Chapter II

Victim of Inaction

Ethan Frome

He was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but

the ruin of a man

Ethan Frome

It was on a motor drive with a friend near Lenox that Wharton passed a

battered old house, down-at-heel, unpainted, with a neglected yard, hens

straggling over it, and ragged children sitting on the steps. It is about one such

place that Wharton meant to write a story on.

Only last week I went to the village meeting house in Lenox and

sat there alone, trying to think what such lives would be, and

someday I shall write a story about it. (Coolidge 112)

Subjects for stories were apt to crowd into Edith Wharton’s head so fast

that she found it difficult to push them away and go on with what she was

writing. Sometimes she actually did set aside what she was doing to outline or

partly develop some new theme. Fairly often she kept an idea in mind and

brooded on it while characters, names and incidents gathered around it. The

germ of Ethan Frome developed in this way.

Edith Wharton had the ability to depict people whose daily routines and

circumstances are different from her own, and to recreate the life of earlier
generations, whether in Italy, New York, or Western Massachusetts. Whether

she accurately judged how much Ethan would have charged to drive Mr.

Lockwood, the narrator; how much he would have known about alimony and

bank loans; and how the community dances in the village were staged, all

matter less than her insight into the psychological effects of rural isolation; her

knowledge as an avid gardener; of the patience demanded of those who work

with unproductive soil; and her empathy as one at that moment preparing for

divorce, with Ethan’s compulsion to escape a deadening marriage. Edith

Wharton knew, from living with a sick and difficult spouse that pettiness and

anger, more often than nobility, are the results of suffering. The contrast

between the beauty of the landscape around Lenox and the mental starvation of

people who inhabited it disturbed her.

Ethan Frome, the protagonist is a victim, because of his suppression of

feelings, and inarticulateness. The pain experienced mentally and physically is

projected by the gloomy atmosphere and background picture of winter. As

Lubbock observes: “Ethan’s history was just a flash of inarticulate passion,

thrown against the blinding whiteness of the New England Winter” (54) .Ethan

Frome is a man set apart from his neighbors by education, intellect and

feelings, but lacks the force or courage either to impose him or to get away.

This retreat leads to a kind of stasis in his life.

Ethan Frome has an image of life-in-death, and of hell-on-earth. Ethan

Frome portrays the “rigors of life in a harsh land, with its rocky soil, its cold

winters, and its bleak, desolate beauty” (Mcdowell 72). The crippled Ethan,
45
and Zeena, his dreadful wife, and Mattie Silver, the once charming girl he

loved, now bedridden and querulous with pain, all live out their death in the

kitchen of the desolate Frome farm. This reveals a perpetual suffering caused

by a moment of passion.

The novel depicts the tragedy caused by the challenging convention.

Ethan Frome, a young man of good and gentle character is the only son of a

New England farm couple. He has some intellectual gifts and some desire to

know the world, and for a year he is happy attending a technical school. But

when his father becomes disabled by a farm accident, Ethan dutifully returns to

manage the failing farm and saw mill. After his father’s death, his mother loses

her mental faculties and during her last illness she is nursed by a female

relative whom Ethan marries for no other reason than that he is in fear of

loneliness.

The new wife, Zeena, who is elder to Ethan, immediately becomes a

shrew, and lives only to be ill. To help Zeena in her household work, the

Fromes take into their home, a gentle and charming young girl, Mattie Silver, a

destitute cousin of the wife. Ethan and Mattie fall in love, innocently but

deeply. The wife, perceiving this, plans to send the girl away. At the thought of

separation Ethan and Mattie decide to commit suicide. They mean to die by

sledding down a steep hill and crash into a great elm tree. Their plan fail and

they survive. Ethan is sorely crippled and Mattie is bedridden in perpetual pain

and Zeena becomes the devoted nurse and the jailer of the lovers.

46
 The difference between the present and the recent past is emphasized by

Wharton, by using a young narrator, who is made to look back twenty-five

years into the past. Distressed by the duration into late spring of snow drifts

and intense cold, the narrator, Mr. Lockwood, an engineer, imagines himself in

the place of these people in the recent past when hardship and isolation would

have been even more severe. Twenty-eight during the main part of the story in

the engineer’s retrospective narrative, Ethan is already fifty-two and

prematurely aged by toil and by the bitter climate when the narrator first sees

him. In the words of the narrator:

It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the

“natives” were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the

stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had,

in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain.

There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and

he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man

and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two.

(EF 9)

Ethan Frome’s outlook deepens the implications of his tragedy because

time has only dulled Ethan’s wounds and not cured them. He had to learn to

endure, and time has only accentuated his suffering instead of alleviating it. As

the tragedy continues to extend from the past into the present through the

sensitivities of an imaginative narrator, mundane survival for Ethan and Mattie

becomes more horrible in its impact than their sudden death would have been.
47
As a result of their accident, Mattie and Ethan exchange a hope for life-in-death

for a demeaning death-in-life when their attempt to commit suicide fails.

In Ethan Frome, growth is exchanged for regression. Refusal to

participate in the process of change which is life, leads always to the extinction

of the self. The tragic image portrayed is the death-in-life which is Ethan’s

permanent fate.

Edith Wharton’s three chief figures, Ethan Frome, Zeena and Mattie

Silver, seem to be extensions of the grim landscape. McDowell observes: “The

ardent lover turned cynic, the beautiful woman turned soured cripple, and the

protective mother figure emerging as a sinister dictatorial presence are all

illuminating and arresting conceptions” (74-75). The symbol clusters that

appear in the novel – the house, the grave, light and darkness, winter and

summer – externalize the states of mind. The emotions of the characters are

revealed through the projection onto an external visual field. The visual world

manifests the mental state.

The moral sense of winter, the season of the dead seem to pervade the

novel’s frame. This symbolic meaning is internalized and used as a dominant

image. Winter, the season of the novel, suggests contraction and immobility as

Ethan Frome “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” (EF 12). Ethan Frome looks frozen and seems to be dead and in

hell.

