How did Ethan try to escape Starkfield?

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Ethan Frome.

        The book Ethan Frome was written in a narrator’s point of view, although the actual story is in Ethan’s thoughts and his actions. The book runs around two main themes, the fight between love and public standard and the effects that a harsh winter climate can have on a person’s spirit. These themes affect Ethan’s character and make him very upset, lonely and very unhappy. Overwhelmed with his duty to his wife he becomes stuck in Starkfield in a way he is frozen like the landscape around him, “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters,”   a local tells the narrator.

Ethan grew up with a desire to escape Starkfield for bigger cities, and also had a great desire for a career in science. His first attempt to escaping Starkfield was leaving for college. He has to return when his father gets kicked in the head by a horse and dies. He stays and helps his mother on the farm but soon his mother becomes ill, so he invites a distant family member Zeena to help him around the house and look after his mother. Zeena looks after his mother and Ethan very well but his mother still died ‘After the funeral, when he saw her preparing to go away, he was seized with an unreasoning dread of being left alone on the farm; and before he knew what he was doing he had asked her to stay with him.’

He could have sold the farm and used the money for his second escape attempt to the city, ‘he had often thought since that it would not have happened if his mother had died in the spring instead of winter.’ but no matter what he had done the farm was not easy to sell because it was out of the village and the soil for farming was not very good.

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A few years later Zeena became very ill. Ethan knew he could not move her to the city so he therefore became stuck in Starkfield for good.

Zeena’s illness prevented her from being able to do jobs around the house so she called upon a distant cousin, Mattie Silver, to help around the house and help look after the farm. Mattie and Ethan fall secretly in love with each other over the year Mattie had lived with them and Zeena starts to get a feeling that there is something going on. Zeena goes away to see a doctor in Corbury ...

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