Fascinating novella by a wonderful writer. Ethan Frome is trapped - in a cold winter and a cold marriage. When love presents itself, he is desperate to change his circumstances. The tension and atmosphere Wharton creates in such a short piece, is impressive. Perhaps a little high on the melodrama  (sledding never occurred to me as an efficient suicide method before)  ... but otherwise, this piece has depth, and made me think.

It is a plaintive story of a poor farmer, Ethan Frome, a man with thwarted desires and meagre resources. His entire life (past, present and future) is allegorical of hardship, austerity and distress!

I was expecting it to be focused around passion (as from the blurbs), but I found it to be everything else but passion. Maybe had I read it a few years ago, then I might have exultantly and emotionally rated it high, but a mindset smacked with experiences, derives loopholes, and studies books with a different lens!

The synopsis -
A poor farmer (Ethan Frome) of meagre resources,
Of bleak and stiffened appearance,
Frozen by his tragic past,
Imprisoned in a forever mortal silence,
Having accumulated the cold,
of many Starkfield winters!
Living in a mute melancholy,
Having lost his parents,
Expecting a brief reprieve post marriage with Zeena,
But both fall into a forever ghastly silence,
No love, no communication,
Just doctoring his sickly wife!
The birds start twittering, and love is foretold,
When pretty, sensitive, natural beauty, Zeena’s cousin, Mattie, joins the family,
To help her!
Ethan starts falling for Mattie!
Zeena forces upon a smothering silence on her too!
A day comes by, when the 2 are alone,
Savoring every moment.
Zeena returns back home, with a medical report full of complications,
The wife confronts the two,
Catching them red-handed,
basking in a pleasure perverse!
Ethan’s sense of responsibility to his wife,
outweighs his love for Mattie,
So drives Mattie to the station, to bid her adieu.
A change of heart occurs,
When the 2 take a detour,
both reminisce about the fleeting moments of happiness shared,
Desperate, both plan a final sled ride down the hill(sledding),
Just to join each other forever in death!
But a horrendous turn impends,
Their plan is impeded, and
Both are left brutally injured,
Zeena, changes her mind/outlook post the accident,
Accepts Mattie in the household,
Story fast-forwards 20 years,
With the two slovenly women,
Huddled together in cold,
In a poorly furnished room!

My views stand tangentially opposite to what it is supposed to be construed!

For me Ethan Frome suffuses silence, isolation, self-flagellation, living in a hard-rule-bound society, and finally irrationality! But definitely, I couldn’t find a tinge of real passion/love, as it professes!

Throughout there is a silence – emotional, mental, physical



There is an eternal silence in Ethan’s life, Zeena too resorts to horrendous silence post her marriage, there is an evident lack of communication between the husband and wife.

Finally, when Mattie joins in the household, silence is enforced on her by Zeena, and finally Ethan and Mattie, both abandon rationality as they decide to commit suicide, just to enter a forever hell of silence.
For me they were already living a silent hell, suicide wasn’t a solution!
Ethan Frome is emblematic of silence & isolation, post losing parents, getting married, adoring Mattie and yet not getting her!

The imprisonment and enslavement to society rules hold the centre stage in the novel! Ethan doesn't leave his wife because he feels bound by his marriage avowals. He dreams about being married to Mattie; he writes his goodbye letter to Zeena, but subsequently his conscience does not allow him to execute his wishes. Instead, the rules of society govern his life and stays ensnared in a loveless marriage!

If I have to define the 3 characters my way, I would say-

n  
Ethan Fromen - Epitome of self-flagellation
n  
Mattien- metaphor for the ephemeral joys of life, transience of life and joy!
n  
Zeenan- the sickly kind-hearted wife, who accepts Mattie back, post the accident, irrespective of their affair!

It is defined as a tale of adulterous passion, but honestly, I found it to be a tale of poignancy, silence and isolation. Where an isolated being, finding love and pleasure, still couldn’t get it due to society rules and self-flagellation, and finally when he loses all his rationality, he ends up making the rest of his life as the worst of his life!

Did the irrationality in Ethan sprung-up due to his love for Mattie or the abomination towards his life? I presume the latter is true.

There is no effrontery but only submission!

“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 think of nothing to say or to do that should arrest the mad flight of the moments”
I was restive and had a queer feeling throughout the read.

A queerly 3.5 stars!

Like Wurthering Heights, this is an unintentional cautionary tale about the downside of getting romantically involved with a close relation. Just stay-off your first cousins, your unacknowledged half-brothers (or your acknowledged half-brothers for that matter), or your wife’s cousins (it counts cause it’s messy…like sled accident messy).

