In trappola

Il New England rurale, neve, freddo, neve, desolazione, neve, ghiaccio, neve, gelo, neve, tempeste di neve, neve, tanta neve, fanno da sfondo a un triangolo amoroso: Ethan, Zeena, Mattie.
Quello che divampa tra Ethan e Mattie sarà un amore impossibile, dai risvolti tragici, che condannerà Frome a un inesorabile e interminabile inverno del cuore.

Sembrava parte di quel paesaggio muto e malinconico, un’incarnazione del suo gelido dolore, con tutto quel che di caloroso e sensibile c’era in lui ben sepolto sotto la superficie; il suo silenzio però non aveva niente di ostile.

Ma quanta sofferenza può sopportare un essere umano? Quanta desolazione? Quanto sacrificio?
Edith Warthon ha dato un volto e un nome al dolore: Ethan Frome.
Romanzo breve, intenso, straziante.

https://youtu.be/1FSU_EJjp3s

Few novels feel as aptly suited to the barren chill of winter as Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. Short in length but rich in atmosphere and emotional drama, it’s a slim novella that unfolds for me like the frozen rasp of snow underfoot — slow, deliberate, and laden with the threat of collapse. It’s a wintry tale of quiet desperation and impossible longing, told with an icy precision that cuts to the bone.

The story centers on Ethan, a farmer bound by duty to his ailing and embittered wife, Zeena, and tortured by his love for her cousin, Mattie. Wharton traps her characters in the stark, snow-covered landscape of Starkfield, Massachusetts, a setting as oppressive as it is sublime to me, especially when reading in the winter months. The blanketing snow and frigid cold here aren’t merely atmospheric; they seep into the marrow of the novel, shaping every mood and movement. Wharton’s descriptions — of snow-draped fields, crystalline moonlight, and the claustrophobia of a one-room farmhouse — have both a painterly beauty and an unrelenting constriction around the chest, a testament to Wharton’s mastery of tone.

To read Ethan Frome in winter is to feel its chill twice over: in the frozen world of Starkfield and in the bleak inevitability of its story. Wharton writes with a scalpel, carving out in ice the futility of Ethan’s dreams with merciless precision. And yet, to me, beneath this bleakness, there is a kind of brutal beauty. Ethan and Mattie’s unspoken desires — glances held too long, the brushing of hands — are suffused with a fragile intensity that lingers, even as the shadow of ruin looms ever larger.

That said, the novel’s economy is both its triumph and its trap. Wharton crafts a narrative as compact and unforgiving as the winter snow itself, and while the brevity intensifies its impact, it also leaves me longing for a thaw that never comes. Ethan Frome is not a novel that proffers easy catharsis; to me its striking force lies in its refusal to do so. The famous sledding scene, a moment of reckless abandon that veers into devastation, is a masterstroke — Wharton pulls us as readers into its exhilaration only to leave us gasping in its aftermath.

For all this starkness, Wharton’s prose does achieve an elegance that transcends its grim subject and gelid setting. She imbues the story with a lyricism that captures both the beauty and the brutality of its frozen world. Her sentences, spare but evocative, mirror the desolation of Starkfield while offering moments of piercing, clear-as-ice clarity. Still, some plot points do feel far-fetched, edging toward melodrama, and occasionally the narrowness of the novella’s focus freezes us out from further emotional depth. Wharton’s gaze is so fixed on the inevitability of Ethan’s tragedy that it occasionally neglects to let the plot feel grounded or its characters breathe. Zeena, and even Mattie at times, feel more like shadows than fully realized figures — a limitation shaped in part by the novel’s narrative structure. The story is framed by a first-person narrator who arrives in Starkfield, piecing together Ethan’s tragic past through fragments of gossip and observation. But when the narrative shifts into Ethan’s history, it switches to third-person limited, immersing us in his interior world. By anchoring us so closely to Ethan’s perspective, Wharton deepens our understanding of his inner struggles but narrows our view of the women in his life — Zeena and Mattie often feel partially obscured by Ethan’s subjective gaze, their individuality blurred into echoes of his desires and fears. Sure, it’s an intentional constraint that mirrors the claustrophobia of Ethan’s life, but it also means the women feel more like projections of his turmoil than whole people in their own right. Though, in a novel where every moment feels steeped in inevitability, this sparseness could be taken as a deliberate reflection of lives constricted by poverty, duty, and the unyielding grip of winter.

For fellow fans of seasonal reading, plunging into Ethan Frome in the cold months heightens its potency. The novel is a lovely companion to the season for those who appreciate winter’s bleak beauty, stark frozen landscapes under a moon-suffused sky, and Gothic-tinged melodramas that feel like they cut through even the warmest fireside. Like any good wintry novel, Wharton invites us not to escape the cold, but to sit with it, to feel both its weight and its allure, to grapple with the characters’ fragile threads of hope that persist even in the deepest freeze.

To me, despite its weaker narrative moments, Ethan Frome’s strength lies in its wintry atmosphere, its expedition into the limits of desire, the destruction caused by passivity, and its quiet tragedy etched into the frost of memory. It’ll always be associated with winter for me — a slim novel to read while wrapped in a heavy blanket, as snow gathers quietly at the windowpane.

3.5/5

I thought I had read this novel before, but honestly cannot remember it at all. Does that ever happen to you?

I'm so glad that I read this one now. It was a quiet, beautifully told story of suffering, pain, and mundane life on a small Massachusetts farm. We meet an unnamed narrator who gets caught in a snowstorm and has to hire this mysterious Mr. Frome to taxi him back and forth to the station for work. The novel switches perspectives and we go back in time to find out what happened to Ethan. Ethan is married to Zeena and she suffers from constant pain and contributes nothing to the household. She has taken in her cousin Mattie for help, although she finds her an annoyance and looks to get rid of her as soon as possible. Ethan loves having Mattie around to being some small joy into his hard and dull life with Zeena. Tragedy sets the story on its axis and a quick turn of events makes for a hard ending.

I enjoyed the writing and the complicated relationships of all these characters. I savored the landscape of a winter in Starkfield and Wharton was able to fully tell this story within the comfort of a 100 pages. I won't soon forget this one.

n  CAMOUFLAGEn

There is the stark landscape of the stark field. Starkfield it is.

Then slowly, through third party eyes, with all the distance that this implies, we begin to discern a shape that slowly acquires its own entity against its background. No, not even third party eyes, but third parties of the third party. Even further removed. For the book begins thus: I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

And thus, in this remoteness, emerges a figure, and the third party is discarded and we get a lot closer, sitting or, or reading, or looking from the first row.

But still. Hardly discernible, even if the title helps to focus on the developing shape.

n  He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface.. n

.

Veiled are also the rest of the characters. They all live a discoverable and outward, but their feelings are hidden: to the others and to themselves. Again, as one tunes in one’s eye, one’s senses, one begins to discern those covered, those concealed and unformed emotions. Feelings are so clouded that it takes them years, for people living under the same roof, to identify them, to let them free. Actions and speech of the people in Starkfield are all concealments. They do not perceive what they are, or identify what think; they interact without discovering the other person. Appearances delude.

But then there is all that snow, cold, brisk and bleak: paralyzing.

This is so until disaster strikes – and then the characters continue to live, or die, secluded in their eclipsed-away house, as if they were already living, or not living, in their graves. And their physical appearances take on the abandoned, disgruntled, nature of their settings.

Even the author has camouflaged. The writer of the upper echelon of social classes of the New England is here transporting us to poverty and to rural and snowy settings. Unrecognizable. After reading The Reef, I had to rub my eyes and squint if I were to accept that this was Wharton’s world, and that I was not reading something akin to Growth of the Soil. Wharton has donned a Norwegian cloak.

But her words...., her words lead you.

And, eventually, one can see the cat... It was on the first photo too.

Stuck in Starkfield, New England for the winter, the narrator sets out to discover the life of the mysterious local Ethan Frome who had a tragic accident years prior. After getting little response from fellow locals when asked, the narrator learns of the details when a snowstorm forces them into an overnight stay at the Frome household. Edith Wharton soon whisks us back to the year the tragedy occurred and we begin following Ethan as he walks through Starkfield at night to collect his wife's cousin, Mattie Silver, at a dance she attended in the village church. When he arrives, he is transfixed by the sight of a young woman in a red scarf. It is soon revealed that Mattie is that woman, the object of Ethan's affection who feels similarly for him. Here a tragic love story begins. The atmospheric setting heightens the connection between the pair who allow their shared feelings to hang between them, waiting to be acted upon. They never once consummate their love nor verbalise their passion. They do, however, risk losing it all, including each other. When Zeena, the wife of Ethan, decides Mattie must go, the pair venture on a nostalgia trip taking a sledging adventure they had never undertaken but proposed. The success of this prompts a discussion on suicide. They cannot be together in life, but they can be together in death. They accept their fate as they take their positions in the sledge, locked in a final embrace. However, they wake up.

