Character of Ethan Frome.

Name: Gail Edilia Rego

Class: Senior 4D

Character of Ethan Frome

Ethan Frome, a tragic romance, first published in 1911, is widely regarded as Edith Wharton's most revealing novel and her finest achievement in fiction. Set in the bleak, barren winter landscape of New England, it is the tragic tale of a simple man, bound to the demands of his farm and his tyrannical, sickly wife, Zeena, and driven by his star-crossed love for Zeena's young cousin, Mattie Silver. An exemplary work of literary realism in setting and character, Ethan Frome stands as one of the great classics of twentieth-century American literature.

The uselessness of poverty, mean spiritedness, and grim silence are all-present in the tragedy of Ethan Frome. At each turn the circumstances of rural poverty, mixed with the bitterness of isolation and failure, lead the
main characters to lives of tragic resignation. As a result of their
miserable existence, they grow hard and mean-spirited, rarely
communicating except with complaints and anger. The townsfolk
tend to avoid them and are even reluctant to speak freely of the
ruined lives of Ethan, Mattie, and Zeena. Poverty's greatest curse is that it takes away options. It traps Ethan at the farm, just as later it forces Ethan, Zeena, and Mattie to live under the same roof.

The story is set in a small town of Starkfield, a barren and an unproductive place. Ethan Frome, the novel’s protagonist, is described as having “been in Starkfield too many winters.” Ethan Frome is a taciturn, extremely responsible young man who marries an older woman because of fear of being alone. He has no social skills, shy and naive, and has got a kind of martyr complex.

Ethan and Zeena had planned to move to a big city and start a new life. Lack of fertile land and enough money prevented their dreams from coming true. Zeena became sick and Ethan realized that he was never getting out of Starkfield. Zeena is an old, frigid, cold and an ugly woman. She was emotionless and never expressed her feelings. She was always down and depressed, passive, aggressive and manipulative.

Zeena Frome is cold and unappealing, a woman prone to long silences, who is always described as speaking in a “flat whine,” while Mattie Silver is a picture of youthful vigor and beauty, with a sparkling personality and name to match. Ethan as a healthy man is helpless but Zeena who is supposed to be sick woman is fervent.

The description of Zeena evokes not only ugliness and, but also sickness and death. Zeena’s thinness may result in part from her chronic illness. Moreover, when the narrative draws attention to the “fantastically” exaggerated “hollows and prominences” in her face, its “ring of crimping-pins,” it is evoking more than mere ugliness. Here she is the picture of death itself, in opposition to life in general.

After a while, Zeena stopped complaining because Ethan stopped listening. Their house became silent and cold. All of that changed when Mattie, Zeena’s cousin comes to stay with ...

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After a while, Zeena stopped complaining because Ethan stopped listening. Their house became silent and cold. All of that changed when Mattie, Zeena’s cousin comes to stay with them. She is a young, flirtatious, outgoing cousin of Zeena, who also loved nature just like Ethan. She was a vibrant woman who brought life to the house. Ethan ends up falling in love with her.

The quotation from the introduction of the book, “When I had been there a little longer, and had seen this phase of crystal clearness followed by long stretches of sunless cold;…………………………………….I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its six months siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter.”

The narrator describes his experience of a Starkfield winter. His metaphorical comparison of Starkfield’s trouble against the harsh winter and a “starved garrison” struggling against a besieging army establishes one of of Ethan Frome’s principal themes: the bleak, harsh physical environment surrounding the characters acts as an oppressive power, forcing a sort of emotional listlessness. When one of the old inhabitants of Starkfield says that Ethan Frome has “been in Starkfield too many winters,” he means that Ethan has lived for too long in what amounts to a state of siege by the climate. The novel suggests that when snow buries Starkfield each year, the emotions, dreams, and initiative of sensitive souls like Ethan also become buried, destroyed by the “long stretches of -sunless cold.”

Ethan is a sensitive man, a lover of nature, and a basically decent person, but is “as bare as milk pan” which means he has lost his heart, he lacks emotional strength and so is mastered by circumstances. Wharton has portrayed him as a round character.

In Ethan Frome, the bleak winter setting is a primary clue that nature plays a key role in the story. Nature is displayed as a powerful and malevolent force that is indifferent to humankind. In the novel, the narrator once stated, "But when winter shut down on Starkfield, and the village lay under a sheet of snow perpetually renewed from the pale skies, I began to see what life there--or rather its negation--must have been . . . “. This statement depicts the winter seasons in Starkfield as gloomy and undesirable weather.

The imagery of Ethan Frome is built around cold, ice and snow, and hues of white. Like the narrator we eventually find beauty in the drifts, flakes and icicles. Eventually, however, the unremittingly wintry imagery becomes overwhelming and oppressive, as the overall tone and outlook of the book became increasingly bleak.

“She had taken everything else from him; and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for all the others. For a moment such a flame of hate rose in him that it ran down his arm and clenched his fist against her.”

