Ethan Frome (Questions) 1. Discuss the three characters. Do you find Zeena's shrewishness believable? Does Ethan control his life, or do life's events control him? Is Mattie a sympathetic character or not? 2. What does the name Starkfield suggest about the setting? How does Herman Gow corroborate this later (p. 5). 3. What role do the townsfolk play in Ethan Frome? 4. Mattie wears red when we readers first see/meet her. What does the red signify? 5. Discuss Mattie's and Ethan's decision in the sleigh—an act of desperation, clearly. Is it justified, immoral, unethical, irresponsible? Or the only honorable way out of an untenable situation? 6. hat is the significance of Ruth Varnum and Ned Hale's relationship. 7. Which character, Mattie or Ethan, holds the power in their relationship? 8. How does Ethan's confrontation with Zeena in Chapter 7 act as a turning point for his character? 9. In what ways is fear the driving force that keeps Ethan from eloping with Mattie in Chapter 9? 10. Ruth Varnum gets the last word in the story. Why? Do you agree with her statement that Ethan, Mattie, and Zeena would be better off dead? 11. How is Zeena’s reaction to Mattie’s departure a contrast to Ethan’s? What are the implications of her behavior? 12. Discuss the ending—in what way is it ironic? How do you feel about Ethan's final situation? 13. What might the story look like from Zeena's point of view? From Mattie's? Do you think the narrator does a good job of showing us Ethan's point of view? 14. Is Ethan a believable character? Why or why not? 15. Do you identify with any of the characters? If so which ones and why? 16. What could Mattie have said to Ruth when she woke up after the accident? Why can't Ruth repeat it? Is this mystery important? 17. Ruth Varnum gets the last word in the story. Why? Do you agree with her statement that Ethan, Mattie, and Zeena would be better off dead? 18. Harmon Gow tells the narrator that Ethan takes care of Mattie and Zeena. Ruth tells the narrator that Zeena takes care of Ethan and Mattie. Who is right? How do you know? Can both be right? 19. Why do you think that the book is structured in this particular way, with the main story from the past sandwiched in between the Prologue and Epilogue showing Ethan and company 24 years later? 20. It seemed like there was not much humor in this story. Did you see any? If you did find humor, where? If not, do you think this was a wise choice for the novel? Would a little humor have heightened the tragedy, or would it be out of place in the story? https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/fiction/300-ethan-frome-wharton?start=3 Ethan Frome (About the Author) Birth Date— January 24, 1861 Place of Birth— New York City Birth Death— August 11, 1937 Place of Death— Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France Education— No formal education Awards— 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Literature The Age of Innocence National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996 Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones into a wealthy family on 24 January, 1862 in New York City. She was the youngest of three children born to George Frederic and Lucretia Jones, descendants of English and Dutch colonists who had made their fortunes in banking, shipping, and real estate. She was a member of the fashionable 'old money' society of New York, which she was to observe and satirize in her novels and stories. Privately educated by European governesses, she wrote stories and poems from childhood. In 1866, the family moved to Europe to conserve funds in the post-Civil War depression, before returning to the United States in 1872. More In 1885, Edith married Edward (Teddy) Wharton, a Boston banker twelve years her senior. The marriage was unhappy and within a few years she was suffering from neurotic ailments which ended in a nervous breakdown. Her doctors advised her to write as part of her 'rest-cure.' Her first book, The Decoration of Houses, was published in 1897. Her first collection of short stories appeared in 1899. In 1902, the Whartons moved into the country house that Edith had built, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts. In 1903, prompted by a downturn in Teddy's health, they left for Europe, where Edith thrived on the stimulating salon culture. Until 1912 they divided their time between homes in the United States and Paris. But as Edith recovered and grew in professional standing, her husband declined into mental instability. In 1906-09, Wharton had an affair with the American journalist Morton Fullerton. When Edith discovered Teddy had embezzled money from her to support his mistress, the marriage collapsed. The Whartons were divorced in 1913 and Edith lived for the rest of her life in France. Edith Wharton gained her first literary success with her novel The House Of Mirth (1905), a portrait of the materialistic lives of the rich, followed by The Custom Of The Country (1913). Among her most famous novels is The Age Of Innocence (1920), a satirical commentary on high society manners which won the Pulitzer Prize, the first time it was given to a woman. Other major works include Ethan Frome (1911) and The Reef (1912). Wharton also wrote poems, essays, and her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934). During and after World War I Wharton worked tirelessly for homeless children, orphans, refugees and unemployed women. She organized the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, taking charge of 600 Belgian children who had to leave their orphanage during the German advance. Edith Wharton's last novel, The Buccaneers (1938), was left unfinished, but published posthumously in 1938. She died of cardiac arrest in France on August 11, 1937 and is buried in the American Cemetery in Versailles. https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/fiction/300-ethan-frome-wharton?start=1 Ethan Frome (Reviews) The Guardian The combination of irony and moral seriousness in Wharton's satirical depiction of American high society at the beginning of the 20th century made her a bestseller and earned her widespread critical acclaim. Her international reputation was established with her second novel, The House of Mirth, which sold more than 100,000 copies in the first three months after its publication in 1905. She also became the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer prize for fiction, winning in 1921 for The Age of Innocence. Both her reputation and her sales dipped after her death in 1937 - elegant dissections of a vanished world looked very out of date in a world of Finnegans Wake, Murhpy, To Have and Have Not and Of Mice and Men - but have risen steadily since the release of her papers in the late 1960s. A succession of Hollywood adaptations have brought her work to a wider audience, while deepening academic interest has seen her stature rise to the point where she is bracketed with the author she called "Maître", Henry James. Blog: Los Angeles Review of Books Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome is a tragedy, almost unendurably poignant, about a thwarted double suicide, which ensures purgatory-like suffering for its participants. I first read the short novel as a junior in high school, and it scared me. It’s a grim New England horror show — puritanism, repression, and stoic endurance — more ghastly than that other high school English favorite, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. What stayed with me since high school was the fateful sled ride in the anesthetic snowy landscape, a sneaky metaphor for dangerous, thrilling sex, alluded to in the beginning of the novel as the “smash-up.” The sled ride was foreshadowed throughout the story before its climactic (pun intended) reveal. (As a notable aside, according to Urban Dictionary, “smash” is now slang, meaning: “to f–ck someone really good.”) A male engineer travels to the Dickensian-named Starkfield, recognizing in the limping Frome the “ruin of a man,” and unfolds the “smash-up” tale through his interactions with Frome via commentaries and stories. As these tales are told, Wharton deftly demonstrates how culture and circumstances trap people. What little we know or understand about Zenobia Frome and her young cousin, Mattie Silver, who revolve around Ethan, is vague, as the final stinging, ironic commentary from Mrs. Hale validates: “… I don’t see’s 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 women have got to hold their tongues.” It’s not like the women who are alive — Zeena and Mattie especially — get to be gregarious truth-tellers, either. Zeena’s an income-sucking, hypochondriac killjoy, seven years older than her husband’s 28 years, though “she was already an old woman.” Ethan probably married her out of guilt: after all, she’d taken care of his dying mom. Zeena has “asthmatic breathing,” she wraps her hair in “yellow flannel,” and she keeps her false teeth in a cup on the bedside table. Later, she’s reading a book (Ethan paid extra postage for its delivery) called Kidney Troubles and Their Cure. Mattie sells her piano for 50 bucks to travel to Starkfield, so she can become Zeena’s caretaker, since there are no other viable options, now that her parents have died and left her destitute. What she lacks in domesticity skills, she makes up for by being Zeena’s opposite.