User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
“He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. 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.” 
Our narrator, we never learn his name, hired Ethan Frome to drive him around in a sleigh for a few days. A winter storm necessitates that he spend an evening and a night in Frome’s house. He meets Mattie the cousin and Zeena the wife. The situation existing in the House of Frome is an odd one and his natural curiosity spurs him to start an informal investigation into the life of Ethan Frome.
After the opening chapter we flash back twenty-four years to a man in the process of waking up from a life he has found himself trapped in. When Ethan meets Mattie an internal conflict begins. Mattie reads and she reminds on a daily basis, just by her presence, the part of himself that vanished like smoke years ago when he made the decision to stay in Starkfield and take care of his momma. He borrows books from her and starts to remember that other Frome, that other man, who wanted so much more. He is a reed, long bent, that has suddenly found a way to stretch toward the sun once again.
Mattie is a lost soul as well. She hasn’t found her place in the world. She has been sickly, too delicate to find work, and is basically living off the “kindness” of her cousin Zeena. Truth be known, Zeena just wanted someone to take more of the load of her housework. Mattie tries, but never does come up to the expectations of her cousin. Frome can’t help, but compare the differences in the two women.
”Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast, while the other held a lamp. The light, on a level with her chin, drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of her hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollow and prominences of her high-boned face under the ring of crimping pins…. He felt as if he had never before known what his wife looked like.”-------------------------------------------------------------------------------”She held the light at the same level, and it drew out with the same distinctness her slim young throat and the brown wrist no bigger than a child’s. Then, striking upward, it threw a lustrous fleck on her lips, edging her eyes with velvet shade, and laid a milky whiteness above the black curve of her brows.” 
Drawing from the CD cover of the Douglas Allanbrook Opera of Ethan Frome.It is not an even contest, Zeena is seven years older than Ethan, but a lifetime spent embracing her own illnesses has made her a hypochondriac. As if to justify her state of mind, lines of disapproval and discomfort have etched themselves into her face and withered the bloom of her youth. Ethan exchanged a sickly mother for a sickly wife. He is trapped in a loop and watching his own life through a veil in gray scale. Until:
“They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods”A man deserves some happiness. After a lifetime of devoting himself to others he is on the verge of taking back control of his own life. There is this poignant moment when Mrs. Hale lets him know that his sacrifice has not went unnoticed.
”I don’t know anybody around here’s had more sickness than Zeena. I always tell Mr. Hale I don’t know what she’d ‘a’ done if she hadn’t ‘a’ had you to look after her; and I used to say the same thing ‘bout your mother. You’ve had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome.”As Zeena starts to become suspicious of Ethan’s growing feelings for Mattie she takes steps to send her away and finds a new maid to come live in the house.
“She had taken everything else from him, and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for it all.” Wharton, deftly, has both characters dance around their feelings. Each filled with longing, believing the other feels the same, but unable to tell each other how they really feel until suddenly they are faced with never seeing each other again.
”They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for a moment, had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to marry. He looked at her hair and longed to touch it again, and to tell her that is smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say such things.” One kiss can change everything. (view spoiler)
[They commit a desperate act, born out of fear and sadness, that leaves them both shattered shells of themselves. This impulsive act destroys the very best of what they love about each other, and forever leaves those apparitions of themselves suspended on a sled going down a slope. (hide spoiler)] 
The MountEdith Wharton wrote this book during a time when she was having difficulties with her husband, Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton. She certainly seemed to feel as ensnared by marriage as her character Ethan Frome, even though she was living on her beautiful Lenox, Massachusetts estate called The Mount at the time. Even lovely surroundings will lose their luster if you are unhappy with your circumstances. Wharton was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1927, 1928, and 1930. She never did win the Nobel, but in 1921, for Age of Innocence (1920), she did become the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. This book seems to attract a mixture of positive and negative reviews today much the same way it did when it was first published. Lionel Trilling says it was
lacking in moral or ethical significance. The type of criticism that leaves me shaking my head wondering if we read the same book.
One of my favorite pictures of Edith WhartonAnother interest point was the theme departure this book has from the bulk of Wharton’s writing. Most of her books are centered around the elite New York society, but this one was set in rural Starkfield and involved characters of the lower classes. Despite the change in venue Wharton’s signature writing style is on wondrous display.
We have all felt trapped by our circumstances, maybe a stale relationship or an unfulfilling job or a long stint caring for a sick relative. This book is a masterpiece because it is simply unforgettable and those that love it and even those that didn’t like it are going to have moments in their lives when they think about Ethan Frome, and wish they had a sled and a slope of snow that will take them somewhere else.
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Rating: really liked it
* Spoilers follow*
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This is a romantic tragedy that culminates in a sledding accident. I will just say a few brief words about that. First, there is probably a reason that sledding accidents don't figure more prominently in tragedies. Shakespeare wrote like 13 tragedies and to the best of my knowledge none featured a sledding accident (I have not read Titus Andronicus, so I can't be sure). If Shakespeare doesn't need to include a sled wreck, then neither do you.
I will also say that I found Ethan and Mattie's attempted double suicide by sledding a little hard to take seriously. I mean, there are probably dozens of reasons that serious people don't rank sled-tree collisions on their Top 5 List of preferred suicide methods, but certainly the fact that adult doubles sledding is inherently ridiculous is one. Another that springs to mind is the unreliability of trying to kill yourself by sledding into a tree. Ethan ends up breaking his legs and paralyzing Mattie, which is pretty much the best you can realistically hope to do if you sled into a tree.
Really, I find it remarkable that Edith Wharton's reputation survived Ethan Frome and his sled antics. It makes me want to read House of Mirth, because it must be REALLY REALLY good.
As a side note, this is *exactly* the kind of ridiculous melodramatic bullshit I always had to read in high school. Teachers getting all worked up about the symbolism of the New England winter and failing to understand why 16-year-olds don't respond to the tragedy of star-crossed lovers doubling each other into a tree on a sled. Please.
Rating: really liked it
It is a plaintive story of a poor farmer, Ethan Frome, a man with thwarted desires and meagre resources. His entire life (past, present and future) is allegorical of hardship, austerity and distress!
I was expecting it to be focused around passion (as from the blurbs), but I found it to be everything else but passion. Maybe had I read it a few years ago, then I might have exultantly and emotionally rated it high, but a mindset smacked with experiences, derives loopholes, and studies books with a different lens!
The synopsis -A poor farmer (
Ethan Frome) of meagre resources,
Of bleak and stiffened appearance,
Frozen by his tragic past,
Imprisoned in a forever mortal silence,
Having accumulated the cold,
of many Starkfield winters!
Living in a mute melancholy,
Having lost his parents,
Expecting a brief reprieve post marriage with
Zeena,
But both fall into a forever ghastly silence,
No love, no communication,
Just doctoring his sickly wife!
The birds start twittering, and love is foretold,
When pretty, sensitive, natural beauty, Zeena’s cousin,
Mattie, joins the family,
To help her!
Ethan starts falling for Mattie!
Zeena forces upon a smothering silence on her too!
A day comes by, when the 2 are alone,
Savoring every moment.
Zeena returns back home, with a medical report full of complications,
The wife confronts the two,
Catching them red-handed,
basking in a pleasure perverse!
Ethan’s sense of responsibility to his wife,
outweighs his love for Mattie,
So drives Mattie to the station, to bid her adieu.
A change of heart occurs,
When the 2 take a detour,
both reminisce about the fleeting moments of happiness shared,
Desperate, both plan a final sled ride down the hill(sledding),
Just to join each other forever in death!
But a horrendous turn impends,
Their plan is impeded, and
Both are left brutally injured,
Zeena, changes her mind/outlook post the accident,
Accepts Mattie in the household,
Story fast-forwards 20 years,
With the two slovenly women,
Huddled together in cold,
In a poorly furnished room!
My views stand tangentially opposite to what it is supposed to be construed!
For me Ethan Frome suffuses silence, isolation, self-flagellation, living in a hard-rule-bound society, and finally irrationality! But definitely, I couldn’t find a tinge of real passion/love, as it professes!
Throughout there is a silence – emotional, mental, physical
There is an eternal silence in Ethan’s life, Zeena too resorts to horrendous silence post her marriage, there is an evident lack of communication between the husband and wife.