48
 Ethan Frome’s stark simplicity is revealed by Ethan daily calling at the

post office, a connection with the outer world from which he never receives a

communication. Ethan Frome is trapped by his marriage to Zeena, and the

circumstances of his life. He becomes the victim of the grim side of New

England life, which engulfs him into a state of inarticulateness.

The journey of Mattie begins in the winter landscape of Starkfield,

moves into the Frome’s constricted house and finally returns to the “frozen

external world” (Gimbel, Ethan Frome 63). The crippled heroine Mattie is

forever within a confined diminished dwelling. It is a state of death-in-life.

Ethan Frome presents the struggle of Mattie Silver in almost parable

form. There is the typical setting of the prison world – here Starkfield, a place

of desolation, a living death. It is a town of eternal winter, for in it nothing

changes, nothing develops or grows. Images of death and stasis crowd this

novel; in the countryside the occasional farmhouse stands isolated, “mute and

cold as a grave stone” (EF 22) and the very tombstones seem to call out

mockingly to the passerby: “we never got away – how should you?” (EF 22).

Starkfield’s chief prisoner is Ethan Frome, the typical Wharton male, a man of

greater perception and sensitivity than those around him, trapped by his

weakness and by marriage to Zeena, a living symbol of Starkfield and its

paralysis.

When society in the form of the silent and vicious Zeena, expels Mattie

Silver, Ethan is offered a chance to escape from Starkfield himself. But, again

49
like the typical Wharton male Ethan cannot free himself, for he has never left

his winter world except in fantasy. Ethan has never acted or planned to make

his fantasies real, but instead has only imagined that he will always go on

living here with Mattie . He was never as happy with her as when he

abandoned himself to these dreams.

It is Mattie who must take the initiative, who must make one last attempt

to keep Ethan and to free him in the only way she can think of – in death.

Mattie suggests the attempt, and takes her lover down the hill, encouraging,

pushing and forcing him to take the only way out. But the escape through death

is denied the pair for, as Ethan is about to hit the fatal tree, the real world

intrudes: “his wife’s face, with twisted monstrous lineaments, thrust itself

between him and his goal” (EF 56). Starkfield has won. It has gained a new

prisoner for its frozen world. The novel ends, as it began, with paralysis; not

only Mattie’s physical paralysis but the living death that results when one

cannot change and cannot act. Ethan Frome demonstrates that the failure to

gain independence results in death – or worse, maiming.

Cold is considered an absence, a diminishment and finally death.

Everything contracts in the cold. Wolff aptly remarks:

The “place” of the novel is defined by this contraction: from the

world to Starkfield; from Starkfield to the thickening darkness of

a winter night, “descending on us layer by layer”; from this

50
 “smothering medium” to the “forlorn and stunted” farmhouse that

is a castrated emblem of its mutilated owner. (Modern 76)

Winter seems to share the mortal problems and mortal pain. The narrator

confronts with such a world and is brought to a terrible task with Ethan Frome,

as “Frome, is his Winterman, his shadow self, the man he might become if the

reassuring appurtenances of busy, active, professional, adult mobility were

taken from him” (Wolff, Modern 76). The unknown interior of Frome’s house

represents the structure of the human body; it contains the story of the meaning

of women and the secret of life and death. It is the story of female bareness and

relentless infertility. The characters in the novel suggest untold suffering.

The winter landscape reduces the world and leaves no trace of the

surface distinctions. As the narrator and Ethan Frome drive to the Corbury

Junction, Ethan points to the house in which he lives and shows the isolated

New England farm house steeped in loneliness and surrounded by snow which

is reflected in the following lines:

Orchard of starved apple – trees writhing over a hill-side among

outcroppings of slate that nuzzled up through the snow, like

animals pushing out their noses to breathe. Beyond the orchard

lay a field or two, their boundaries lost under drifts; and above

the fields, huddled against the white immensities of land and sky,

one of those lonely New England farm-houses that make the

landscape lonelier. (EF 14)

51
 The narrator is invited into the Frome household due to a severe storm

outside. No one outside the family has ever set foot inside the Frome household

for so many years. The narrator, with Ethan Frome, moves through the hall to

the door of a small, warm room. He hears a woman’s voice “droning

querulously” (EF 15) behind the door. The droning voice grows still as Frome

opens the door and speaks. As the door to the Frome’s kitchen opens, it reveals

a world where there is an inability to communicate. As Wolff observes, “its

inhabitants are inarticulate, mute; and like the patient farm animals they tend

to, they are helplessly bound by their own incapacities” (Modern 79). This

moment of revelation is presented as the story of Ethan Frome.

After twenty years of tragic adversity, Ethan’s history is pictured as - A

young man, ambitious for an education, ambitious for a profession,

continuously thwarted, first by the illness of his father, then of his mother; later

marrying Zeena, the woman who nursed his mother, partly from a sense of

obligation, partly from compassion, but finding no comprehension or sympathy

in her for his aspirations; dogged by poverty and misfortune beyond his power

to avert. Other possibilities had been in him, possibilities sacrificed one by one

to Zeena’s narrow–mindedness and ignorance. And what good had come of it?

She was a hundred times bitterer and more discontented than when he had

married her. The one pleasure left her was to inflict pain on him. All the

healthy instincts of self defense rose up in him against such waste.

As the narrator enters Frome’s kitchen, he sees a world of irrecoverable

retreat. Central to such a world is an inability to communicate. Speech is the

52
bridge that might carry Ethan Frome to a world beyond Starkfield, the

necessary passport to wider activities and larger horizons. Without it, he is

literally unable to formulate plans of any complexity because all such

determinations are beyond his limited powers of conceptualization and self-

expression. As he cannot think of his problems though in any but the most

rudimentary way, he is as helpless as a child to combat the forces that bind

him. It is not that he does not feel deeply, for he does. However, one mark of

maturity is the ability to translate desire into coherent words, words into action,

and Ethan Frome is incapable of all such translations.

Frome has a look on his face, which is not due to poverty or physical

suffering, but something more than that. The narrator hires Frome to drive him

to the train that he takes to the power plant everyday; yet despite their daily

contact, there is no progression in their intimacy. The narrator notes that Ethan

“never turned his face to mine, or answered, except in monosyllables, the

questions I put or such slight pleasantries as I ventured (EF 12). Ethan Frome is

finally provoked into speech by the sight of his house. The house is exposed in

all its “plaintive ugliness” (EF 14). Ethan’s psychological state is continuously

projected through the image of the house. Ethan tells the narrator, in the frame

of the novel, that the house then included ‘L’ and he explains ‘L’ thus:

… long, deep-roofed adjunct usually built at right angles to the

main house, and connecting it, by way of store rooms and tool-

houses, with the wood-shed and cow-barn … it is certain that the

53
 “L” rather than the house itself seems to be the centre, the actual

hearth-stone, of the New-England farm. (EF 14)

The loss of the ‘L’ is linked to the sickness of Ethan’s mother – the protective

structure shrinks to a diminished dwelling. When Mrs. Frome becomes ill, the

loneliness of the house grows more oppressive than that of the fields. As part of

his architectural reading of life in Starkfield, the narrator sees the ‘L’ as an

image with a certain symbolic sense.

The Frome house looks forlorn and stunted because it has lost the limb

which the narrator associated with the image of a life linked with the soil

enclosing in itself the chief sources of warmth and nourishment. When the

falling snow blocks the view of the house, the narrator feels that Frome’s

silence too falls with it, letting down between them the old veil of reticence.

As Ethan Frome drives in silence, he becomes the main focus of

attention. He is “like the bronze image of a hero” (Waid, The Woman 65).

There is nothing unfriendly in Ethan’s silence, but he lives in a depth of moral

isolation. His loneliness is not merely the result of his personal plight, but has

in it the intensely accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

This depth of moral isolation, divides Frome from the narrator’s efforts

to know him and discover the reason for his muteness and silence. One day, the

narrator accidentally leaves a book on biochemistry on the sleigh. When Frome

returns the book at the end of the day, Frome looks at the narrator and speaks:

“There are things in that book that I didn’t know the first word about” (EF 13).

54
Hoping for speech from Frome and some entry into knowledge of the man, the

narrator lends the book to Frome. He is intrigued by Frome’s interest in the

book where he finds:

such tastes and acquirements in a man of his condition made the

contrast more poignant between his outer situation and his inner

needs, and … something in his past history, or in his present way

of living, had apparently driven him too deeply into himself for

any casual impulse to draw him back to his kind. (EF 13)

Mrs. Hale, the narrator’s landlady, is the most perceptive local

informant. Every evening she regales the narrator with “another and more

delicately shaded version of the Starkfield chronicle” (EF 11). Mrs. Hale is the

intermediary the narrator looks for in order to understand the minds of the

villagers. The narrator observes:

It was not that Mrs. Ned Hale felt, or affected, any social

superiority to the people about her; it was only that the accident

of a finer sensibility and a little more education had put just

enough distance between herself and her neighbors to enable her

to judge them with detachment. (EF 11)

Although Mrs. Hale’s mind is a store-house of harmless anecdote, and

although inquiries about other people usually brought forth details, Mrs. Hale is

unexpectedly silent on the subject of Ethan Frome. All she would say is “Yes, I

knew them both …. it was awful” (EF 11). Mrs. Hale keeps silent because she

has waited all these years for someone to see what she alone has seen and
55
known about Ethan Frome. For Mrs. Hale, the end has been going on for over

twenty years as three crippled figures sit around the winter fire. The

unspeaking landscape tells part of the frozen woe- the muteness of the

unspeaking man.

Ethan Frome is the story of the “ruin of a man” (EF 9) who is marked

with a scarred wound of “red gash” (EF 9) but is still the most “striking figure”

(EF 9) in Starkfield. The story of Ethan gains stature from the refinement of

torture which Wharton inflicts on him. Ethan is treated with utmost sympathy.

He is created more sensitive than the people about him, to the appeal of natural

beauty. The sweetness of his communion with nature reveals:

His unfinished studies had given form to this sensibility and even

in his unhappiest moments fields and sky spoke to him with a

deep and powerful persuasion. But hitherto the emotion had

remained in him as a silent ache, veiling with sadness the beauty

that evoked it. (EF 18)

His other qualities such as kindness, generosity, and sociability, and his

impressive physical appearance seem to be his gifts. For Ethan, the inherited

sense of duty is strong enough to conquer.

Isolated from the world, Ethan Frome’s wife, Zeena naturally chooses to

be sick because “sickness promises adventure in its possible complications,

sudden cures, and relapses” (McDowell 74). The patent medicines she receives

in the mail provide her excitement and relief from a paralyzing spiritual

monotony. She resents Mattie Silver’s vitality and her tendency to daydream
56
more than she fears Ethan’s interest in her. Zeena is not simply a part of

Ethan’s curse but a deprived woman who grieves over lost beauty when the

cherished red pickle dish she has saved since her wedding is used by Mattie

and broken.

It is in view of Ethan’s potentialities that his marriage to Zeena is a

catastrophe. By the time Mattie Silver appears on the scene, he is only twenty-

eight but already trapped by the circumstances and unable to extend the horizon

of his future beyond the family graveyard. She becomes the victim of Zeena’s

jealousy, offers a way out which Ethan is quick to follow. But immediately his

plans seem not to work out as his farm and mill are mortgaged. He has no

credit, and time is against him. Moreover, even in the heat of his resentment he

cannot disregard Zeena’s plight because it is only by incessant labor and

personal supervision that Ethan drew a meager living from his land, and his

wife, even if she were in better health than she imagined, could never carry

such a burden alone.