Jumping forward as we jump back, we find ourselves with the narrator once again as he enters the Frome household. Inside are two frail women: Zeena and the paralysed Mattie, fated to be romantically apart from the man she loves, and Ethan Frome, a jinxed man. My goodness, Edith Wharton knew how to write. At under 150 pages, this should not have worked nor had me so engrossed but it did.

This book is a good one to read if you live with someone who has also read it. This way, any time there is a lull in the conversation you can talk about how depressing it is. Conversations between me and my roommate often go something like this:

"You know what I was just thinking about? Ethan Frome."
"GOD. That book is so depressing."
"I know, right."

The book is not only enjoyable, but also a great conversation piece. Do not read it if you cannot stand unhappy endings.

Every year I try to make it thru a winter in New England but only rarely do I succeed. The short winter days can be hard for this California girl. Reading this book in November probably was not a good idea--the bleakness of it and the cold can almost be felt through these pages. What a great story, as well as tragic and sad. When can a man get a break? Not in the long short days of winter in New England.
I started with the audio of this book read beautifully by George Guidall (one of my favorite narrators) but picked up the book about midway to read at night by the fire. A good story for that and another Wharton gem.

Well, that was bleak...

I'm not sure why I thought this would be a pleasant, happy story. It is Edith Wharton after all!

I've loved her work since I first read The House of Mirth and she lived a good portion of her time in Massachusetts, which is my home state. When I saw I could listen to the audio free through Prime, I downloaded it and here I am.

Written in the early 1900's, the story takes place in the fictional town of Starkfield. It's one of the few tales from Wharton that does not take place in a location of high society. It's the story of a simple man, whose life plans change so that he can care for his ailing father. Rather impulsively, he marries a sickly woman to avoid being alone after his father passes. A few years later his wife's young cousin comes to stay and their lives will change forever.

I never expected this tale to go in the way it did. It was sad and tragic for everyone involved. It's amazing to me that Wharton was capable of packing so much into a relatively short story. Perhaps it is dated in regards to its setting, but the emotions and the characters involved are still perfectly relatable in today's day and age.

I have a volume of Wharton's ghost stories that I hope to read soon. In the meantime, I will be thinking of the cold town of Starkfield and Ethan's fate.

“He 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; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.”

n  n

Our narrator, we never learn his name, hired Ethan Frome to drive him around in a sleigh for a few days. A winter storm necessitates that he spend an evening and a night in Frome’s house. He meets Mattie the cousin and Zeena the wife. The situation existing in the House of Frome is an odd one and his natural curiosity spurs him to start an informal investigation into the life of Ethan Frome.

After the opening chapter we flash back twenty-four years to a man in the process of waking up from a life he has found himself trapped in. When Ethan meets Mattie an internal conflict begins. Mattie reads and she reminds on a daily basis, just by her presence, the part of himself that vanished like smoke years ago when he made the decision to stay in Starkfield and take care of his momma. He borrows books from her and starts to remember that other Frome, that other man, who wanted so much more. He is a reed, long bent, that has suddenly found a way to stretch toward the sun once again.

Mattie is a lost soul as well. She hasn’t found her place in the world. She has been sickly, too delicate to find work, and is basically living off the “kindness” of her cousin Zeena. Truth be known, Zeena just wanted someone to take more of the load of her housework. Mattie tries, but never does come up to the expectations of her cousin. Frome can’t help, but compare the differences in the two women.

”Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast, while the other held a lamp. The light, on a level with her chin, drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of her hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollow and prominences of her high-boned face under the ring of crimping pins…. He felt as if he had never before known what his wife looked like.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

”She held the light at the same level, and it drew out with the same distinctness her slim young throat and the brown wrist no bigger than a child’s. Then, striking upward, it threw a lustrous fleck on her lips, edging her eyes with velvet shade, and laid a milky whiteness above the black curve of her brows.”

n  n
Drawing from the CD cover of the Douglas Allanbrook Opera of Ethan Frome.

