’What chance had she, inexperienced and untrained,
among the million bread- seekers of the cities?’
Communications were less developed than today or even than the time on narration, when ’winter shut down on Starkfield’ everyone was isolated. There was no telephone, radio, television, buses or cars. If you needed to contact someone it had to be by foot or horse and Ethan ’[had] been in Starkfield too many winters’ so the season, added to Ethan’s plight. Even when the railroad had been introduced it had left them ‘side-tracked’ because before ’there was considerable passing’. This left Ethan and his family even more alone and desolate from the rest of the country.
The second factor is the place the novel is set in. The name Starkfield is suggestive of deprivation and lifeless souls, all contributing to Ethan’s hardship.
The main season in the novel is the ’enemy’ of winter. Edith Wharton uses the climate to match the feelings of people in Starkfield, walking with a ’sluggish pulse’.
Wharton uses a military metaphor on page seven,
‘Storms of February had pitched their white tents
About the devoted village and the wild cavalry of
March winds had charged down to their support’.
As I was saying before, the presence of Ethan in Starkfield for the whole of his life has added to his plight. The metaphor is showing how the residents of Starkfield, they are defeated by the winter, allowing the reader to understand why Ethan stayed. The narrator wonders, ‘how could any combination of obstacles have hindered the flight of a man like Ethan Frome’.
Ethan Frome is again associated with the ‘melancholy landscape’, an incarnation of it’s frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface’. Ethan Frome is very quiet and depressed, he is an embodiment of silence, keeping all of his feelings to himself. We can conclude that he is only like this because of the harsh winters, the suffering and repression.
Another little reminder to Ethan that he has been stuck in the depressed village is the Frome gravestones at his house. Ethan did want ‘change and freedom’ and because he never found it they mock him, ‘we never got away - how could you?’. His farm is his existence, his farm is ghostly as it stands ‘in all it’s plaintive ugliness’. His house has rubbed off on Ethan and the ghostly house has contributed to his hard life.
Ethan has been left to ‘carry the burden of the farm’, since his ‘father’s accident’ and when his mother fell ill he was left alone, so since he was young he has looked after his mother and the farm. Ethan’s mother’s illness led him to meet Zeena, his future wife. When his mother died, ‘he was seized with an unreasoning dread of being left alone on the farm’, so he asked Zeena to marry him, without really loving her.
Ethan’s economic problems have had a major effect on his life because he has been poor all of his life so he has had to work very hard. All Ethan has to try and get his home through winter is a ‘barren farm and a failing saw mill’. Frome’s wife, Zeena also adds to Ethan’s economic problems with all of the different medicines she buys.
Even when Ethan does meet ‘his one ray of light’ whom he loves, he can’t leave, Ethan is trapped by his poverty. He can’t leave his wife or farm because he doesn’t have enough money. All of Ethan’s hopes and dreams were always dashed by the economic and moral dilemmas and this leads to unhappiness and stress, ‘The inexorable facts closed in on him like prison- warders handcuffing a convict.’
Ethan’s moral duty, maybe the most important factor in tragedy, has led him to unhappiness and despair. For the whole of his life he ’had to stay and care for the folks’. He is so used to caring he can’t bring himself to abandon Zeena.
’Sickness and trouble: that’s what Ethan had his
plates full of with, ever since the very first helping’.
Ethan has such growing love for Mattie who makes him feel alive again, she ‘was like the lighting of a fire on a cold hearth’ to him unlike Zeena who was the ’deadly chill of a vault’ so Mattie is heat and Zeena is the cold.
To Ethan Mattie,
‘Had an eye to see and an ear to hear; he could show her
things and an tell her things and taste the bliss of
feeling that all he imparted left long reverberations
and echoes he could wake at will’.
Mattie made Ethan feel clever and wanted. He could tell her things and she would remember unlike Zeena who was in charge of Ethan. Mattie ’had given him something of her own ease and freedom’ and Ethan benefited from her so when she was forced to leave he was shattered.
Over time Ethan has grown to hate Zeena, he even wishes his wife was dead. Ethan thought of his wife as having ’flat breasts’, ’puckered throats’, ’high-boned face’. She has made her husband think of her like that because of her personality towards him; even her bonnet is ’hard’ and ’perpendicular’. To Ethan, Zeena has been the ’woman at every turn has barred his way’, she has stopped him being happy and therefore his hate and revulsion against her has risen.
Ethan’s longing for freedom is being weighed up against the fear of leaving Zeena all alone. Zeena even gives Ethan a clue that she wasn’t cared for, when she ’reflectively’ tells him about some geraniums that wasn’t cared for. Ethan has to decide from the economic hardship, social and moral obligations and everything that he has been trained to do from childhood for example caring and putting people before himself.
All of these situations that have occurred has made the situation become intolerable for all three of them, this led to the ’smash up’. Ethan and Mattie realise that because they can’t be with each other because of these factors I have discussed they discide to end it together. Both Mattie and Ethan express their love for each other on the top of the slope, the first time that they actually kissed and expressed love for one another. They sooner realised ’what’s the good of either of [them] going anywheres without the other one now?’
‘Some erratic impulse’ and their love drove them to try and commit suicide. Ethan suffered after the ’smash up’. He became ’the ruin of a man’ through his ’warped right side’ and ’red gash’ across Frome’s forehead.
The accident scared both Mattie and Ethan for life and changed their life forever and with the mental factors for example the economic problems along with the last physical factor, the ’smash up’ has contributed to his tragic fate.