Ethan’s rebellion dies out, but is rekindled immediately when Mattie is

about to leave the house. Suddenly it occurs to him that to take Mattie with him

he can get money from Andrew Hale, Mrs. Hale’s husband, by giving Zeena’s

illness as a reason, and that Zeena is in need of a servant. He starts on foot for

Starkfield, meets Mrs. Hale on the way and is touched by her expression of

sympathy “You’ve had an awful meantime, Ethan Frome” (EF 48). Ethan

realizes that he has planned to appeal to Hale’s sympathy to obtain money from

them on false pretenses. With the sudden perception of the point to which his
57
madness has carried him, the madness falls and he sees his life before him as it

is. Ethan feels:

he was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his

desertion would leave alone and destitute; and even if he had the

heart to desert her he could have done so only by deceiving two

kindly people who had pitied him. (EF 48)

From the beginning, Frome is represented as being on the outside. He is

pictured in the snow-covered village with its “white house fronts” (EF 15)

visible between the church with their “shafts of yellow light” (EF 15). Frome

stands on the outside looking in at the scene of the church social gathering

where Mattie Silver dances and resists the attention of an admirer. Ethan is

found to be the hidden watcher.

The central symbol of dance is revealed. The dance is a communal rite

involving everyone in the village. Wharton describes the scene thus:

… On clear evenings the church corner rang till late with the

shouts of the coasters; … The silence of midnight lay on

Starkfield and all its waking life is gathered behind the church

windows, from which strain of dance – music flowed with the

broad bands of yellow light. (EF 16)

At the centre of the dance is Mattie Silver, who is drawn forth to do the

“Virginia Reel” (EF 17). The heroine is partnered by Denis Eady, a lively

young man whose fast pace she catches. Together they move in the
58
“exhilaration of the dance” (EF 17). As Eady and Mattie move in circle of

increasing swiftness the chain dance becomes symbolic of the linking of male

and female.

The frozen darkness mirrors the frozen emotions that keep Ethan away

from the dance of life. Thus “the winter night through which he moves is

suggestive of the unconscious, the infant primordial world cut off from the

adult rigor of the social world” (Gimbel, Ethan Frome 67). Ethan Frome walks

alone towards the village to collect Mattie. As he nears the church, he hugs the

shadow and keeps out of the sight of others. He sees the dance through the

window as he stands in the frozen darkness.

As Mattie emerges from the hall, she stands poised between opposing

poles. The polarities are personified by two young men, where Denis Eady is

associated with movement and Frome represents stillness and darkness. Instead

of Eady, Frome becomes the rigid force who pulls back Mattie. The opposition

is seen externalized as a choice between a ride with Eady and walk home with

Ethan. Mattie decides to go with Ethan and “they stood together in the gloom

of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and grey under the

stars” (EF 21).

The walk from the village to the farmhouse takes Ethan and Mattie

through the graveyard where Frome’s forbears are buried. The cemetery

reflects Ethan’s internal state. It is a concrete image of his attraction to the

house which he inhabits. Gimbel states, “The sight of the little enclosure gave

59
him a warm sense of continuance and stability” (Ethan Frome 68). The

graveyard and the house merge into one sustained image. The symbolic

associations unify them, that they become mirrors of each other. The cemetery

and the farmhouse sharpen the awareness of the house as a metaphor of death.

The second movement takes Ethan and Mattie inside the house. The Frome

house presents the psychic distortions of each of its inhabitants. It is an

externalization of crippled modes of being.

Ethan and Mattie’s fused selfhood begin to reveal itself with their arrival

at the house. Meaning emerges from the confrontation with Ethan’s wife

Zeena. Mattie’s submissive attitude towards Zeena goes deeper than her status

as servant. While returning to the house with Mattie, Ethan twice has a fantasy

about the death of his wife. The fantasy Ethan sees is described in the

following lines.

A dead cucumber – vine dangled from the porch like the crape

streamer tied to the door for a death, and the thought flashed

through Ethan’s brain: “if it was there for Zeena –” Then he had a

distinct sight of his wife lying in their bedroom asleep, her mouth

slightly open her false teeth in a tumbler by the bed. (EF 23)

On reaching the house Ethan kneels on a level with the lower panel of the door

and sees a ray of light beneath it and wonders who could be stirring in the silent

house. He hears steps on the stairs and recollects the thought of the vision he

has about Zeena’s death. The door opens and he sees his wife.

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 A mutual attraction develops between Mattie and Ethan, already beaten

down by Zeena’s harshness and pretended ill-health. Their happiness consists

of inarticulate flashes of rapport. Only months later, on a night when Zeena is

in another village to see yet another doctor, in pursuit of yet another cure, is

Ethan emboldened to make his first amorous advances to Mattie, circumspectly

and awkwardly, in the hope of a kiss or a light caress. The narrative seems to

bring in a similarity between Mattie and Zeena. Mattie seems to replace Zeena.

“She stood just as Zeena had stood, a lifted lamp in her hand, against the black

background of the kitchen” (EF 31). As the evening progresses a series of

symbolic exchanges take place, through which Mattie seems to replace Zeena.

Mattie brings out the red glass pickle dish that is Zeena’s most valued wedding

gift. The cat knocks the dish off the table and it breaks into pieces. Later,

Frome asks Mattie to sit in Zeena’s empty rocking chair and he has a

momentary shock when he sees Mattie’s young head detaching itself against

the cushion that Zeena uses. This fantasy of replacement is shocking, because

Frome imagines that it is Zeena in the chair and not Mattie. In the words of the

author “It was almost as if the other face, the face of the superseded woman,

had obliterated that of the intruder” (EF 33). Zeena’s face seems to divide

Mattie and Ethan. He finally realizes that Zeena is the obstacle for all his goals.

