Ethan Frome Edith Wharton THE EMC MASTERPIECE SERIES Access Editions SERIES EDITOR Robert D. Shepherd EMC/Paradigm Publishing St. Paul, Minnesota Staff Credits: For EMC/Paradigm Publishing, St. Paul, Minnesota Laurie Skiba Eileen Slater Editor Editorial Consultant Shannon O’Donnell Taylor Jennifer J. Anderson Associate Editor Assistant Editor For Penobscot School Publishing, Inc., Da nvers, Massachusetts Editorial Design and Production Robert D. Shepherd Cha rles Q. Bent President, Executive Editor Production Manager Christina E. Kolb Sara Day Managing Editor Art Director Sara Hyry Diane Castro Editor Compositor Laurie A. Faria Janet Stebbings Associate Editor Compositor Sharon Salinger Copyeditor Marilyn Murphy Shepherd Editorial Advisor ISBN 0-8219-1649-1 Copyright © 1998 by EMC Corporation All rights reserved. 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Published by EMC/Paradigm Publishing 875 Montreal Way St. Paul, Minnesota 55102 Printed in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 xxx 09 10 11 12 Table of Contents The Life and Works of Edith Wharton. iv Echoes . vii Time Line of Wharton’s Life. viii The Historical Context of Ethan Frome. x Characters in Ethan Frome. xii Illustration . xiii Introduction by Edith Wharton. xiv Prologue . 1 Chapter 1 . 15 Chapter 2 . 23 Chapter 3 . 31 Chapter 4 . 39 Chapter 5 . 50 Chapter 6 . 55 Chapter 7 . 62 Chapter 8 . 73 Chapter 9 . 81 Epilogue . 97 Plot Analysis of Ethan Frome . 103 Creative Writing Activities . 105 Critical Writing Activities . 107 Projects. 109 Selections for Additional Reading . 111 Glossary . 116 Handbook of Literary Terms . 125 THE LIFE AND WORKS OF Edith Wharton Edith Wharton (1862–1937). In 1862, Edith Newbold Jones was born into a wealthy and distinguished New York family. Her family traveled to Europe when she was three years old to escape the inflation that followed the Civil War. There they remained for eight years. Her private education by a gov- erness was supplemented by her own voracious reading. At the age of seventeen, Wharton made her debut into society. Her first engagement was broken by her fiancé’s mother, who was angered by the cold reception she received from Edith Wharton the Jones family. Shortly after this incident, Wharton met Walter Berry and, although they did not meet again for sev- eral years, the two became lifelong friends. In 1885, she married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, a rich Boston banker twelve years her senior. In the early 1890s, Wharton began to suffer from severe depression. After a series of rest cures, she recovered only to dis- cover her husband’s mental illness. In 1901, she designed and built The Mount, a country house in Lenox, Massachusetts, which served as a retreat from society where she could work steadily. Concern for her husband’s ill health kept her from making The Mount her permanent home, but for several years the Whartons spent summer and autumn there. Teddy Wharton’s condition grew worse; beginning in the spring of 1908, he had several affairs and used his wife’s money to sup- port his social interests. Wharton had an affair as well, with Morton Fullerton, also a writer. A stay in a sanitarium seemed to help Teddy’s condition, but Wharton’s marriage did not improve. She decided to sell The Mount and move permanently to France. Wharton’s unhappy and unsatisfy- ing marriage to Teddy Wharton ended in divorce in 1913. Wharton lived as an expatriate in France for the rest of her life. During World War I she dedicated four years to the war effort, serving as the head of the American committee of an organization called the Accueil Franco-American, which dis- tributed meals, clothing, and information. When asked by the queen of Belgium to aid 650 orphans, she established the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee to care for the children iv ETHAN FROME and place them in homes; she took six children into her own home. To support the cause, Wharton organized The Book of the Homeless, a compilation of works donated by musicians, such as Igor Stravinsky; artists, including Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin; and writers, including Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and William Butler Yeats. Wharton translated the works that were not written in English. Wharton’s war efforts taxed her health considerably. She spent her last winters at Pavillon Colombe, an eighteenth- century house outside of Paris that she began restoring in 1918, and her last summers at a restored monastery at Hyères. She maintained contact with her homeland through corre- spondence with the people she knew in the United States. She returned to her country rarely, on one occasion in 1923 for only a few days