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.

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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.

Ethan falls for Mattie almost instantaneously, and she him, their connection providing flickers of joy in an otherwise joyless existence, love the sole respite. Frome’s excitement comes in no small part from the magic of intimacy, how “he could show her things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of feeling that all he imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at will.” He’s a caretaker, duty-bound: his parents, the farm, his ghoulish wife. He’d loved

college, but: “His father’s death, and the misfortunes surrounding it, had put a premature end to Ethan’s studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be of practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.”

Marital duty is also a hard foe, personified by Zeena’s cat, Puss, who gets between Ethan and Mattie while Zeena’s away, as if her stand-in, sitting in her place at the dinner table, and finally, inevitably, breaking an irreplaceable pickle dish, a wedding gift, no less. I love that Wharton chose the unglamorous pickle dish, and that it echoes an earlier scene, where Zeena hands Mattie an empty medicine bottle, having sucked out its last dregs, stating, “‘If you can get the taste out it’ll do for pickles.’” (In the margin, I wrote: YUCK.)

I can’t help but wonder if Zeena, who is at times comically abhorrent, represents Wharton’s disgust for her own husband. It’s possible to imagine the misery of Wharton’s marriage, alongside the short-lived, but blissed-out affair she’d had with the caddish, bisexual American journalist, Morton Fullerton, whom she’d met in 1907. In many ways, Wharton was a traditionalist, who believed strongly in marital fidelity, and she wrote the novel at the heels of her short-lived relationship with Fullerton. Like Ethan and his women, she was suffering, trapped, and her situation must’ve felt impossible. By the time the novel was published in 1911, she and Fullerton had been broken up for three years. A few years later, after a 28-year slog, she finally divorced her husband. That fleeting, charged triangulation — one relationship duty-bound and relentlessly awful, the other passionate but emotionally treacherous — no doubt played into her telling of Ethan Frome. Fullerton was charismatic, menacing, and he came with all sorts of baggage: during his relationship with Wharton, his former mistress was blackmailing him over love letters sent to him by his friend, Lord Gower.

Wharton also claimed to have written the original version of the story in French as an exercise, and to have “talked the tale over page by page” with the lawyer and diplomat Walter Berry who was her lifelong friend and another unrequited love, though her relationship with Berry was more weighted and complicated. Berry, Wharton stated, “exacted a higher standard in economy of expression, in purity of language, in the avoidance of the hackneyed and precious.” The language and the theme of Ethan Frome needed to be treated “starkly and summarily.”

Fullerton was dangerous, and he didn’t reciprocate Wharton’s love, but he awakened her sexuality and uninhibited passions can be frightening. Ethan and Mattie’s fatefully doomed sled ride resembles passionate, reckless sex — the kind they had denied themselves previously. “Her breath in his neck sent him shuddering,” and he “leaned back and drew her mouth to his…” Then “her blood seemed to be in his veins.” But Zeena’s face flashes, “with twisted monstrous lineaments,” causing Ethan to flinch, the sled swerving. He rights it, driving down on the “black projecting mass. There was a last instant when the air shot past him like millions of fiery wires…”

It’s not until later that the startling revelation came: had Ethan not insisted on sitting in the front of the sled, most likely to take the brunt of the collision, duty- bound yet again, convincing Mattie by saying he wants to “‘feel you holding me,’” he might have been able to navigate more accurately, thus achieving their original intention, death being the luckier outcome — an escape from reality’s sharp trap.

Reading World: Susan Coventry

When I finished The Age of Desire by Jennie Fields, a novel of the life of Edith Wharton, I knew I’d have to move one of Wharton’s classics to the top of my list. The Age of Innocence has been sitting on my shelf for a good while, but for some reason I felt compelled to re-read the novella Ethan Frome instead. I read it in high school, and while I couldn’t remember it in too much detail, I vaguely remembered the plot. I recalled the impression of it being the bleakest, most depressing novel I’d ever read. Was it really that bad? I had to read it again.

It is a downer. However, since my high school days, I’ve been exposed to a great deal of bleak reading material--not all of it fiction--so Ethan Frome didn’t retain quite the power to depress that it had back then. Set in a fictional New England town in the dead of winter, an unnamed narrator tells the story of a mysterious local figure, the partially paralyzed, physically arresting Ethan Frome.

The story tells of three people trapped by extreme poverty and by cruel Fate. Ethan Frome, the "hero," married a woman he does not love. He proposed to Zeena, his mother’s caretaker, after the death of his mother, without quite understanding the significance of the commitment he was making. Ethan and

Zeena both wanted something other than the poor farming life ahead of them in cold, isolated Starkfield. When it became apparent they were not going to escape, Zeena retreated into the self-absorption of chronic physical ailments, real or imaginary. Ethan, worn down by the demands of the farm and the demands of her illness, tried to turn a deaf ear to her complaints. She grew more and more bitter. He grew more and more withdrawn. And then, Zeena’s cousin, Mattie Silver entered the picture. A lively, pretty young girl, Mattie’s economic circumstances were even worse than Ethan and Zeena’s. Completely destitute, she was grateful to accept an unpaid position as Zeena’s live-in housekeeper and nurse.