About Ethan’s failure in life the narrator aptly remarks:

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

61
 had barred his way. She had taken everything else from him; and

now she meant to take the one thing that made up for all the

others. (EF 41)

The warmth of the evening is brought to an apprehensive end by the

accidental breaking of one of Zeena’s sacred never-used pickle dish. That the

pickle dish, a wedding gift, has never been used makes it a strong symbol of

Zeena’s self, as she prefers not to take part in life. The depth of Zeena’s

reaction to the dish being broken is revealed by her angrily twitching lips and

by two small tears on her lashless lids.

Meanwhile Zeena has acquired the medical recommendation that she

hire a housekeeper because she is too ill to do any of the housework, although,

in fact, since the arrival of Mattie, she had done very little housework. Such a

recommendation is most welcome because it provides her with an excuse to get

rid of Mattie, of whom she has become increasingly jealous. Zeena declares

that, having given Mattie a job for a year, she has no more responsibility for the

girl. Mattie is to leave the very next day - the same day on which her already –

hired replacement is to arrive. Although Zeena has arranged for the handyman

to drive Mattie to the railroad station, Ethan angrily declares his own intention

of doing so, and he does.

Only on the last drive does the rapport between Ethan and Mattie, which

has now become mutual passion, ceases to be primarily inarticulate.

Articulateness begins when the thoughts of each turn to nearby Shadow Pond

where the previous summer, at a picnic, they had become aware of their love

for each other. Now, in winter, they revisit Shadow Pond on the way to the

station. Realizing that Mattie will likely marry someone else, Ethan avers that
62
he would rather have her dead than married to someone else – “Oh, I wish I

was!” (EF 53) Mattie sobs.

This first outbreak of despair is, however, suppressed for the time being.

Inspired by the sight of two boys coasting, a sight that reminds them of Ethan’s

unfulfilled promise to take Mattie coasting, they now coast, for the fun and the

thrill, and to postpone the moment of leave-taking. As they walk back up the

hill, with the intention of leaving the borrowed sled where they found it, they

embrace passionately. The hopelessness of their love is borne in on them more

strongly than ever. They must stay together. But the only way they can do that

is in death.

Mattie is the one who actually proposes suicide. They take off again in

the sled, flying down the slope. Ethan’s intent is to steer a collision course into

a big elm tree in the center of the coast. But as he brushes aside a vision of

Zeena’s face between him and his target, he swerves the sled. Despite Ethan’s

instant redirections, those swerve results in an imperfect collision. Though

injured, Mattie and Ethan survive. At the time of the fictive narrator’s visit to

Starkfield, they have been living for at least twenty-four years after the smash-

up, as cripples, under the care and dominance of Zeena.

Zeena now takes care of both Ethan and the more seriously injured

Mattie, while before the accident she was unable even to take care of herself.

Mattie, who before the accident was vivacious and sweet, is now immobile and

querulous. Though the Ethan of the central story was prematurely old, his

taciturnity and shyness were in fact gradually disappearing and his emotions
63
were coming to life in the presence of Mattie. But now he is a ruin of a man,

and “there is something bleak and unapproachable in his face” (EF 9). He is

assigned to the living dead by the local informant who says “… if she’d

(Mattie) ha’ died, Ethan might ha ‘lived” (EF 59). This is an ironic reversal of

the situation before the accident, when Ethan only began to live by virtue of the

presence and influence of Mattie. But in the long years after the accident, the

continued presence of Mattie in the household could only contribute further to

Ethan’s grief.

The fifty-two-year-old Ethan, despite his added misery, his suffering

when Zeena and Mattie “get going at each other” (Lawson 70) and his face that

would break one’s heart is not now essentially different from what he was in

the first years of his marriage. Even then he had an immense tolerance for

suffering; even then he was capable of cheerfulness and a close personal

relationship with a responsive person, that is, Mattie. Now his tolerance for

suffering has been tested longer.

Zeena who is ill-naturedly ministering to the needs of the invalid Mattie

and the partial cripple Ethan, is a replica of the Zeena who nursed Ethan’s

mother thirty-two years ago. And the Zeenas, the early and the recent are

consistent with the intervening hypochondriac Zeena, who was preoccupied

with nursing herself. Her (early) skill as a nurse had been acquired by the

absorbed observation of her own symptoms.

Mattie’s personality is the only one that has basically changed. When

Mattie, the outsider, arrived in Starkfield she was vital and light-hearted in a

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community typified by and given to deadness. Mattie wore bright red ribbons

in her hair in a locale characterized by ice, snow, gray and black. However

inevitably, however innocently, Mattie becomes the third point in a domestic

triangle. However agreeable her disposition, Mattie was a threat to the Fromes’

marriage, and Zeena knew it. Finally, Mattie had to live, or half-live, with the

realization that only as a hopeless cripple was she acceptable under Zeena’s

roof. Zeena took her back when Mattie was no longer a threat, and when her

presence could only make Ethan’s life more miserable. Ethan Frome is fated

for suffering.

Ethan Frome finally becomes the story of the horror of sameness and

repetition in an unchanging life. Mattie becomes the querulous woman behind

the door, replacing Zeena. “Replacement means barrenness as a young woman

becomes an old woman” (Waid 73) and not regeneration. The inmost

characters of women, the interior, are empty and silent. The female body is the

site of barrenness rather than fertility.

Frome finds Zeena’s silence “disquieting” (EF 19). He fears Zeena’s

silence to be the inevitable result of the life on the farm. He worries that she

might become like his mother who had become increasingly silent. Frome

recalls his mother’s “taciturnity” (EF 28) and wonders if Zeena is also turning

queer because “when she spoke it was only to complain and to complain of

things not in his power to remedy; and to check a tendency to impatient retort

he had first formed the habit of not answering her and finally of thinking of

other things while she talked” (EF 28). Zeena replaces Ethan’s mother, but only
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by assuming her disquieting silence. Her silent brooding suggests that there is

something more than ill will in the cycle of repetition and replacement. The

brooding silence reproduces itself in an infertile cycle of repetition as Mattie

too becomes silent. Zeena and Mattie both become the image of

inarticulateness.

