Ethan Frome, By Edith Wharton 2 Essay, Research Paper

11L2

13 May 1994

Fantasy is an Escape from Winter

Ethan Frome, the title character of Edith Wharton’s tragic

novel, lives in his own world of silence, where he replaces his

scarcity of words with images and fantasies. There is striking

symbolism in the imagery, predominantly that of winter which

connotes frigidity, detachment, bleakness and seclusion.

Twenty-eight year old Ethan feels trapped in his hometown of

Starkfield, Massachusetts. He marries thirty-four year old Zeena

after the death of his mother, “in an unsuccessful attempt to

escape the silence, isolation, and loneliness of life” (Lawson 71).

Several years after their marriage, cousin Mattie Silver is asked

to relieve Zeena, a gaunt and sallow hypochondriac, of her

household duties. Ethan finds himself falling in love with Mattie,

drawn to her youthful energy, as, “The pure air, and the long

summer hours in the open, gave life and elasticity to Mattie”

(Wharton 60).

Ethan is attracted to Mattie because she is the antithesis of

Zeena. “While Mattie is young, happy, healthy, and beautiful like

the summer, Zeena is seven years older than Ethan, bitter, ugly and

sickly cold like the winter” (Lewis 310). Zeena’s strong,

dominating personality emasculates Ethan, while Mattie’s feminine,

effervescent youth makes Ethan feel like a “real man.” Contrary to

his characteristic passiveness, he defies Zeena in Mattie’s

defence, “You can’t go, Matt! I won’t let you! She’s [Zeena's]

always had her way, but I mean to have mine now -” (Wharton 123).

To Ethan, Mattie is radiant and energetic. He sees possibilities

in her beyond his trite life in Starkfield, something truly worth

standing up for. Her energy and warmth excite him and allow him to

escape from his lonely, monotonous life.

While Zeena is visiting an out of town doctor, Ethan and

Mattie, alone in the house, intensely feel her eerie presence. The

warmth of their evening together is brought to an abrupt end by the

accidental breaking of Zeena’s prized dish. Zeena’s fury at the

breaking of an impractical pickle dish exemplifies the rage she

must feel about her useless life. “That the pickle dish has never

been used makes it a strong symbol of Zeena herself, who prefers

not to take part in life” (Lawson 68-69). Ethan’s response to

Zeena’s rage was silence.

Just as Ethan lives in silence, so too does his wife. The

total lack of communication between the “silent” couple is a

significant factor in Ethan’s miserable marriage. Ethan kept

silent in his dealings with his wife, “to check a tendency to

impatient retort he had first formed the habit of not answering

her, and finally thinking of other things while she talked”

(Wharton 72).

Zeena is the cold and ugly reality from which Ethan tries to

escape in his dreams of a life with Mattie. He is happy only when

imagining his life with Mattie. The night that they are alone, he

pretends that they are married. Often when they are together, he

fantasizes that Zeena is dead and that he and Mattie live together

in blissful devotion. Ethan deludes himself because, as a prisoner

of circumstance, his only escape is illusion. His happiness in the

company of Mattie is the product of a self-deception necessitated

by his unhappy marriage to Zeena, the obstacle to a life long

relationship with Mattie.

After the night of the broken dish, Ethan and Mattie finally

articulate their feelings for each other, and are forced to face

the painful reality that their fantasies can not come true:

The return to reality was as painful as the return to

consciousness after taking an anaesthetic. His body and brain

ached with indescribable weariness, and he could not think of

nothing to say or do that should arrest the mad flight of the

moments (Wharton 95).

“Zeena herself, from an oppressive reality, had faded into an

insubstantial shade” (Wharton 39). Her hypochondria is her outlet,

just as Ethan’s world of fantasy is his. “It [her obsession with

her health] is adventurous in contrast to her monotonous marriage”

(McDowell 66). Sickly Zeena is able to manipulate her husband

using her frail health to justify her bitter personality. “When

she [Zeena] spoke it was only to complain” (Wharton 72).

Ethan and Mattie attempt to preserve their happiness and

remain together the only way they can, in death. At this point,

Mattie inadvertently becomes the cause of Ethan’s tragic suffering.