Finally, when Mattie joins in the household, silence is enforced on her by Zeena, and finally Ethan and Mattie, both abandon rationality as they decide to commit suicide, just to enter a forever hell of silence.
For me they were already living a silent hell, suicide wasn’t a solution!
Ethan Frome is emblematic of silence & isolation, post losing parents, getting married, adoring Mattie and yet not getting her!
The imprisonment and enslavement to society rules hold the centre stage in the novel! Ethan doesn't leave his wife because he feels bound by his marriage avowals. He dreams about being married to Mattie; he writes his goodbye letter to Zeena, but subsequently his conscience does not allow him to execute his wishes. Instead, the rules of society govern his life and stays ensnared in a loveless marriage!
If I have to define the 3 characters my way, I would say-
Ethan Frome - Epitome of self-flagellation
Mattie - metaphor for the ephemeral joys of life, transience of life and joy!
Zeena - the sickly kind-hearted wife, who accepts Mattie back, post the accident, irrespective of their affair!
It is defined as a tale of adulterous passion, but honestly, I found it to be a tale of poignancy, silence and isolation. Where an isolated being, finding love and pleasure, still couldn’t get it due to society rules and self-flagellation, and finally when he loses all his rationality, he ends up making the rest of his life as the worst of his life!
Did the irrationality in Ethan sprung-up due to his love for Mattie or the abomination towards his life? I presume the latter is true.
There is no effrontery but only submission! “The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anaesthetic. His body and brain ached with indescribable weariness, and he could think of nothing to say or to do that should arrest the mad flight of the moments”
I was restive and had a queer feeling throughout the read.
A queerly 3.5 stars!
Rating: really liked it
Because March is women's history month, I made it a point to only read women authors over the course of the month. As the month winds to a close, I have visited many places and cultures, learning about historical events from a female perspective. Yet, to observe women's history month, it would not be complete with paying homage to classic authors. In this regard, I decided to read Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton's tragic novella.
Ethan Frome of Starkfield, Massachusetts has known much tragedy in his life. First his father grew ill, leaving young Frome to move back to care for the family farm. Then his mother grew sick, and a young relation named Zenobia Silver came to live with the Fromes to care for her. Without much of a future besides the farm in his possession, Frome falls for Zenobia, and they marry. Yet, Zenobia is not a country girl, and Frome hopes to sell the farm so that he can move his wife into town.
Tragedy strikes again as now Zenobia grows ill. Frome is unable to sell the farm and is isolated in the country. Zenobia'a relations suggest that a young cousin Mattie Silver come and care for her in the manner that Zenobia had cared for Frome's mother. While Zenobia is ailing and supposedly on her deathbed, Frome starts showing feelings toward Mattie. What ensues for the rest of the novella is his conflicted feelings toward both women, as he considers his future.
Wharton paints a picture of a grim reality for Frome. That the story occurs in winter in a town named Starkfield is no coincidence. Her witticism as she debates whether Frome should honor his wife's feelings or leave her and elope with Mattie are uncanny. Even though Starkfield appears as a depressing town to life in, Wharton's use of language and plot development had me reading to discover the denouement of Frome's sad tale. The fact that she included her usual twist toward the end enhanced the story.
I have only discovered Edith Wharton over this March's women's history month reads, but I find it remarkable that her writing can go from comedy in one story to tragedy in another and still contain a high level of wit. She wrote at a time when the novel was dominated by the middle class, and was one of few upper crust society women to write. That she entered a male profession and eventually won a Pulitzer for her writing, makes her career all the more impressive. Although Ethan Frome is a tragedy, I found the story interesting enough to hold my attention, especially as Wharton inserted her mark at the end. A four star read, I look to read more of Wharton's work in the future.