I didn’t find this tale romantic or sexy or #romancegoals. However, some people find Heathcliff romantic or sexy when clearly he’s a horror show who is neither. I mean, lord, I’ve heard people say that Beth Dutton and her sociopathic husband are #relationshipgoals, and well, it just confirms that therapy needs to be more affordable, accessible, and widely available. It’s like reading King Lear and saying: “That Goneril and Edmund—aspirations!”

The writing is solid, so I’m giving it three stars. Wharton can write. I just had little empathy for Ethan, or for anyone else, for that matter. All Ethan had to do, cause it was the turn of the century and men had the final word (or you had the fist), was to say ‘no’ to his wife or his cousin-mistress (or mistress-cousin or cous-miss).

Also, question: what is with these kind of books glutting up the required reading list for high school kids? Like, high school is a gauntlet of anxiety, hormones and bad relationship choices already. Why expose them to so many doomed, “romantic” ships that include suicide? Like it’s time to revise, here. Plenty of great writing out there that doesn’t include relationships with relatives (that end in bizarre suicide pacts).

Ever read a book as required reading (in high school or college) and then, rediscover it as an adult? Ethan Frome had receded to the dark recesses of my mind such that I had even forgotten that I had read it. I remembered reading Age of Innocence, but good old Ethan had left my mental building. When my youngest son left his retired textbook edition at my house (an old Scribner’s edition in trade paperback priced at $1.25 original price—oh for those days again!), I grudgingly put it on one of my shelves of literature and told myself that I needed to read it someday. It wasn’t until I reread the book this week (thinking it was my first reading, but anticipating the events far too clearly as I turned each page) that I realized I had read it before and, for some reason, its powerful story had not stayed in my accessible conscious (I’m sure Jung could have explained it and, unfortunately, I can do so, as well.)

What makes a novel, “literature?” Is it the intricate precision of the prose interwoven with delicate artistic touches? If so, Ethan Frome doesn’t meet the criterion. Rather than clever metaphors and similes that sing from the page, there is a plodding, methodical stacking of word upon word that rivals the quiet, mysterious nature of the protagonist himself. Perhaps, the art is in making the rhythm of the story match the theme and characters. If so, Ethan Frome very clearly meets the criterion.

Does the cosmic significance of the plot or message transform a mere novel into “literature?” Again, Ethan Frome would fail the test. But if the criterion is that “literature” reveals something powerful about our human condition and causes us to both empathize with others (in this case, the characters) and re-evaluate our own attitudes and situations, the novel succeeds extremely well. When reviewing computer games, I always contended that art means something that changes our perspective and affects us as individuals (for good or bad). In that sense, Ethan Frome could also be classified as “art,” as well as “literature.”

What is it about this relatively short book that placed it on so many required reading lists? Personally, I think it is the expression of that universal human experience of encountering hope after trying to live through a bad personal decision (uninformed career choice, bad marriage, poor investment, misplaced trust in another person or an authority, etc.), only to have that hope shattered. This story is about reaching for that hope, having that hope stolen, experiencing the despair of loss of hope, attempting to counteract that despair, and living with the consequences.

Attempting to summarize the story without too many spoilers is quite difficult. It is the story of a poor man who gives up his hopes for a future outside his small New England village as a dutiful son and husband. Having entangled himself in a marriage from which he cannot gracefully extricate himself, he settles into what might be described as an emotional adultery by fixating upon another. [Having been trapped in a horrible marriage, myself, I don’t need Wharton to tell me that this doesn’t work or Jung to explain why I conveniently forgot that I had read this book when I was fixating upon, not one, but many others. If anything, this book where the physical expression of desire is limited to hands touching, an arm supporting, and the briefest of kisses manages to express most eloquently the wisdom of Jesus’ teaching about having “done it in one’s heart” being equivalent to committing adultery in deed.]

Yes, the theme of being imprisoned in a relationship is found in this novel as in Age of Innocence and the ideal of that wonderful, perfect relationship is captured in many heart-wrenching scenes, but Wharton deals with the issue as realistically as if she was writing from a later era. The results of the decision to break out of the imprisonment are, of course, disastrous. Nothing in the book is as simple as it initially appears. One has a sense of foreboding throughout the book that is deftly underscored by heavy foreshadowing (descriptions of the cutter, mysterious allusions to a tragic event, and more), but the final result is (at least, to me) even more tragic than one expects.

Ethan Frome is a tragedy in the Greek sense. As such, it fits neatly into the “literature” category in my taxonomy. It’s just that poor Ethan didn’t seem to have enough “hubris” to bring this tragedy on his head. He seems more a victim than a tragic protagonist, but he reflects a lot of victims who suffer through horrid relationships and would like to grasp at something that seems like an escape. Even escapes have consequences. The question is: “Which consequences can you best live with?” I wonder what Ethan would say about his choice if he were “real” and alive today.

Lo que pasa en esta novela se podría resumir en 2 líneas, pero tranquilos, que no voy a hacer spoilers. Lo de menos es lo que pasa, lo más impactante es la ambientación y la sensación de opresión incluso en espacios abiertos que consigue crear la autora. Una novelita corta ideal para conocer el estilo de la autora y sobre todo para leer en invierno o tiempo frío. Ha sido mi primer acercamiento y me ha dejado claro que leeré más cosas suyas.

‘The passion of rebellion had broken out of him again.’

Once the holidays are over and the grey soaks into everything, winter can be a ferocious and chilly beast. Edith Wharton transforms this bleak atmosphere into her own icy novella, the trepidatious tragedy Ethan Frome, in which we find a man trapped by his own circumstances in a melancholic Massachusetts countryside under ‘pale skies’ from which ‘sheets of snow perpetually renewed.’ It is a tale of morals and duty conflicted by desire. A landscape of loneliness. A story where one is shook by the silence of internal screaming further muffled out by the falling snow. Yet, for all the heavy themes and dread, Wharton’s prose proves rather sprightly and gives the story a welcomed lightness that makes it a quick and engaging read. Sharply addressing the social suffocation from traditional gender roles and the temptations of desire, Ethan Frome is a chilling little book where a man’s dreams to escape his circumstances must run up against the beleaguering external forces of life and duty. It's a disaster we see coming, yet you won't want to look away.

‘He lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access.’

A big thank you to emma and her review for recommending this one to me. Ethan Frome novel serves as a sort of character study of the titular character, Ethan Frome, one that is slowly sussed out by a narrator who has taken an interest in the slow, sullen man. It is an engaging framing that invites a sense of mystery as we wonder how the hard-working Ethan came to be such a ‘ruin of a man.’ They hear whispers and half-stories but ‘I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps,’ and it isn’t until being forced by a snowstorm to spend the night on Ethan’s farm that they learn his history and how falling in love with his ailing wife’s cousin led to tragedy.

‘I began to see what life there—or rather its negation—must have been in Ethan Frome’s young manhood.’

There is a sense of Ethan as the literary “everyman,” being a stand-in for a humanity in his quest to break out of the harsh hand life dealt him, to assert a sense of free will against determinism. Ethan ‘with something bleak and unapproachable in his face’ is practically a mirror of the harsh world he lives in. ‘He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe,’ Wharton writes, ‘with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface.’ Ethan’s father died young, his mother grew ill from loneliness and before she died had a young girl (Zeena) serve as her nurse, to whom Ethan would marry out of a sense of duty to keep the farm and family legacy going. But with Zeena—a city girl who resents their farm&now ill, bitter and aloof like his mother, Ethan’s desires turn to 21 year old Mattie, his wife’s cousin brought on as a live-in nurse. In Mattie and her vivaciousness, Ethan sees an escape from the cold farm and cold marriage, but Zeena may have taken notice and drops subtle hints of his burning desires for infidelity.

The color red is highly symbolic in the novel. A bright fiery color against a pale, grey landscape to symbolize life and passion. We see it in Mattie’s scarf, which signals to Ethan she is different from the rest, or in her red ribbons, and these flashes of red mark their growing intimacy. Though Zeena’s prized dish is also red, and Mattie’s accidental destruction of it is a nod to her presence shattering the long untouched and faded marriage between Zeena and Ethan. And Ethan’s attempts to glue it together don’t pass Zeena’s inspection, a rather clear metaphor of his attempts at subverting their marriage in secret being less discrete than he thought.

‘They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars.’

Wharton explores how Ethan is pulled in two directions, one in his desires for Mattie but also towards his duty to his wife, the farm, and social expectations. Leaving an ill wife is not going to look good, and not just because they are in a religious community but because it's a pretty shit thing to do. Wharton does attempt to soften the reader to this moral conundrum by making Zeena rather harsh, though it should be remembered that mentions like ‘she had taken everything else from him’ is from a narrator, presumably male, that is empathetic to Ethan. And it is fairly ironic that Ethan tells Mattie ‘I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome,’ when this is exactly what he will be denying his wife (though the sense of duty feels less begrudging when given to someone one chooses for themselves instead of by social needs). Still, Zeena serves as a personification of all the external forces that have worked against Ethan his whole life.

‘All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way.’

We see a sense of determinism winning out, that ambition leads to folly, that one is confined by their circumstances and all attempts to escape lead to further disaster, though we also can detect a message that this need not be the only way. That society has set us up for this failure and society is itself a creation of ours.

This is most prominent in the way we see traditional gender roles as stifling here. Women are set up to fail and have no choice but the drudgery of household chores and servitude to a man. Mattie has no education beyond the ability to be a servant and women at the time were still not encouraged to seek higher education. And so, like her cousin before her, she had to serve a family and hope to be married into a reasonably liveable situation. Women were made to rely on a man, essentially. But also the traditional views of marriage, one made for “smart matchmaking” of being able to keep a farm and have a support instead of for love, also was often a path to resentment and loneliness. And divorce was still a huge social taboo. There is also some slight social class criticism, with Ethan bound to his low-income feeling resentment towards Denis Eady, a rich young man who positively invited a horse-whipping.’ Wharton shows how our lack of access to freedom and free will was largely at the mercy of a society that we can and should criticize to push public opinion towards progress.

Ethan Frome is a chilly little novel, but one that captures an incredible sense of icy atmosphere and dread in order to better juxtapose the burning desires of Ethan at the heart of this tale. Much different than Wharton’s usual, more comedic novels, this is still a sharp story gorgeously written that delivers quite the punch. A great little winter read.

3.5/5

‘They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.’

Haunting, tragic tale of forbidden love

HATE! Wharton as usual writes well enough to make you sympathetic with characters forever imprisoned in bleakly miserable lives with no hope of redemption. One would inflict this on oneself willingly WHY?

Un relato corto pero intenso. Oscuro, opresivo, que se hilvana poco a poco, muy recomendable para el invierno, porque nos lleva a la nieve,la soledad, la icomunicación....vaya, toda una joya muy recomendable.

I didn’t happen to read this during my school days, but caught up in 2006 or 2008, I think, and was impressed with this condensed tragedy and the ambiance of a harsh New England winter. It struck me even more on a reread as a flawless parable of a man imprisoned by circumstance and punished for wanting more.

I had forgotten that the novella is presented as a part-imagined reconstruction of the sad events of Ethan Frome’s earlier life. A quarter-century later, the unnamed narrator is in Wharton’s fictional Starkfield, Massachusetts on business, and hears the bare bones of Ethan’s story from various villagers before meeting the man himself. Ethan, who owns a struggling sawmill, picks up extra money from odd jobs. He agrees to chauffeur the narrator to engineering projects in his sleigh, and can’t conceal his jealousy at a technical career full of travel – a reminder of what could have been had he been able to continue his own scientific studies. A blizzard forces the narrator to stay overnight in Ethan’s home, and the step over the threshold sends readers back in time to when Ethan was a young man of 28.

Spoiler-y discusson: Ethan’s household contains two very different women: his invalid wife, Zeena, eight years his elder; and her cousin, Mattie Silver, who serves as her companion and housekeeper. Mattie is dreamy and scatter-brained – not the practical sort you’d want in a carer role, but she had nowhere else to go after her parents’ death. She has become the light of Ethan’s life. By contrast, Zeena is shrewish, selfish, lazy and gluttonous. Wharton portrays her as either pretending or exaggerating about her chronic illness. Zeena has noticed that Ethan has taken extra pains with his appearance in the year since Mattie came to live with them, and conspires to get rid of Mattie by getting a new doctor to ‘prescribe’ her a full-time servant.

The plot turns on an amusing prop, “Aunt Philura Maple’s pickle-dish.” While Zeena is away for her consultation with Dr. Buck, Ethan and Mattie get one evening alone together. Mattie lays the table nicely with Zeena’s best dishes from the china cabinet, but at the end of their meal the naughty cat gets onto the table and knocks the red glass pickle dish to the floor, where it smashes. Before Ethan can obtain glue to repair it in secret, Zeena notices and acts as if this never-used dish was her most prized possession. She and Ethan are both to have what they most love taken away from them – but at least Ethan’s is a human being.