This passage from chapter 7 makes clear that Ethan is a physically strong man who commanded respect, but, as the reader comes to understand, he lacks a force of personality. His clenched fist even hints at potential physical violence. Yet these emotions ultimately lead nowhere, as his fury breaks up into a “bewildered voice”, a sharp contrast to his inner “flame of hate”. Ethan may be filled with emotional turmoil, but he ultimately proves weaker than his wife.

Ethan Frome is presented as a tragic figure; his tragic flaw, his weakness, is his loneliness, which gives rise to his fantasies. His
dreams of escaping the dreariness of his farm and leading a life
outside of Starkfield; he also dreams of having Mattie for his
wife. But like a robot, he goes through life, trudging to the Post
Office each day and allowing his sickly wife to control his fate.
At the same time, he is aware of his real situation, his
"responsibility" to Zeena and his farm. He sees his problem in
terms of two poles; life with Mattie is endlessly sweet, and life
with Zeena is completely sour and hopeless. Ethan does not know
how to deal with the problem, for he has had limited experience;
his life has been spent toiling on the farm.
Ethan excites the reader's sympathies, for he is created as a pathetic character that has been dealt a difficult set of
circumstances. He is basically a sensitive and intelligent man, but
he is chained to his existence on the farm. He was forced to leave
college to care for his aging and ailing parents. He married Zeena
because he feared loneliness and felt he owed her something for
her help with his parents. He has worked diligently on the farm,
never enjoying leisure or social connection. But his circumstances
have made him jealous, controlling, and weak. To satisfy his own
selfish needs for communication and connection, he preys on the
vulnerable and innocent Mattie Silver and wins her love. Then he
refuses to stand up to his wife to protect Mattie. He allows her to
be sent away, for he feels powerless against Zeena. In truth, he
becomes his own hopelessness.

“There was one day, about a week after the accident, when they all thought Mattie couldn’t live. Well, I say it’s a pity she did……………if Mattie ha’ died, Ethan might ha’ lived; and the way they are now; I don’t see there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; ‘cept that down there they’re all quiet, and the woman have got to hold their tongues.”

We realize the full horror of Ethan’s life. He is trapped not only with a Zeena but also with a Mattie who has been transformed into a crippled copy of his wife. The comparison between the Fromes life and the corpses’ existence in the graveyard emphasizes certain aspects of Ethan’s fate. It underlines the permanence of his situation, implying that his imprisonment is irreversible like death. If there is one thing more fearsome than death, it is a living death. A living death, Ethan’s tragic fate continues to torment the soul for years.

There are three themes in this story. Love, Ethan and Zeena never had true love for each other. Ethan has had a loveless marriage, and Mattie Silver has been the catalyst for some very powerful emotions. Betrayal, Ethan wanted to have an affair with Mattie despite the fact that he was married to her cousin. Communication, lack of communication was the problem between Ethan and Zeena. Communication is the key to a good relationship. Zeena and Ethan didn’t talk so they didn’t know how each other felt. If they had had better communication, Ethan wouldn’t have had the need to be with Mattie because he would have already had a companion in Zeena.

In spite of the fact that Ethan considers an affair, Wharton portrays him a generally sympathetic character. Though sympathetic Ethan remains a frustrating main character. Ethan is a passive, unhappy victim of circumstance, weighed down by his duty to his wife, his bitter existence as a poor farmer and the strain that Starkfield’s frozen landscapes places on his soul.

The negative aspects of Zeena’s personality emerge quite clearly, making her seem like the novel’s villain. While she is technically the victim of Ethan’s plans to commit adultery, the reader comes to sympathize much more with Ethan, because he feels imprisoned in his marriage to the sickly and shrewish Zeena.

There has been a lot of nature imagery used. Some examples include: The name "Starkfield" symbolically portrays the bleak, harsh landscape of the book. Winter was characterized by "long stretches of sunless cold" while the sky "poured down torrents of light and air on the white landscape." Images of "starved apple-trees writhing over a hillside," and sparse orchards whose "boundaries were lost under drifts" further demonstrate the debilitating effects of the harsh winters on the land and the men who work it.

The moral of this book is that, go for what you want in life and don’t get yourself caught up in something you cant get out of. Ethan married Zeena even though he didn’t love her and got stuck in taking care of her. This isn’t what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to run away with Mattie from the start but couldn’t do it because of his responsibility to Zeena.

In my opinion, Ethan was never in love with Zeena. She was to him, an escape from the sadness and isolation of the winter after his mother died. She looked to him as an adventure a chance to have a good life. This failed. As the isolation crept up on them, Ethan and Zeena began to notice not the loss of their love, for they never had love, but the realism of their fates. Neither were where they wanted to be in life and their previous dreams were wrecked. This is what brought the sadness into the home, only to strengthen as winters passed. Mattie, too was not a love but rather an attempt to find something in his life to make him happy. She represented everything that he wanted in himself, youth, happiness, chance. In himself he thought that she might offer some sort of temporary escape from his own gloom. Mattie and Ethan were never in love. It was no more than a failing shot at life. This is how I conclude that the focus of this book is not a tragic love story but rather, a story of broken dreams, false hopes, and the realism of the brutality of human fates.