Rating: really liked it
spoilers?? what spoilers??
i have changed my stance on the cover. a) initially, i thought that it was showing an altogether different type of activity, and then b) when ariel called it a spoiler, i reinterpreted it to something else and was
still wrong, and then c) everything that may potentially be spoiled is pretty much spelled out in the first ten pages. so is that a spoiler, or is that foreshadowing??
tomato, potato...
what is so excellent about this book is that it is not at all a depressing book while you are reading it - it is an intensely hopeful book. but then - gutpunch!! the depressing bits happen offscreen, after all the meat of the story has been ... digested?? this metaphor is escaping me... but in the lacuna between when the story ends and the nosy new kid-narrator in town comes on the scene. (such a fantastic new-england type character - "hi, i just moved in, tell me all your neighbor's secrets!!") the tragic bits are in imagining what these characters went through between point a and point b. so shivery-horrible! and that kind of story is right up my alley. great description, great pacing - simple story, but haunting and devastating longing. and aftermath. i love aftermath.
i liked this much more than
summer, and i may read more wharton based on the strength of this one.
hmmm... who could i find to advise me....???
come to my blog!
Rating: really liked it
It is a novel to despair of love, pessimistic, where selfishness and conventions are predominant. It is a novel where the silences speak louder than the words.
That's a closed door where Edith Wharton, between the lines, seems to denounce her time's customs and social conditions with her precise writing.
It takes us into literature from another age, where talent was a necessary preamble to writing.
Rating: really liked it
Sparse prose is sexy.
Sexy.
And that's why I've given it a special shelf on my page, called
a buck and change.
Guess what else sparse prose is?
Rare.
That's why I have only seven books on there.
Why? Why are these precious books that fall under 200 pages so rare?
Because writers tend to overwrite everything.
But not Edith Wharton, the queen of sparse prose. And Ms. Wharton, though she may appear stolid in her old black and white portraits, was one sexy lady.
She manages in
Ethan Frome to take one anti-hero, one untamed shrew, and one manipulative maiden, and proves, in less than 100 pages, that winter, isolation and poverty do not discriminate.
Wharton is never a sell-out. She gives you foreshadowing, symbolism and metaphors in just the right dosages, and she never wastes your time.
And when one red dish shatters into sharp pieces all over that never-ending landscape of white. . . you can not help but be bewildered at what an exceptional writer can do, especially in succinct and clever prose.
Rating: really liked it
In the bleak setting of 1880's Starkfield, appropriately named, (Lenox, western Massachusetts) where it always seems like perpetual winter, and its cold, dark, gloomy, ambiance, a poor, uneasy farmer, Ethan Frome, 28, is all alone, his mother has just died, the woman who took good care of her, Zenobia (Zeena) Pierce, is about to leave, though seven years junior to the lady, he purposes, she accepts gladly and the biggest mistake he believes, of his life, occurs. Zeena, not a beauty, likes nursing sick people, the capable woman knows what to do, unlike the hapless Frome, but soon develops a strange illness herself, while idle, seeing many doctors, they tell her what she wants to hear, given some pills, advice and then off to another one. The hypochondriac continues this ceaseless pattern, Ethan becomes quite disillusioned, after only a year of marriage, Zeena's, physicians prescribe that she get a maid, to help with the hard, tiresome housework, which is ludicrous, since her husband does most of it...Yet the struggling farmer, not the best around, has troubles of his own, a deteriorating, old house, that frequent blizzards, cause much damage to, a failing, lumber mill, also, and the new expenses... he reluctantly agrees, though, Mattie Silver, Zeena's petite cousin arrives, with no close family left, she is healthy, cheerful, lively and yes, pretty, Mr. Frome, a lonely man, falls in love, but naturally keeps it a deep secret, his sour, silent wife lives in another world and does not notice. He begins to daydream, neglects his not prosperous farm and negligible mill, thinking about pleasant thoughts, their few walks and rides together... bliss. Does Mattie, not the best maid, either, rather more a dreamer, like Ethan, love him too, the possibilities are endless, thinks he, can they dare run away together, to the western frontier, forget the people they abandoned and live only for themselves? The triangle if it exists, will have winners and losers, but Ethan must find out quickly how Mattie feels, a new woman is coming to replace Miss Silver, at the insistence of the unpleasant Zeena, the crises looms, decisions have to be made now, the scared girl has no place to live...An uncommonly captivating story of love, ( but not for all, the narrative can be difficult to digest) responsibility, and propriety, in an age that demands this from everyone, scandals are not tolerated by society, all must know the rules, the few who brake them are ostracized in perpetuity...