The mental disturbance of Ethan’s mother locks her into a private world

from which Frome is excluded. The withdrawal from all the labors which

constitute the positive side of maternity, communication, nourishment,

protection – is experienced by Ethan as a withdrawal of love.

The arrival of Zeena as a nurse to his ailing mother restores the lost

balance. Zeena is made to stay back after his mother’s death, because Ethan is

not prepared to be in loneliness. Ethan’s marriage to Zeena “might not have

taken place if it had been spring instead of winter” (Gimbel, Ethan Frome 72).

The grotesque quality of the marriage between Zeena and Ethan is shown

through the image of the house. The bedroom marks only stagnation instead of

fertility. As the couple retires to the marital bed, an aura of death is produced

by their silent use of the space. Without a word, Zeena lies down “with her face

turned away” (EF 29). Ethan blows out the light so that he need not see her

when he takes his place at her side. The house with its unlit hearth has the

annihilating power of the grave to which it is symbolically linked.

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 Marriage to Zeena is a submission to the regressive lure of the

unconscious world. It is the fulfillment of an infantile longing to remain with

the mother. Jung describes the psychodynamics of the situation thus:

The more a person shrinks from adapting himself to reality, the

greater becomes the fear which increasingly besets his path at

every point. Thus a vicious circle is formed : fear of life and

people causes more shrinking back, and this in turn, leads to

infantilism and finally into the mother.(Gimbel, Ethan Frome73)

Marriage to Zeena marks the triumph of isolation.

Marriage leads to a duplication of the experience in which Ethan found

himself during his mother’s illness. Once again, there is a withdrawal of love as

Zeena’s disappointment drives her into a similar world of sickness and self-

absorption. The atmosphere is of silence and loneliness. Once again, there is no

‘L’ at the center of the house. Ethan, as a desperate child receives Mattie Silver

in the same spirit in which he once greeted Zeena. His fantasy is the restoration

of the house. He experiences Mattie’s coming to the house as “the lightning of

a fire on a cold hearth” (EF 18). There is no erotic component to his longing for

her; it is solely a desire for the maternal. Though Mattie had no natural turn for

housekeeping he dreams of transforming her into a mother: “Ethan had an idea

that if she were to marry a man she was fond of, the dormant instinct would

wake and her pies and biscuits become the pride of the country” (EF 18).

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 Mattie’s passivity allows her to become whatever others need her to be.

To be housed, she takes on the shape of any structure which she inhabits.

Mattie’s background provides the psychological basis for this code of being. As

the author states, “She could trim a hat, make molasses candy, recite ‘Curfew

Shall Not Ring Tonight’, and play ‘The Lost Chord’ and a potpourri from

Carmen” (EF 25). On the surface this training is a parody of the formative

process. The ability to trim hats is of no use in the world – ‘The Lost Chord’ is

a metaphor of the note which Mattie strikes in the world. ‘Curfew Shall Not

Ring Tonight’ is a pseudo-poetic exercise in a sentimental code to which she

remains addicted.

Mattie’s education suggests that she has never developed any interests

of her own. Nothing has changed her imagination to give it direction. It is the

pathetic chronicle of a polite young girl who has always acquiesced. Asked to

make molasses candy, she does it. Told to memorize a silly ballad or play, a

required piece, she does that as well. Her education has prepared her to do only

what others ask her. It has led her to accept a role in Ethan’s fantasy, simply

because he wishes it.

When Zeena is away from home, Mattie and Ethan alone at home sit for

their supper. In preparation for their evening alone, Mattie lays the table for

supper “with fresh doughnuts, stewed blackberries and his favorite pickles”

(EF 31). In the kitchen, the fire which was out when Zeena was present has

been lit again. It is the symbol of the good mother who presides over the hearth

and so restores the ‘L’. Within this womb, Ethan is “suffocated with the sense

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of well-being” (EF 31). It is that timeless unconscious world of infancy for

which he has longed. As Gimbel remarks, “He had a confused sense of being in

another world where all was warmth and harmony and time could bring no

change” (Ethan Frome 77). As Mattie moves into Zeena’s chair, she becomes

the classic mother rocking her child in the well-lit house.

In Ethan’s psyche, the search is only for the Good mother. All women

are transformed into that goddess. As each turns her terrible aspect towards

him, the child feels deprived, and the search for a substitute begins. As Zeena

replaced the silent Mrs. Frome, Mattie will replace Zeena until she too

withdraws from the eternal child. The cycle appears to be endless as one

mother succeeds another.

The fantasy house collapses as the cat leaps and shatters Zeena’s pickle

dish. As a vessel or container, the pickle dish is related to Zeena’s soured

feminity. A wedding present, it is a memento of her position as married

woman. Like the dish, which is valued but never used, she too is locked away

and untouched. The shattering of the dish evokes the negative effects of

infantile fantasy. To build their playhouse, Ethan and Mattie had to destroy the

existing structure, Zeena’s house of marriage.

Mattie’s tears imply some understanding of the moral significance of the

event. She knows that she has been playing with another woman’s marriage

and that she will have to face the consequences. Seeing the broken pieces of the

pickle dish Mattie tells Ethan:

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 Yes, but you see, she never meant it should be used, not even

when there was company…It was a wedding present-don’t you

remember?...That’s why she wouldn’t ever use it. Oh Ethan,

Ethan, what in the world shall I do?. (EF 32)

As Ethan looks at the pieces of glass, he knows that “the shattered

fragments of their evening lay there” (EF 32). His energy is directed towards

mending the glass so that the event passes unnoticed. Ethan feels “if he glued it

together the next morning, months might elapse before his wife noticed what

had happened and meanwhile he might after all be able to match the dish at

Shadd’s Fall or Better Bridge” (EF 33). His power to convince Mattie that he

can nullify the act quells her fears and stifles her awareness. They are united

again in the house of childhood.

