Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Ethan seems the play-thing of a manipulative and cruel destiny or fate. Upon his first appearance, he is depicted as prisoner of a "lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain"(Signet Classic, Shreve introduction (2000), p.3). Destiny is again evoked when the narrator recalls standing beside Frome at the post office, where they "waited on the motions of the distributing hand behind the grating"(p.4). He is also painted as a heroic, Promethean figure, at least initially; the narrator wonders "how gallantly his lean brown head ... must have sat on his strong shoulders before they were bent out of shape"(p.5) and describes his "brown seamed profile, under the helmet-like peak of the cap, relieved against the banks of snow like the bronze image of a hero"(13).

Ethan's battle is against a host of allied forces: sickness, death, winter, but mostly a blind and cruel fate that seems only driven by circumstance. All of these forces work against romance, love, warmth, prosperity; anything remotely resembling well-being. The narrator imagines him as living in a "depth of moral isolation to remote for casual access."(13) Moral isolation is an interesting if ambiguous term. It implies that he lives apart from society and its conceptions of right and wrong. Moral is also defined as: "of, pertaining to, or acting on the mind, feelings, will, or character"(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/moral). Taken this way, Frome seems a character whose will and being is forever removed from possible influence, positive or negative. He lives without moral support. This is in keeping with Wharton's depiction of him as existing in a state of living death.

Frome is thematically simple: this is the meeting of life and death. It's message is bleak: death conquers all. Yet, there is complexity here via the character of Frome. His soul seems capable of change. In part, the tale in Frome perversely inverts many of the elements of the Orpheus and Euridice story. Like Euridice, Frome seems a character consigned to the underworld who is given a deliverer. Zeena is a monstrous and malevolent force. She is often spoken of as almost a force of nature. When Mattie suggests she thought Ethan might not pick her up, Ethan asks incredulous, "What on earth could stop me?" Mattie replies, "I knew Zeena wasn't feeling any too good today"(p.39).

Yet, there is something morbid about Frome himself. His touch seems deadly. Worse, he seems death without meaning or purpose. Zeena seems the personification of death as a malevolent and scheming enemy. Ethan seems a personification of death as a mysterious ,brute and dumb force. It is drawn to life, is attracted, but can't help killing it when it comes into contact with it. Worse, Ethan doesn't kill precisely. Frome doesn't deliver death to all he touches. Instead, he deals a death-in-life, evoking ancient conceptions of life in the underworld.

In her introduction, Wharton suggests her characters lack an interiority, or at least an articulated one. She describes them as "rudimentary characters" and opposes their minds to "the more complicated minds"(xv)reading about them. She views them as "granite outcroppings ; but half-emerged from the soil, and scarcely more articulate"(xiv). She mentinos discarding the idea of having a single village gossip relate the tale in favor of multiple tellers so as to achieve a "roundedness." Such comments suggests Wharton intended to present her characters from the outside and from a distance.



Yet, at least with Ethan, we do journey into his thoughts and feelings as he thinks and feels them, or at least as envisioned by the narrator. Ethan is certainly presented as more than a granite outcropping. Ethan is "more sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty"(29); his studies had "made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things"(24). He's not articulate. Wharton implies that, until Mattie's arrival, he's never had a person with whom to share and thus articulate his impressions. Their early attempts to express their feelings in the face of nature are almost comically crude. Responding to a beautiful nature setting(ornately rendered in words by Wharton; this doesn't seem an instance of free, indirect speech), Mattie exclaims, "'It looks just as if it was painted' [and] it seemed to Ethan that the art of definition could go no farther"

We are given precise witness to the emotion Ethan can't express in outward words to others. Sometimes, it is Wharton who words his emotions, as when his rage at Zeena grows almost volcanic: "She was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding"(103). However, at other points, it seems Ethan's emotions in his own words, as when he contemplates running off with Mattie.: "He was too young, too strong, too full of the sap of living, to submit so easily to the destruction of his hopes. Must he wear out all his years at the side of a bitter, querulous woman"(113).

While she does drop down into Ethan's thoughts, Wharton's tale is primarily achieved through a remarkably compact set of scenes from ordinarly life. For the most part,she sticks to surface of the lives of her characters. Ethan Frome might be rendered as a series of paintings, or moving tableaus. I sense that Wharton aimed to create a story without much in the way of comment, from either the narrator or the characters. A tale that spoke through actions and movements, like a ballet.

The characters have signature gestures. Mattie is typically moving uphill or stairs, either with Ethan or in front of him. Ethan is generally holding Mattie tight, or reaching for her. He is also on the road a great deal, indicating a homeless quality. Zeena appears in doorways, in front of windows, and finally, her face "thrusts itself between him and his goal" when he and Mattie toboggan to their wished-for death.

Reading her introduction, the story's frames, I sense that Wharton may have thought about or wished to more simply 'report' her story but couldn't see her way to doing so. It would be intriguing to imagine the middle of Frome rendered as a report of a relatively word-less evening spent at the Frome's, with the underlying story and tragedy revealed by objects, small arrangements, casual gestures and limited conversation.

On one level, the story reads as an instance of tragic fate, rendering moral comment superfluous. On another level, Wharton tells a story that continually highlights choices and decisions. Although he has a strong conscience, Ethan lacks moral integrity. He engages in petty lies and deceptions with Zeena. In contemplating running off with Mattie, he sees the wrong he'd do but ultimately appears stymied by practical considerations. He doesn't have enough money to get out of town.

Worse, Frome seems a tale where a little sin might have prevented a bigger sin. Out of pride and moral consideration,Ethan is never able to simply act for his happiness. His failure to do so leaves him in a horrible situations which prompts him to join Mattie in attempting a terribly immoral action, suicide, which in its failure produces enormous hurt for all.