Of course, Ethan and Mattie fall in love. Zeena senses their growing attraction and attempts to banish Mattie. But everyone’s plans go awry and the three are trapped even more cruelly. The story is told in such a way that everything is seen from Ethan’s perspective. Zeena is a sour, scheming, hypochondriac whose only joy in life seems to be making other people miserable. Mattie is sweet, innocent, and tragically unlucky. And Ethan is stoic and accursed.

However, there is more than one side to every story and this time around I had a bit more sympathy for Zeena’s position. Young Ethan seemed more pitiably weak. And I found Mattie to be a bit stupid. There is plenty of tragedy to go around in Ethan Frome, but I’m not so sure that it is as inevitable a tragedy as I believed it to be the first time I read it. Fate is certainly cruel to Ethan, Zeena and Mattie but their own poor decisions are just as much to blame.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/10/edithwharton https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/smash-edith-whartons-ethan-frome/ https://susancoventry.blogspot.com/2012/11/book-review-ethan-frome-by-edith-wharton.html

Ethan Frome

(Enhancement)

Edith Wharton was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature. She was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale, and a full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

• Wharton enjoyed writing Ethan Frome more than any other book.

Wharton was nearly 50 years old when Ethan Frome was published, and she had written other novels, nonfiction works, and stories by then. However, she wrote in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, that Ethan Frome was "the book to the making of which I brought the greatest joy and the fullest ease." She had long wanted to write about the struggle of life in rural New England rather than the upper-class problems of wealthy New Yorkers, and the novel allowed her to do that.

• The sledding accident in Ethan Frome was based on a real disaster.

The climax of Ethan Frome features a terrible sledding accident that dooms the main characters. This sledding accident was probably based on a real accident that took place in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Wharton worked at the library. In 1904 five children were killed when their sled crashed into a lamppost. One of Wharton's coworkers at the library was a survivor of the accident.

• Some critics believe Ethan Frome reflects Wharton's own unhappy marriage.

Wharton married Edward ("Teddy") Robbins Wharton in 1885. Teddy was 12 years older than she and mentally unstable. As her career took off, he became financially dependent on her. They had separate bedrooms, and until she was in her mid-40s, when she met and began an affair with Morton Fullerton, her life lacked a passionate relationship. This cold marriage is mirrored in Ethan and Zeena's passionless life together, and Wharton's awakening to love is reflected in Ethan's relationship with Mattie.

• Ethan Frome was originally written in French.

Wharton went to Paris for the winter in 1907. Wanting to update her French, which she was told was very "17th century," she hired a tutor. The tutor, however, was too nice to correct her spoken French, so she decided to write a story for him to correct. It introduced the book's three main characters and was eight pages long. That story later became the novella Ethan Frome.

• Wharton had no formal education.

Wharton grew up in an upper-class family where, according to tradition, males were sent to school and females were educated at home, if at all. She was forbidden to read novels and she wrote, "My childhood and youth were an intellectual desert." However, she spoke French, German, and Italian and traveled extensively. Her beloved governess taught her German, and she read through her father's library voraciously, devouring German mythology, poetry, travelogues, and the Old Testament.

• The New York Times called Ethan Frome "cruel."

The 1911 review of Ethan Frome in the New York Times bore the headline, "Three Lives in Supreme Torture." The review stated, "It is a cruel story. It is a compelling and haunting story," and went on to claim that it was a greater work than Wharton's House of Mirth (1905). The reviewer believed that she looked at her characters and their lives with "the eye of the tragic poet" rather than the "deep sympathy, smiling tenderness, and affectionate tolerance of the greatest novelists."

• Teddy Roosevelt told Wharton Ethan Frome was "powerful."

Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. president from 1901 to 1909, was a fan of Edith Wharton's work. He wrote her a letter in 1912 in which he mentioned Ethan Frome, saying, "Did I tell you how much I liked 'Ethan Frome'? It is a really great story." He stated that the novella was "one of the most powerful things you have done." Wharton was a cousin of Roosevelt's second wife; she and the president were close enough that they exchanged letters often, and she wrote a eulogy for him when he died.

• Wharton wrote her first novel at age 11.

Wharton began writing as a child, basing her work on the upper-class life she knew. She was not encouraged by her family and wrote on brown parcel paper. Her first novel was completed at age 11 and began, "'Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Brown?' said Mrs. Tompkins. 'If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing room.'" When Wharton showed it to her mother, she responded, "Drawing rooms are always tidy."

• Wharton's family was the origin of the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses."

Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones to one of the wealthiest families in New York. It's likely that the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses," which means comparing oneself to one's neighbors in terms of social class or ownership of goods, originated with two of Wharton's great-aunts. The aunts built a mansion north of 57th Street in New York City, which at the time was shocking, but others followed their lead, trying to keep up with them.

• Liam Neeson starred in a poorly reviewed film of the novel.

Liam Neeson and Patricia Arquette starred in a 1993 film adaptation of Ethan Frome. The New York Times hated it, saying that Mattie looked like "a New Bedford hooker in the last stages of consumption" and that the film was "only a distant reflection of the Wharton work." Other reviews were less harsh; one said it "packs a wallop," and another called it "honestly played and deeply felt."

https://www.edithwharton.org/discover/edith-wharton/