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Ethan Frome is a 1911 novella by American author Edith Wharton. It details the story of a man who falls in love with his wife's cousin and the tragedies which result from the ensuing love triangle. The novel has been adapted into a film of the same name. [1]
- Edith Wharton
- 1911
Edith Wharton transforms this bleak atmosphere into her own icy novella, the trepidatious tragedy Ethan Frome, in which we find a man trapped by his own circumstances in a melancholic Massachusetts countryside under ‘pale skies’ from which ‘sheets of snow perpetually renewed.’.
- (129.6K)
- Paperback
Originally begun as a French exercise and titled Hiver (French for “winter”), Ethan Frome draws upon Wharton’s time in the Berkshires. According to her memoir, A Backward Glance , “It was not until I wrote Ethan Frome that I suddenly felt the artisan’s full control of his implements.”
Edith Wharton wrote Ethan Frome as a frame story — meaning that the prologue and epilogue constitute a "frame" around the main story. The "frame" is The Narrator's vision of the tragedy that befalls Ethan Frome.
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Media Adaptations
- Themes
- Style
- Topics For Further Study
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
Critics have called Ethan Frome the most carefully constructed of Edith Wharton's novels, and have praised the economy of its language and its intensity. The novel is a naturalistic—that is, unsentimental—portrait of emotional frigidity set in the New Englandwinter. Young Mattie Silver arrives in the mountain village of Starkfield to help with hous...
Edith Wharton was born January 24, 1862, to a wealthy New York family. She showed an interest in writing and literature from an early age. Despite the attempts of her family to discourage her, Edith regularly wrote poems and short stories, some of which were published in magazines such as Scribner's and Harper's. Walter Berry, a family friend, enco...
Ethan Fromeis the story of a man who, following the death of his father, gives up his education and other opportunities to return to the family farm in Starkfield, Massachusetts, to support his ailing mother. When his mother dies, Ethan, overcome by loneliness, impulsively marries Zeena Pierce, an older cousin who helped nurse his dying mother. Wit...
Dennis Eady
The son of Michael Eady, an ambitious Irish grocer. Dennis has a reputation for applying the same techniques his father used so successfully in business in pursuit of the young women of Starkfiled.
Ethan Frome
Ethan Frome is twenty-eight years old and physically impressive at the time the events in the novel take place. A series of family crises put a premature end to his engineering studies and force him into agriculture, for which he has no inclination, and now he must also care for Zeena, his cranky, hypochondriacal wife of seven years. Ethan's brief studies made him "aware of the huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things," and because he is "by nature grave and inarticulate," he is "...
A dramatization of Ethan Fromeby Owen and Donald Davis was produced in New York in 1936.A 1993 screen version directed by John Maddenstarred Liam Neeson as Ethan, Joan Allen as Zeena, and Patricia Arquette as Mattie. It was coproduced by American Playhouse, Companion Productions, and...Richard Krausnick adapted and directed the novel as a full-length stage play for Shakespeare and Company, who first performed it in 1995 in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Wharton had a home.An unabridged audio recording read by C. M. Herbert is available from Blackstone Audiobooks.Frustration
The theme of frustration is central to Ethan Frome.Sometimes the frustration is a product of the oppressive environment, and sometimes it stems from their personalities. Ethan's early plans to become an engineer are frustrated by the need to care for his father and mother as well as for the farm. He had always wanted to "live in towns, where there were lectures and big libraries and 'fellows doing things."' His marriage to Zeena is a study in frustration, not only because of her hypochondria...
Individual Responsibility
Related to the theme of frustration is that of individual responsibility, insofar as it is Ethan's sense of duty that chains him to his circumstances. Critic Blake Nevius defined the "great question posed by Ethan Frome" as "What is the extent of one's moral obligation to those individuals who, legally or within the framework of manners, conventions, taboos, apparently have the strictest claim on one's loyalty?" Responsibility interrupts Ethan's studies and brings him home to the farm to care...
Loneliness
The theme of loneliness pervades the novel. At the outset, the narrator remarks of Ethan Frome, "I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters." Ethan's home is "one of those lonely New Englandfarm-houses that make the landscape loneli...
Point of View
Critics hail Ethan Frome as the most carefully constructed of Wharton's novels. The story relates events that occurred twenty-four years previously within a narrative frame of the present, similar to Emily Brönte's Wuthering Heights. Of the story-within-a-story structure, the Nation wrote in 1911, "Such an approach could not be improved." A single, unnamed narrator tells the entire tale. Wharton frankly acknowledged that she borrowed the technique of the narrator as omniscient author from Hon...
Explore the various options young people have today for getting an education and making their own way in the world, and explain how the lives of the characters in Ethan Fromemight have been differe...Investigate the trend to urbanization of the 1920s and explain how it would have affected towns like Starkfield.How has the worldwide lumber industry changed since the late 19th century, and is there any role in it for small operators like Ethan Frome?Research the technology available to today's amateur astronomers for exploring the night sky, and describe the kinds of things Ethan would have been able to show Mattie if he had had access to that...Expansion and Reform in the 1910s
The decade of the 1910s in which Edith Wharton wrote Ethan Frome was characterized by economic prosperity in the United Statesand increasing political influence in the world, especially as it endured and triumphed in the First World War. It was a time in which the country's freedom became a principal feature of America's identity, but also a time in which these values were questioned by the unfinished business of women's suffrage. Competing values of labor and capitalism also continued to wor...
Innovation in Industry and the Arts
Industrial growth and the use of new technologies were two of the reasons for the explosive economic expansion of the 1910s. The first direct telephone link between New York and Denver was opened in 1911, the year Ethan Frome was published. Examples of these developments are evident in the narrator's remarks about having come to Starkfield in the "degenerate day of trolley, bicycle and rural delivery" and easy communication between the mountain villages," which he contrasts with conditions tw...
The First World War
America's attempts at neutrality became irrelevant as the efforts of American manufacturers to capture world markets drew the United States into the affairs of other nations. U.S. economic interests were particularly strong in Latin America and the Caribbean, exemplified by Bethlehem Steel's purchase of Chile's Tofo Iron Mines in 1911, and the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914. The policies of interventionist presidents like Roosevelt and Taft contrasted with those of Woodrow Wilson. But...
Critics generally regard Ethan Frome as a departure from Wharton's usual subject matter. Wharton herself remarked that "it was frequently criticized as 'painful,' and at first had much less success than my previous books." The enduring popularity of the novel has somewhat cynically been attributed to its brevity and its place in the high school and...
People also ask
Why did Edith Wharton write Ethan Frome as a frame story?
Is Ethan Frome a good book?
Why is Ethan Frome based on a true story?
Who is Ethan Frome?
In writing Ethan Frome, Wharton was greatly influenced by Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book and Balzac's short story "La Grande Bretèche," from which she drew her narrative method, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, from which Zeena's name is taken (Ethan's name was based on another Hawthorne ...
Ethan Frome is a poor farmer, trapped in a marriage to a demanding and controlling wife, Zeena. When Zeena’s young cousin Mattie enters their household she opens a window of hope in Ethan’s bleak life, but his wife’s reaction prompts a desperate attempt to escape fate that goes horribly wrong.