Rating: really liked it
Magnificent, spectacular... I somehow always feel I must assign many types of superlatives to the magnificent & spectacular Edith Wharton! Definitely top ten writers of ALL TIME contender. Her best is "Age of Innocence," & her not-as-much (personally, alas) is "House of Mirth", but sandwiched between them is this tense novella about the restrictions of "unconventional" feeling. & it has the type of invigorating force that compels the reader to do his one job and do it good. I adore this slim tome, admire Wharton for being absolutely angelic literature-wise in her rare & immense perfection.
Rating: really liked it
"Hey Mrs. Kinetta, are you still inflicting all that horrible Ethan Frome damage on your students?" - John Cusack, Grosse Pointe Blank If you're looking for a book with an ever-increasing level of misery, this one is hard to beat. Try this test the next time you're with a group of your friends: just mention "Ethan Frome" out loud, and see how many of them groan audibly.
Rating: really liked it
“If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade: and you must have asked yourself who he was…”- Edith Wharton,
Ethan Frome Famously known as an acute observer of class and society in classics such as
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton’s
Ethan Frome strays far from her typical stomping grounds, leaving behind wealth and privilege to follow a struggling farmer who is exceedingly close to complete financial ruin. Despite the drastic change of scenery, she nevertheless delivers a hammer-blow of a doomed love story, in one of the least likely places imaginable.
The setting is the aptly named (and fictitious) village of Starkfield, a bleak and grim place that – like Narnia – seems caught in an endless winter. A million miles from New York City high society, the novel’s titular lead is a young man caught in a loveless marriage with a sickly, possibly hypochondriacal wife named Zenobia. The only glimmer of sunshine in Ethan’s gray world is his wife’s cousin, Mattie Silver, a beautiful, lively young woman who has come to live with them.
This rather dreary love triangle provides the setup for Wharton’s short, well-executed tragedy. I don’t think it is spoiling anything to say that this is a combination of Shakespeare,
Anna Karenina, and the Winter Olympics.
Ethan Frome is a framed story, with a prologue and epilogue narrated in the first-person by an engineer who has traveled to Starkfield to do some work. While there, this observer becomes haunted by the image of an aged Ethan, the survivor of an ambiguously-labeled “smash-up.”
It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the “natives” were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two.
Because of a snowstorm, the narrator is invited into Ethan's house, where he ostensibly learns the bits and pieces of Ethan’s tale. From there, and for the bulk of the book, Wharton switches to the third-person for what amounts to an extended flashback, showing how Ethan came to be that “ruin of a man.”
At 157 pages in length, Wharton has to make every word count. There is no fat, no wasted moments. The characters are drawn boldly. Though they lack great depth, they are mostly memorable. Of the trifecta, Mattie makes the least impression. She is a bit of a cipher, more symbol than person, existing mainly to show Ethan that there are worlds within worlds, and that he has the possibility of a different life.
Ethan is frustrating. Physically strong, he is mentally – and perhaps morally – weak. Just about everything that goes wrong in this novel could have been avoided by even average decision making. Then again, if everyone in fiction used common sense, there would be a lot less drama worth reading about. Though I didn't like him, I can't quite shake him, either.
In my opinion, Zenobia – who goes by Zeena – is the most memorable of Wharton’s creations. Heck, I'd go so far as to say that she's one of the more exceptional low-key villains I've encountered in American letters. Without ever raising her voice or hatching a plot, she skillfully wields her chilly demeanor, her highly refined passive-aggressiveness, and her preternatural understanding of her husband to get exactly what she wants. Though she is mostly hateful, Wharton eventually gives us a few insights into her personality that enrich our understanding of her.
Ethan Frome is a work that is extremely straightforward. The symbols are unambiguous, as is its central theme, that of small-town conventionality stunting an individual’s ability to find happiness and growth via unconventional pathways. Yet, the simplicity is deceptive. Though uncomplicated, the prose does a beautiful job of conveying the oppressiveness of Ethan’s existence, where the walls – represented by the weather, community expectations, and economic failures – are constantly closing in.
When I first read this is high school, I really liked it, and not only because it can be read comfortably in just a couple sittings, and requires no parsing of language to get its meaning. No, my attachment sprung from the repressed passion between Ethan and Mattie, and the way it seemed like the entire universe balanced on their love. At the time, such romantic nonsense really appealed to my sensibilities. As one example among many, I saw
Titanic in the theater five times. Five times. While I truly love the historical ship, I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t also there for Leo and Kate and their brilliantly-flaming meteor of a relationship.
Now far removed from high school, I appreciate
Ethan Frome on a different level. Ethan’s flaw is in failing to recognize that his problems go beyond the constricting ethical framework in which he is hemmed. His failure is not one of imagination – he knows there is a better life out there, for the taking – but of motivation. Hamlet-like in his dithering, Ethan has an unfortunate genius for choosing the worst option to a difficult question. Instead of looking for the way forward, he is looking for a way out, and that is not the same thing.
Ethan Frome rests on its ending. After all, from the very first page, we are teased with the riddle of Ethan’s fateful moment. For the book to work, the denouement has to work. I think it does. The finale is a bit operatic, bordering on black comedy, but it is effective because of Wharton’s unadorned, just-the-facts style. The epilogue, as well, provides a powerful kicker.
This is a novel that is written with assuredness and confidence. Wharton seems to know exactly what she’s doing with every word. Because of this, and because of her talent,
Ethan Frome certainly belongs in the category of “classics.” With that said, it can feel like a minor one. It does not grapple with huge ideas or say something profound about an age. It’s just the story of an unhappy marriage, of a man one step shy of a fool, who can’t get anything to work. For all that, it’s really hard to forget. Certainly, it'll make you think twice about outdoor winter recreation.
Rating: really liked it
But Mrs. Hale had said, "You've had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome," and he felt less alone with his misery.This is the book with marvelous writing that sets you in a different atmosphere and melancholic emotional state. It is a story about longing, isolation, sorrow, complexity of life, written in long descriptive prose that is surely my favored kind of writing style.
A great piece of literature that expands beyond the ethics and morals and shows life is a much more perplexing than a black and white picture. Perfect for people that consider adultery unjustifiable and inexcusable and can’t find empathy for infidelity.
What Wharton brilliantly does is description of cruel unexchangeable circumstances of destiny that make a person quietly despair. Ethan From is a character of desperation, someone who has become stiff, cold, almost internally dead in an environment of a poor farm in neverending winter. The language of landscape is outstanding, and I love that, as in Wuthering Heights, the landscape and weather reflect the internal state of characters. The cold, always snowy and gloomy environment is interconnected with melancholy, emotional coldness of marriage without love or passion and lives stuck as they have been frozen in ice.
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; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. 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.Ethan is an odd character. At the same time, I’ve sympathized with him immensely, but he was a little distant and I couldn't connect with him completely, and there is almost a wall between him and the reader. Ethan is also an example of a grown man fixed in the mother-complex. His freedom was constrained in his early life with taking care of sick mother, and later on, he exchanges the sick mother for always-in-bed, hypochondriac, neurotic wife. His wife Zeena has total control over him, and much of that authority over him is due to her always being in the bad physical state. Adler described the way patients can use physical or psychological symptoms in order to attain power, which is exactly how Zeena establishes her dominance. Their marriage is a relationship without connection, companionship, emotion, or comfort on any level. What Ethan thought will alleviate his solitariness in Starkfield, becomes the main source of isolation as a relationship without partnership can bring up more loneliness than solitude. But even in a marriage of that quality, without any form of true communication, Ethan is codependent and can’t make autonomous decisions.
Ethan’s life is a perpetual loop of things that he doesn’t like but has nor strength nor possibilities to change. In that state on his farm comes young Mattie, and she is the alteration that brings long-forgotten spark in his life. Wharton excels in describing the true nature of erotic, not sexual obsession. The sexual desire strives to relieve tension, but the erotic longing is in a whole completely different realm. Erotic has transformative power over a person’s life, it can make dead feel alive again, the unauthentic qualities become vibrant and true, it transforms dullness into a fiery passion and a priorly meaningless life into a life worth living. The object of erotic desire, Mattie, reminds Ethan of all of the parts of himself that were lost or neglected in his dismal everydayness. In contrast to sexual infatuation that longs for other person body, erotic fantasy is not just a relationship with other persons, it’s a fantasy about transformed, different kind of life, and another version of oneself, a dream about a life of fulfillment, intimacy, joy, freedom, warmth and happiness.