The aborted suicide attempt leads to their tragic fate, living a

life of physical suffering, so badly injured that former invalid,

Zeena is forced to care for them.

“If she’d [Mattie'd] ha’ died, Ethan might ha’ lived” (Wharton

181). It is horribly ironic that, as a result of the accident,

Mattie, the source of Ethan’s earlier joy, is now an additional

trial in an already depleted life. Where Ethan was once uplifted

by virtue of Mattie’s being, he is now burdened by her very

presence. Tragically, time only accentuated his suffering instead

of alleviating it. After suffering so long with the sickly Zeena,

Ethan now has to exist with the horribly deformed remains of a once

beautiful, sensitive, and loving girl. Once again surrendering

himself to the forces of isolation, silence, darkness, cold, and

“death-in-life” (McDowell 68).

The setting for Ethan Frome is winter. Edith Wharton, the

author, chose winter as a theme because it symbolizes the emotional

and physical isolation, cold, darkness, and death that surround

Ethan. Similarly, the name of the town Starkfield is symbolic of

Ethan’s arid life. “Stark denotes the harsh winters causing

barren, lifeless landscape, with lifeless and devastated people”

(Howe 113). The narrator notes this connection; “During the early

part of my stay I had been struck by the climate and the deadness

of the community” (Wharton 8).

“Wharton emphasizes the rigor of life in a harsh land with its

rocky soul, its cold winters, and its bleak, desolate beauty”

(McDowell 65). Wharton writes:

The snow had ceased, and a flash of watery sunlight exposed

the house on the slope above us in all its plaintive ugliness.

The black wraith of a deciduous creeper flapped from the

porch, and the thin wooden walls, under their worn coats of

paint, seemed to shiver in the wind that had risen with the

ceasing of the snow (20).

The downtrodden image painted in this quotation describes the

environment, as well as describing Ethan. Just as his house was

once new and beautiful but is now torn by many harsh winters in

Starkfield, so to was Ethan. The ravages of winter destroy both

man’s will to survive and the buildings he constructed to shield

him from this environment. As the narrator explains, “I had a

sense that his [Ethan's] loneliness was not merely the result of

his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it

the profound accumulated cold of many winters” (Wharton 15).

The description of the weather is also used to foreshadow

events and set the mood. Once Ethan and Mattie decide to take

their lives, as if to suggest that something will go wrong, the sky

is described as, “swollen with clouds that announce a thaw, hung as

low as before a summer storm” (Wharton 167). This is just one of

many times in the novel when the climate is used to indicate

foreboding events.

The weather imagery is used in character development and

depiction. After the accident, “He [Ethan] seemed a part of the

mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it’s frozen woe, with

all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface”

(Wharton 14). When Mattie first arrives in Starkfield, her

presence is perceived as, “… a bit of hopeful young life, like

the lighting of a fire on a cold hearth” (33). In contrast to

Mattie’s radiant warmth, Zeena is described as wintery and

unappealing:

She [Zeena] sat opposite the window, and the pale light reflected from the banks of snow made her face look more than

usually drawn and bloodless, sharpened the three parallel

creases between ear and cheek, and drew querulous lines from

her thin nose to the corners of her mouth (64).

In view of his miserable life, the reader can well understand

Ethan’s need to escape into a fantasy world of warmth and love. The

pervasiveness of the winter imagery evokes in the reader a sense

of the bitter solitude, silence, desolation, and despair ultimately

felt by each of the three main characters. Their tragic lives are

overshadowed by gloom and hopelessness, in much the same way that

winter stunts the growth and vitality of nature’s creations.

Howe, Irving. Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays.

New York: Prentis Hall, 1962.

Lawson, Richard H. Edith Wharton. New York: Frederick Ungar

Publishing Co., 1977.

Lewis, R.W.B. Edith Wharton – A Biography. New York: Harper &

Row, Publishers, 1975.

McDowell, Margaret. Edith Wharton. Boston: Twayne Publishers,

1976.

Wharton, Edith. Ethan Frome. New York: Charles Scribener’s Sons,

1911.