It is not an even contest, Zeena is seven years older than Ethan, but a lifetime spent embracing her own illnesses has made her a hypochondriac. As if to justify her state of mind, lines of disapproval and discomfort have etched themselves into her face and withered the bloom of her youth. Ethan exchanged a sickly mother for a sickly wife. He is trapped in a loop and watching his own life through a veil in gray scale. Until:

“They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods”

A man deserves some happiness. After a lifetime of devoting himself to others he is on the verge of taking back control of his own life. There is this poignant moment when Mrs. Hale lets him know that his sacrifice has not went unnoticed.

”I don’t know anybody around here’s had more sickness than Zeena. I always tell Mr. Hale I don’t know what she’d ‘a’ done if she hadn’t ‘a’ had you to look after her; and I used to say the same thing ‘bout your mother. You’ve had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome.”

As Zeena starts to become suspicious of Ethan’s growing feelings for Mattie she takes steps to send her away and finds a new maid to come live in the house.

“She had taken everything else from him, and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for it all.”

Wharton, deftly, has both characters dance around their feelings. Each filled with longing, believing the other feels the same, but unable to tell each other how they really feel until suddenly they are faced with never seeing each other again.

”They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for a moment, had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to marry. He looked at her hair and longed to touch it again, and to tell her that is smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say such things.”

One kiss can change everything.

They commit a desperate act, born out of fear and sadness, that leaves them both shattered shells of themselves. This impulsive act destroys the very best of what they love about each other, and forever leaves those apparitions of themselves suspended on a sled going down a slope.

n  n
The Mount

Edith Wharton wrote this book during a time when she was having difficulties with her husband, Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton. She certainly seemed to feel as ensnared by marriage as her character Ethan Frome, even though she was living on her beautiful Lenox, Massachusetts estate called The Mount at the time. Even lovely surroundings will lose their luster if you are unhappy with your circumstances. Wharton was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1927, 1928, and 1930. She never did win the Nobel, but in 1921, for Age of Innocence (1920), she did become the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. This book seems to attract a mixture of positive and negative reviews today much the same way it did when it was first published. Lionel Trilling says it was lacking in moral or ethical significance. The type of criticism that leaves me shaking my head wondering if we read the same book.

n  n
One of my favorite pictures of Edith Wharton

Another interest point was the theme departure this book has from the bulk of Wharton’s writing. Most of her books are centered around the elite New York society, but this one was set in rural Starkfield and involved characters of the lower classes. Despite the change in venue Wharton’s signature writing style is on wondrous display.

We have all felt trapped by our circumstances, maybe a stale relationship or an unfulfilling job or a long stint caring for a sick relative. This book is a masterpiece because it is simply unforgettable and those that love it and even those that didn’t like it are going to have moments in their lives when they think about Ethan Frome, and wish they had a sled and a slope of snow that will take them somewhere else.

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OMG.
Esta novela tan cortita es de esas que empiezas y hasta que la terminas NO PUEDES PARAR.
La ambientación opresiva, angustiosa y gélida me ha atrapado por completo, Wharton consigue que tu mundo se reduzca a esa cocina congelada con esas tres personas tristes y angustiadas.
¡Me ha encantado!
Es increíble lo bien que escribe esta mujer... Diría que me ha gustado más que 'La edad de la inocencia' a pesar de que esta historia es mucho más "simple"

***Edith te respeto cada día más por esa mente tan oscura tuya, que lo sepas xD

Sparse prose is sexy.

Sexy.

And that's why I've given it a special shelf on my page, called a buck and change.

Guess what else sparse prose is?

Rare.

That's why I have only seven books on there.

Why? Why are these precious books that fall under 200 pages so rare?

Because writers tend to overwrite everything.

But not Edith Wharton, the queen of sparse prose. And Ms. Wharton, though she may appear stolid in her old black and white portraits, was one sexy lady.

She manages in Ethan Frome to take one anti-hero, one untamed shrew, and one manipulative maiden, and proves, in less than 100 pages, that winter, isolation and poverty do not discriminate.

Wharton is never a sell-out. She gives you foreshadowing, symbolism and metaphors in just the right dosages, and she never wastes your time.

And when one red dish shatters into sharp pieces all over that never-ending landscape of white. . . you can not help but be bewildered at what an exceptional writer can do, especially in succinct and clever prose.