COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the works, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the works’ history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome and Selected Stories through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.

Comments

THE NEW YORK TIMES SATURDAY REVIEW OF BOOKS

In “The Pretext” ... we have a bit of pattern weaving of considerable intricacy and of balanced and harmonious design. There are half a dozen possible answers to the suggested question, but the construction of the story is consistent and firm. The characters are clearly seen and produce upon us the effect they would produce in life. There is, perhaps, too obvious a denigration of the narrow setting—there have been pictures of narrower and colder aspects of our American scene that have managed to retain their local charm without the application on the part of their historian of a flattering coat of rose color; but the painter of human character is only rarely as competent a portraitist of places, and Mrs. Wharton is above all a delineator of character.

—October 3, 1908

 

LOUISE COLLIER WILLCOX

There is a certain inexorableness about Mrs. Wharton, as if she herself were constitutionally opposed to happiness, as if she were somewhat compelled to interpret life in terms of pain. Hence her beautifully told but somber tales are so unrelieved, fate in them is so persistently adverse, that they are sometimes not quite convincing. For after all, what men account as Fate does sometimes smile, and pain is pain by contrast with joy. But this particular story of three people, Ethan Frome, his wife Zeena, and Mattie Silver, is so swift, direct, and inevitable that it commands belief. The man, Ethan Frome, an undeveloped idealist, marrying, not for love, but because of feminine proximity and an instinctive recoil from loneliness, then finding beside him his fitting counterpart; the mutual happiness so wan and brief, the swift end, and then the long twilight of that truest heroism—the heroism of endurance—this finely self-consistent story takes firm hold of mind and imagination. And it is told, of course, with all Mrs. Wharton’s rare skill. The forcible right words, like apples of gold in frames of silver, are all here. The seeing and perceiving eye and the divining mind, with all their complexities of observation and penetration, have opened up for their fortunate possessor another field in which her hand seems as sure and certain as in the more urban life she usually portrays, and in the more sophisticated people she usually sets before us.

—from the North American Review (January 1912)

 

FRANCES HACKETT

“Xingu” is perhaps the cleverest of these stories. It is also the least valuably perceptive. A satire on the excessive seriousness, the pretentiousness, the false zealotry of a small American “culture” club, it goes rather too far in an acrimonious caricature of the women as human beings. Mrs. Wharton’s acid bites fairly into their idiocy as the pursuers of culture, it scarifies them too deeply in their social character. The Laura Glyde and Mrs. Plinth and Mrs. Leveret of real life would be equally insufferable about books, but Mrs. Wharton’s cold dislike for their natures is quite unjustified. It is in dealing with such women as these, women who if anything would err on the side of amiability and whose main mistake is to take too seriously the obligations imposed on them by a culture not native, that Mrs. Wharton becomes frigidly conventional. Her Mrs. Plinths and Mrs. Leverets are misjudged from the vantage point of Lenox or Tuxedo, or wherever it is that women do not allow even their illiteracy to detract from their self-confidence.

—from the New Republic (February 10, 1917)

BLANCHE COLTON WILLIAMS

Ethan Frome has indisputable claim to rank as the greatest short story in America. Its close unity, its three main characters, its Greek exaltation of Fate as supreme ruler of man and his affairs, its circumscription of place, and more, lend to it the salient marks of the brief fictive form, though its length places it in the novelette class.

—from Our Short Story Writers (1920)

EDITH WHARTON

It was not until I wrote “Ethan Frome” that I suddenly felt the artisan’s full control of his implements. When “Ethan Frome” first appeared I was severely criticized by the reviewers for what was considered the clumsy structure of the tale. I had pondered long on this structure, had felt its peculiar difficulties, and possible awkwardness, but could think of no alternative which would serve as well in the given case; and though I am far from thinking “Ethan Frome” my best novel, and am bored and even exasperated when I am told that it is, I am still sure that its structure is not its weak point.

—from A Backward Glance (1934)

 

CARL VAN DOREN

From the first [Edith Wharton] had had a satirical flair which at times gave her—as in her short story Xingu—the flash and glitter, and the agreeable artificiality, of polite comedy. The many futile women whom she enjoyed ridiculing belong nearly as much to the menagerie of the satirist as to the novelist’s gallery. In these moments of satire she indicated her own disposition: her impatience with stupidity and affectation and muddy confusion of mind and purpose; her dislike of dinginess; her toleration of arrogance when well-bred; her little concern with the sturdy or burly or homely, or with broad laughter. She was lucid and detached. Her self-possession held critics, and readers, at arm’s length, somewhat as her chosen circles hold the barbarians. No doubt she assigned to decorum a larger power than it often exercises, even in such societies as she wrote about. Decorum is binding upon those who accept it, but not upon passionate or logical natures, who treat it with violence or neglect; neither does it bind those who stand too surely to be shaken. The coils of circumstance and the pitfalls of inevitability with which Mrs. Wharton beset the careers of her characters were in part an illusion deftly employed for their effect. She multiplied them as romancers multiply adventures.

She notably did this in Ethan Frome, a short novel often singled out as her best work though she herself did not consider it that. She had begun it as a book to be written in French, some years before she wrote it over and completed it in English. The scene was laid not in her own world but in rural New England, near Lenox in the Berkshires where she had lived in summer. While she knew little at first-hand about people like Ethan Frome, his nagging wife Zenobia, and Mattie Silver whom he loves, Edith Wharton had felt some resemblance between their community and hers. If a metropolis had its hard decorum, so had a village. And in a village there was the further compulsion of a helpless poverty which could bind feet and wings, and dull life to an appalling dinginess.

—from The American Novel (1940)

Questions about Ethan Frome

1. What would you say is the underlying cause of the tragedy in Ethan Frome? Is it poverty? The New England frame of mind? Zeena’s personality? Sexual desire? The cultural and social and material vacuum in which the principal characters live?

2. Does Mattie’s decision that she and Ethan should commit suicide seem plausible? Is it foreshadowed by anything earlier in the novel?

3. What is a just view of Ethan? Is he weak? Repressed? Should he simply have run off with Mattie? Should he have been less indulgent of Zeena’s self-pity and asserted himself?

4. Is this novel too grim to be enjoyed? Or is there a way in which distressing material can be made to give aesthetic pleasure?