to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale University. She was the first woman to be so honored. In 1924, she also became the first woman to receive the Gold Medal of the American Society of Arts and Letters. When Wharton died in 1937, she was buried in Cimetière des Gonards at Versailles next to the ashes of Walter Berry. From childhood, Wharton had a passion for words and writing. Her efforts were not taken seriously, however, and were often referred to as “scribbling.” When she was sixteen, she wrote a volume of poetry which her parents, despite their disapproval of her literary activity, had published pri- vately. Wharton struggled with the expectations of her social role as a woman of the upper class and her own liter- ary aspirations for many years. During her early years as a writer, she had little encouragement other than from Berry, who greatly influenced her work and aided in the editing and revising process. Her husband did not share her literary and creative interests, but the two did share a passion for travel. After a trip to Europe with her husband in 1888, Wharton’s productivity began to escalate. She published poetry and short stories in magazines such as Scribner’s and Harper’s. Critics called her stories of this period Jamesian in reference to qualities they shared with the writings of American writer Henry James. After reading several of Wharton’s short stories, James wrote to her, and they met in 1903 in London. James visited Wharton at The Mount and in Paris; they also traveled together. The two authors shared an interest in literary theory and in examining the craft of fiction. Wharton was only beginning her career when she met James, who had already published several distinguished works. She was, however, not his disciple; her work is not derivative of his. Rather, each author supported the other. THE LIFE AND WORKS OF EDITH WHARTON v During her early career, Wharton distinguished herself with nonfiction writing as well as with short stories. An interest in order and aesthetics and her desire to improve her home in Newport, Rhode Island, led Wharton to collaborate with architect Ogden Codman, Jr. on a book entitled The Decoration of Houses, which was published in 1897. Other nonfiction works include Italian Villas and Their Gardens and Italian Backgrounds. Throughout her career, Wharton wrote about both European and American subjects and settings. Her first novellas, The Touchstone and Sanctuary, were not as well polished as her short stories. They were followed by sev- eral novels which established her as one of America’s great writers. Her first novel, Valley of Decision, addresses a recur- ring theme in her work, the struggle between individual free- dom and the role of society, a struggle Wharton herself knew well. The House of Mirth, published in 1905, established Wharton’s fame and is still considered one of her best works. Two years later, Madame de Treymes and The Fruit of the Tree were published. Ethan Frome was published in 1911, first serially in Scribner’s Magazine, and then in book form. The novella, now perhaps Wharton’s best known and most widely read work, did not achieve wide commercial or critical success until the 1920s. Wharton’s other novels include The Reef; The Buccaneers; The Custom of the Country, which critics deem one of her highest achievements; and The Age of Innocence, another critically acclaimed novel, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. Wharton’s complete works include other novels; several collections of short stories; collections of poetry; many reviews and articles; The Writing of Fiction, Wharton’s ideas about the craft of writing; and A Backward Glance, her autobiography. vi ETHAN FROME Echoes: Quotations from Edith Wharton My poor little group of hungry, lonely New England villagers will live again for a while on their stony hill-side before finally joining their forebears under the vil- lage headstones. —from Wharton’s introduction to the dramatic adaptation of Ethan Frome Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immatu- rity, the dread of doing what has been done before. —from The Art of Writing Fiction The New York of Newland Archer’s day was a small and slippery pyramid, in which, as yet, hardly a fissure had been made or a foothold gained. At its base was a firm foundation of what Mrs. Archer called “plain people”; an honorable but obscure majority of respectable families who . had been raised above their level by marriage with one of the ruling clans. People, Mrs. Archer always said, were not as particular as they used to be; and with old Catherine Spicer ruling one end of Fifth Avenue, and Julius Beaufort the other, you couldn’t expect the old traditions to last much longer.