The commonplace nature of what they said produced in Ethan an illusion of long-established intimacy which no outburst of emotion could have given, and he set his imagination adrift on the fiction that they had always spent their evenings thus and would always go on doing so…Maybe the book is a little bit didactic in displaying dreadful consequences of overindulging in the erotic fascination, showing how the great promises of erotic can end up in ruin. The storyline makes his book a highly relatable tragedy. Maybe not every single person indulged in the erotic obsession, but every person was susceptible to the false promise of absolute fulfillment in external objects. whatever it may be. Ethan can make us feel less alone in sometimes desolate experience of life that can be cold and melancholic as winters in Starkfield.
Rating: really liked it
Just when you think that it's safe to kiss someone you're not married to, just then, disaster lurks barely a sledge ride away!
Ethan Frome is remarkable, in probability wrongly, in my mind for its relentless bleakness. This is an American novella, by an American author in which there is no escape. The West is there, but the protagonist can't afford the journey. This an impoverished landscape, the modest hero ploughs an infertile furrow. An ungallant way to refer to a marriage, but there you go, in Ethan Frome marriage is duty, more burdensome than most. A best pickle dish is too precious to use and when broken is carried out with as much solemnity as a dead body, perhaps more. The consequences of sin are life long, while grace, let alone redemption, are entirely absent. Then again perhaps it is natural if in a country there is an overwhelming belief in optimism, expansion, and the possibility of forever starting again that a contrasting voice emerges that says 'yes, that may well be the American
dream, but this is the American reality'.
Very oddly
Ethan Frome reminds me of The Great Gatsby and those "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past". There some surface glitter covered over an essential immobility that here is plain and unvarnished. This stands in contrast to relentless reinvention, a rootlessness that allows renewal, the kind of thing we see in Sister Carrie the woman from the back of beyond becoming a star of the New York stage.
This seems to be a dying society on the edges of buoyant country. The narrator's opening remarks talk of the natives, like Frome, and the later emigrants. Although the narrator seem to approve of the old blood, the implication of the story is that they are an evolutionary dead end. Too tied down to achieve anything new. The need to take a trip by horse drawn vehicle to the train station suggests this is a stagnating backwater, cut off from the energetic currants of the nineteenth century let alone those of the twentieth. If the present does reach into the town it is only through the patent medicines that validates Zenobia Frome's status as being perpetually sick.
This work that Lisa Simpson was so pleased to gain a copy of to call her own is like a little piece of Thomas Hardy, transplanted to New England. A corner of a foreign field that is for ever Wessex.
Rating: really liked it
Finally, I have the right word for this predicament: When a capable author uses her prowess to create a work whose sole purpose seems to be to depress the reader, it can be described as
Frome. This word can also be used as a verb, noun, adjective (Frome-ish, Frome-ier, etc), adverb (Frome-ly), etc. to similarly describe the effect it has on the reader, (ie, "I was Fromed.")
An example used in a sentence may be: "John Steinbeck was clearly suffering from a touch of the Frome when he penned The Pearl"
Or, "Can we go see a rom-com? These foreign films are beautiful but leave me feeling Fromey."
Rating: really liked it
Because Edith Wharton was born in 1862 and this novel was written in 1911, I’ve always resisted reading the story fearing that it might contain florid prose and descriptions, which are often mind-numbing for me. Not only did I love it, I was reminded of one of my all time favorite novels, Stoner.
Ethan Frome was a mostly money strapped farmer in a miserable marriage while Stoner was raised by hard-working farm people. Both men were married to wives that were cold hearted, passive-aggressive and cruel.
Zenobia "Zeena" Frome is a hypochondriac but also cunning; and, she uses her obscure ailments to derail Ethan’s love affair with her young and beautiful cousin, Mattie Silver.
Stoner’s wife Edith, also demanding and manipulative, converted Stoner’s den into her art studio in order to deliberately thwart the shared time with his beloved daughter, Grace while he worked and she did her homework.
Ethan Frome and William Stoner were both wonderful characters in literature. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and found the story compelling. But, I adored
Stoner. My rating only reflects that this one suffers by comparison...not that it wasn't well-written and absorbing.
