Ethan Frome
— 1911 —
New York: Penguin Books, 2005; with an introduction and notes by Elizabeth Ammons; 99 pages
FIRST LINES
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
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 who he was.
PLOT SUMMARY
In all likelihood—if you had an American education—you were assigned at some point to read Ethan Frome. If you did, read it again. If you didn’t, read it now. It is a great short book.
Set in a bleak, wintry Massachusetts village, appropriately named Starkfield, Wharton’s compact novella tells a simple, and yes, stark, story about a character who is a “ruin of a man.” Wharton explores the cause of that ruin.
Living on his hardscrabble family farm, barely making ends meet, Ethan Frome is descended from people who have worked this hard land for centuries. He lives in “one of those lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier.”
The farmhouse is visited by the narrator, who arrives in a raging snowstorm, and the story emerges. Ethan Frome is married to Zenobia, a joyless hypochondriac with a constant variety of ills. A suspicious and scornful woman, Zeena seeks a variety of cures that have further reduced Frome’s meager fortune.
Enter Mattie, the orphaned daughter of one of Zeena’s relatives. The young woman was hired to serve as the couple’s live-in housekeeper, but Mattie is never able to please Mrs. Frome. In these close confines, Ethan falls in love with the vivacious Mattie. Obsessed with the young girl, he goes so far as to plot leaving his wife and heading west with Mattie. As events will prove, it is an ill-fated, disastrous dream.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: EDITH WHARTON
The author who became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Edith Newbold Jones was born on January 24, 1862, into New York’s rarefied Knickerbocker society. That upper-crust world of “old money” provided the backdrop for much of her best-known work chronicling America’s Gilded Age. But Wharton spent a considerable part of her life abroad.
In 1866, her family moved to Europe, where they lived for the next six years. Upon returning to New York in 1872, Edith was tutored by a governess, read from her father’s extensive library, and later secretly wrote a short novel, which went unpublished. Her first published work was a selection of her poems, printed by her mother, one of which later appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. “In the eyes of our provincial society,” Edith later said, “authorship was still regarded as something between a black art and a form of manual labor.”
Making her “social debut” in a Fifth Avenue ballroom preceded the family’s return to France in 1881. When her father died in 1882 Edith inherited a considerable sum of money, and she returned in 1883 to the United States. She then met Edward (Teddy) Wharton, a friend of her brother and Boston socialite in Bar Harbor, Maine. Edith married him, at age twenty-three, in 1885. Edith Wharton continued to write and a story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” was accepted for publication in 1890.
Despite the advantages of wealth and society, Edith Wharton suffered personal difficulties that began to grow. Teddy Wharton would prove unfaithful and mentally unbalanced, and their marriage was troubled. Battling depression, she traveled to Italy in 1894 and still managed to write a design guide, The Decoration of Houses, with architect Ogden Codman in 1897. After a nervous collapse, Wharton was treated with the “rest-cure.”
And still she wrote. A short story collection, The Greater Inclination (1899), a novella, The Touchstone (1900), and her first full novel, The Valley of Decision (1902), appeared in quick succession. In 1902, she moved into The Mount, a home she helped design and had built in Lenox, in the Berkshires region of Massachusetts, the setting for Ethan Frome. There she began work on The House of Mirth, published in 1905 to critical and popular success.
With Teddy’s mental state in serious decline, she returned to Europe and began a three-year affair with Morton Fullerton, a Times of London correspondent she had met in 1907 through their mutual friend, Henry James. Around this time, Edith Wharton learned that Teddy had embezzled fifty thousand dollars of her money. Selling her New York apartment, she made France her permanent home and worked toward an eventual divorce in 1913.
In 1911, Ethan Frome had been published to admiring reviews. But the world stage was about to be transformed, as World War I broke out in July 1914. In France, Wharton began an ambitious fund-raising campaign in support of war refugees, unemployed women, and homeless children. She delivered supplies to the front lines in 1915 and organized a committee to rescue children victimized by the war. For her wartime philanthropy, Wharton was later made a Chevalier of France’s Legion of Honor.
In 1920 The Age of Innocence appeared, and it won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, a first for a woman. Wharton’s later writing included an autobiography, A Backward Glance, and The Old Maid, a novella initially rejected by publishers because it dealt with the taboo subject of illegitimate birth. It was later dramatized by playwright and poet Zoë Akins in an adaptation that won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
There was an unsuccessful effort to lobby for a Nobel Prize for Wharton, whose later work paled beside her greatest novels. She would return to the United States only twice—once for an honorary Doctor of Letters from Yale, another first for a woman. In 1937, living at her home in France, she wrote a final short story, “All Souls,” before suffering a stroke in June of that year. She died on August 11, 1937, aged seventy-five, and is buried in Versailles.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
When Ethan Frome was published in 1911, the New York Times called it a “cruel, compelling haunting story.” The rest of the notice did not suggest that it would eventually become a staple of American literature. But it surely has. As in several of Wharton’s novels, Ethan Frome depicts characters trapped in inescapable circumstances, including bad marriages, not unlike Wharton herself.
Read it first for the beauty of the writing, what Harold Bloom described as “sublime eloquence.” In prose that is as spare and cold as its New England setting, yet still remarkably sensual, Ethan Frome grapples with the seeming impossibility of love. In one scene between Ethan and Mattie, when there still seems a glimmer of hope, Wharton writes:
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 it smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say such things.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Two other short novels by Wharton, Summer and Bunner Sisters, are often bound with Ethan Frome. Though less renowned than Ethan Frome, both show Wharton’s elegant prose and artistic concerns. Wharton also wrote a great many short stories that are available in collections.
Of course, her two towering works are: The House of Mirth, the story of penniless orphan Lily Bart seeking a marriage that will bring her into New York society; and The Age of Innocence, the account of an upper-class couple’s planned marriage, upset by the arrival of Countess Ellen Olenska, the bride’s scandal-plagued cousin, and set in the gilded world of Fifth Avenue mansions and Newport “cottages” in which Wharton was raised. The eminent critic Harold Bloom singles out The Custom of the Country (1913), the story of Undine Spragg, another woman looking to climb in New York society, as Wharton’s best.
Wharton’s most famous novels have been brought to screen. Liam Neeson starred in Ethan Frome (1993). Martin Scorsese directed The Age of Innocence (1993) with Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder in the central roles. And a film version of House of Mirth (2000) featured Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart.