmth and a fire that they cannot have due to the coldness that dominates their lives. Furthermore, the cats that play a role in both the poem and in Ethan Frome serve as blatant reminders that love is absent from the characters’ lives. In “February”, the speaker is woken up each morning, not by a lover, but by “a black fur sausage with yellow Houdini eyes” (3-4). Perhaps, this cat is her only companion in the dismal bleakness that is winter. And perhaps, in addition to the warmth provided by the crackling blaze on the hearth, the only other source of warmth comes from the
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