As the scene ends, Ethan and Mattie assume a tableau of mother and

child. It is a picture created by their mutual cooperation. His desire to have a

mother has been matched by Mattie’s longing to become whatever is necessary

in order to remain in the house. With Zeena’s return, the atmosphere changes;

the house becomes dark again. No longer, a projection of Ethan and Mattie’s

fantasy, the house now externalizes Zeena’s angry and disappointing world.

Within the symbolic structure of the story, sickness aptly reveals

Zeena’s troubled emotional state. A result of her disappointing marriage, her

malady goes back to the first manifestations of estrangement - “Perhaps it was

the inevitable effect of life on the farm, or perhaps, as she sometimes said; it

was because Ethan never listened” (EF 28). Her condition has deteriorated
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since Mattie’s arrival. Ethan’s emotional attachment to the young girl has

widened the marital breach to the point at which he listens, even lies, to his

wife. It accounts for the double meaning of her description of the present

sickness. Zeena says she has complications. Ethan knows that complications

are often a death warrant, people straggled on with troubles but they almost

succumbed to complications.

The decision to send Mattie away creates the great confrontation

between Ethan and Zeena. As Wharton remarks “It is the first open scene of

anger in the sad seven years of their marriage”(EF 40). The struggle is

archetypal; it takes two forms within Ethan’s mind, it is the struggle of the

child who must slay the terrible mother in order to survive. Both combatants

are stripped of their social personalities; they are like “serpents shooting

venom” (EF 39). Their faces are not visible but hidden in obscurity. The

atmosphere is so “senseless and savage” (EF 39) that Ethan is seized with

horror of the scene.

As they fight, Ethan sees Zeena in the aspect of that Terrible mother; she

is “a mysterious alien presence”, “an evil energy” (EF 41). To be overcome by

her is to die, for to be rigid, is to be dead. The struggle is waged against

overwhelming odds for Ethan. He is “seized with the despairing sense of his

helplessness” (EF 41). Finally he falls, weak and powerless. In defeat, he is

sucked back into the darkness of nothingness. Ethan abhors Zeena who has

mastered him.

Different rooms of the house express separate and solidified states of

mind. Ethan’s personal world is a “cold, dark study” (EF 45). Not central to the
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house, it is “a small room behind the untenanted best parlor”(EF 44). The most

important of the many suggestive details about the room has to do with its

function as a child’s ‘retreat’. It is a sanctuary given him by his mother, when

he returned to the farm after his father’s illness. He still takes ‘refuge’ there in

summer, but for most of the year it is uninhabitable. It has no heat and the stove

has been moved to Mattie’s room. She contains the warmth which makes it a

livable space. Ethan wants that maternal fire returned to his room. He

associates it with Mattie as the new mother. He craves not sexuality but the life

of her smile and the warmth of her voice.

Nothing is possible for Ethan because his regressive impulses keep him

a prisoner in an unconscious world. In that infantile place, he discards the

dream and falls asleep. He awakens in the reality which is his confinement; his

spirit remains cold, stiff and hungry. Mattie has waited for him to come to her

and he hasn’t. She remarks on the inward state which makes emotional

movement impossible: “You must be frozen” (EF 66).

Mattie’s reasons for going to Ethan are explained in the profile which

her own room reveals. As Ethan visits her, she presents the image of an orphan:

“In the middle of the floor stood her trunk, and on the trunk she sat in her

Sunday dress, her back turned to the door and her face in her hands”(EF 71).

With no belief that a doorway can lead into another room, Mattie turns her

back on thresholds, and collapses into helplessness. In a bare and comfortless

space, she is paralyzed. She too is a homeless child whose mother has left her.

The personal objects which have given the room her personal character confirm
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the centricity of maternity. Ethan remembers the room as having been

dominated by an enlarged picture of her mother. It was placed in a frame and

surrounded by a bunch of dyed grasses like an altar-piece. Now there is nothing

in the room. Mattie has no self except the ephemeral one assigned her by other

people. She goes to Ethan because he offers her a self and makes her feel

housed again. Without it, she is a sobbing child sitting on a trunk. The private

spaces which Ethan and Mattie occupy are architectural analogues of their

individual psyche.

The final movement begins as Ethan and Mattie finally leave the house.

A sense of annihilation pervades as Ethan and Mattie begin their ride to the

station. The atmosphere is externalized in the frozen landscape. The cosmic

negation conveyed by the winter landscape reinforces the thematic movement

of the final episode.

At the gate, Ethan turns the sorrel away from the Starkfield road. He and

Mattie head instead for Shadow Pond. It is a frozen surface covering a small

sheet of water. The sadness in the landscape expresses Ethan’s perceptions: “It

was a shy secret spot, full of the same dumb melancholy that Ethan felt in his

heart” (EF 51). It’s symbolic use is explained by Jung in ‘Symbols of

Transformation’. He sees the maternal significance of water as one of the

clearest interpretations in the entire field of mythology. In support of his care

for the universality of the symbol, Jung cites examples from many traditions,

and points out the biblical injunction. He believes:

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 From water comes life” and the Greeks use water, as a symbol of

generation. He recalls the Vedas in which the waters are called

‘matritamah’ or ‘most maternal’. Even more pertinent to its

implications in the novel is Jung’s linkage of maternal water with

the unconscious: ‘the maternal aspect of water coincides with the

nature of the unconscious, because the latter can be regarded as

the mother or matrix of consciousness. Hence the unconscious

when interpreted on the subjective level has the same maternal

significance as water. (Gimbel, Ethan Frome 86-87)

Ethan’s experience of Shadow Pond as an analogue of his inner state is a

remainder of his longing for reunion with his mother. As is his “cold, dark

study”(EF 45) this “shy secret spot” (EF 51) is a place of unconsciousness to

which he is drawn by his desire for regression. Mattie too longs for immersion

in the maternal waters. Her desire is a function of the relationship to Ethan.