I had remembered that Ethan fell in love with a cousin (though I thought it was his cousin) and that there is a dramatic sledding accident. What I did not remember, however, was that the crash is deliberate: knowing they can never act on their love for each other, Mattie begs Ethan to steer them straight into the elm tree mentioned twice earlier. He dutifully does so. I thought I recalled that Mattie dies, while he has to live out his grief ever more. I was gearing myself up to rail against the lingering Victorian mores of the time that required the would-be sexually transgressing female to face the greatest penalty. Instead, in the last handful of pages, Wharton delivers a surprise. When the narrator enters the Frome household, he meets two women. One is chair-bound and sour; the other, tall and capable, bustles about getting dinner ready. The big reveal, and horrible irony, is that the disabled woman is Mattie, made bitter by suffering, while Zeena rose to the challenges of caregiving.

Ethan is a Job-like figure who lost everything that mattered most to him, including his hopes for the future. Unlike the biblical character, though, he finds no later reward. “Sickness and trouble: that’s what Ethan’s had his plate full up with, ever since the very first helping,” as one of the villagers tells the narrator. “He looks as if he was dead and in hell now!” the narrator observes. This man of sorrow is somehow still admirable: he and Zeena did the right thing in taking Mattie in again, and even when at his most desperate Ethan refused to swindle his customers to fund an escape with Mattie. In the end, Mattie’s situation is almost the hardest to bear: she only ever represented sweetness and love, and has the toughest lot. In some world literature, e.g. the Russian masters, suicide might be rendered noble, but here its attempt warrants punishment.

I can see why some readers, especially if encountering this in a classroom setting, would be turned off by the bleak picture of how the universe works. But I love me a good classical tragedy, and admired this one for its neat construction, its clever use of foreshadowing and dread, its exploration of ironies, and its use of a rustic New England setting – so much more accessible than Wharton’s usual New York City high society. The cozy wintry atmosphere of Little Women cedes to something darker and more oppressive; “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters,” a neighbor observes of Ethan. I could see a straight line from Jude the Obscure through Ethan Frome to The Great Gatsby: three stories of an ordinary, poor man who pays the price for grasping for more. I reread this in two sittings yesterday morning and it felt to me like a perfect example of how literature can encapsulate the human condition.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

I absolutely hated this book.

OK, two things were good. The author draws New England landscapes, particularly in winter, beautifully. Secondly, the book was exceedingly short, so my misery wasn't prolonged. I need to joke after reading this sad, dismal, depressing book. Jeez, how can people look at life with such eyes?! Stop griping and do something with your life. It is your own fault if you just sob and moan.

You follow a couple that is ill-fit. The reader has to listen to their arguments. On top of this, the wife, Zeena, is a hypochondriac. You have to listen to her sob story, complaints and grumbles. Ugh.

Then there is attraction that arises between the husband and the wife's cousin who has been taken into the house as a maid. This is so corny, and so melodramatically described. Overly sentimental too. At the same time there is no fire in this love, and you scarcely see how it develops. You are instead supposed to moan about the impossibility of it all.

What others may think is if of prime importance.


I know this is maybe going to irritate those who love this book. Please excuse me, but this is how I react to the book.

It doesn't get better; the end is pure maudlin.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Elizabeth Klett. The speed varies. It is not always read too quickly, but much is. Each new chapter starts out at a good speed. Then she seems to get carried away by the story, causing her to read faster and faster. The tone, the voices she uses for the different characters, is fine, so this is quite a shame.

It wasn’t hard writing this review! I knew exactly what I had to say! If you are like me, avoid this book. It is depressing, sentimental and maudlin.

Lectura 2021:

“Las arboledas parecían reunirse en la nieve en grupos agitados, como pájaros con las cabezas bajo el ala; y el cielo se alejaba más al apagarse y dejaba más sola a la Tierra.”

A pesar de que casi nunca me animo a releer un libro, en este caso fue un gran acierto haberlo hecho. Por alguna razón había reprimido gran parte de la novela, con excepción del inicio y del final, el cual no ha dejado de sorprenderme.

Reencontrarme con personajes como Zeena, Mattie Silver y el protagonista Ethan Frome fue una muy grata experiencia, además de que Edith Wharton es de mis escritoras favoritas y su manera de escribir es tan profunda y cargada de detalles que te logra transportar al escenario de sus historias.

En fin, muy recomendable como todo lo que he leído de la autora.

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Lectura 2020:

Gran libro, es corto pero no por eso simple.
La complejidad de los personajes es magnífica y el final, aunque se conoce desde el principio a grandes rasgos, es crudo y se siente tan real como la historia misma.

Muy recomendable.