Essay/Term paper: Ethan frome, by edith wharton 2

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Critical Essays

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.




Works Cited
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.