Having accepted the self which he has assigned her, she is wedded to him. To

separate from him is to be left without a self, orphaned and unaccommodated

as before.

At the edge of the water, they relive the summer picnic which

anticipated their return to the pond. Mattie discovers that she is only a creation

of Ethan’s. To be without him is to be extinct. Instead of separation she wishes

for death. She says to Ethan that she has been wishing it every minute of the

day.

The symbiotic force of the union precludes a separate existence for

Ethan and Mattie. Like two incomplete halves, they cling to each other in
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despair: “What’s the good of either of us going anywhere’s without the other?”

(EF 55) . Ethan and Mattie can be united only through death. Zeena’s expulsion

of Mattie has barred the only other door.

All that has occurred at the beginning continues to come together. Only

the degree of intensity separates the first and last movements of the story. After

the dance, Mattie had given her reasons for not wanting to leave the Frome

house: “Where’d I go if I did?” (EF 22). Now the magnitude of her terror

becomes apparent. Fear becomes the argument for double suicide: “Ethan

where’ll I go if I leave you? I don’t know how to get along alone” (EF 55).

Ethan’s earlier fear had been that she might marry and leave. Now it has

deepened into a panicked wish for her death: “I don’t know how it is you make

me feel, Matt. I’d almost rather have you dead than that” (EF 53).

As analogue of Zeena, in her terrifying aspect, the Elm Tree looms in

front of them. A universal symbol of the Great Mother, the tree is deliberately

used to convey the seduction of return to her womb. At the beginning of the

story, Zeena waited for Mattie and Ethan to arrive. Now it is the tree which

appears to await their return. Mattie says, “It’s waiting for us, it seems to

know” (EF 55). Both are formidable obstacles to their love and progress. The

lover’s awareness of this reality is warped by the inflexible mental world which

each inhibits. Ethan again makes Mattie the enveloping mother. He asks her to

sit behind him so that he can feel enclosed. He says, “Because I-because I want

to feel you holding me” (EF 56). Mattie agrees as before; she becomes the self

he requires. Her own rationale comes from that sentimental vision of the world

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which her education has fostered. She sees herself as the heroine of ‘Curfew

Shall Not Ring Tonight’, written by Rose Hartwick Thorpe. It is a

melodramatic ballad about a girl who prevents the death of her lover by

clinging to the clapper of the bell at execution time. To prevent the tolling of

the bell which signals separation, she is willing to go to her death. Her energy

of annihilation is overwhelming; Ethan experiences her as “the embodied

instrument of fate” (Gimbel, Ethan Frome91). Finally they are two children

who crash into a tree and who must repent by returning to their rooms in the

mother’s house. In that moment of impact, the vision of the narrator ends.

As the narrator enters the Frome House, he witnesses a gothic family

tableau. The paralyzed Mattie and the warped Ethan are joined in the kitchen

by Zeena. The kitchen is a poor-looking place and not the seat of warmth. The

mutilated Mattie whines like a child; Zeena, as mother, looks through eyes

which reveal nothing and reflect nothing.

Survival is perceived as it’s opposite. In the eyes of a neighbor, Mrs.

Hale, everybody has died in the crash. Her feelings about the events which

succeeded the accident confirm the validity of the narrator’s vision. She tells of

Zeena’s recuperation as the accident brought Ethan and Mattie back into the

house. Once more, she becomes the mother. As Gimbel comments, “It was a

miracle considering how sick she was-but she seemed to be raised right up

when the call came to her” (Ethan Frome 91). For over twenty years, Zeena has

cared for them both; they have become her permanent children.

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 Mrs. Hale recognizes the situation to be a form of death. They are all in

the grave which Ethan had earlier found so alluring: “I don’t see there’s much

difference between the Fromes up the farm and the Fromes down in the

graveyard” (EF 59). The final word about Mattie also comes from Mrs. Hale;

she voices it to the narrator: “There was one day, about a week after the

accident, when they all thought Mattie wouldn’t live. Well I say it’s a pity she

did” (EF 59). As Raphael aptly remarks:“Ethan Frome is a novel about

destruction, about the warping and distortion of personalities through

imprisonment in a static nightmare world” (57).

In Ethan Frome the author’s eye is bent not on the ennobling of a nature

by adversity but on the tragic spectacle of man pursued by perverse fate. There

are such persons, victims of a blind retribution for sins they have never

committed. The novel represents a world of infertility and death-in-life in

which the inarticulate landscape of New England and the family around the

hearth are seen from the outside us constraining, crippling and entrapping.

The idea of Ethan Frome is also universally true. A man or woman can

be caught by poverty and the demands made by sickness so that it seems

impossible for him to be the person he wishes to be. If he is to escape he must

make a superhuman effort. Yet how can an ordinary human being suddenly

become stronger or wiser and conquer fate? Usually it is impossible. Ethan,

who dreaded silence, cannot escape the voices of the two women.

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 In Ethan Frome, the procedure is extremely simplified; its chief, and

virtually its only effect is to show that Ethan’s hopes are doomed before they

are recognized, and this is one reason the novel seems harshly fatalistic. Ethan

becomes trapped between the woman who inspires him and the woman who

drains him.

“Mattie and Ethan seem to think that the best they can hope for is to be

able to continue living together with Zeena and seeing each other as often as

possible” ( Shmoop.com). Passivity, withdrawal, inarticulateness, helpless

dependency- are the basis for Frome’s misery and consequently Ethan Frome

becomes the victim of his isolated surroundings.

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