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Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton's 1911 novella Ethan Frome is a love story. But the pairings in the story are in many ways simply an excuse for the author to explore and manipulate ideas about masculinity and femininity. She plays with, refutes, and reinforces ideas about gender with images of fate and free will, dreams and nightmares, of life and death. In connecting these series opposites with contrasting views of gender, she creates a tragedy set in the deceptive prettiness of the New England countryside.

Ethan Frome tells the story of how the title character falls in love with Mattie Silver, who is a cousin of Frome's wife Zeena, an invalid. This triangle of three people each of whose ability to love and to dream (and so to live fully) is truncated in different ways must inevitably lead to tragedy. If we have learned anything from reading Wharton opus it is that those who are incapable of dreaming of an unconventional future will be condemned. While we might suspect, given her own experiences as an author in a world in which women were not supposed to be authors, that she would be more sympathetic to women who resigned themselves to conventional lives (given how much pressure there on women to conform) this is not the case at least in her fiction. She treats Zeena none too gently for playing the role of the hapless, passive female.

Major themes in Wharton's work include the effects of class on both behavior and consciousness (divorce, for example, often horrifies the established upper class as much for its offense against taste as for its violation of moral standards); the American belief in progress as actual and good (many "advances" Wharton welcomed; others she was contemptuous of); the contrast between European and American customs, morality, and sensibility; the confinement of marriage, especially for women; women's desire for and right to freedom in general, and particularly sexual and economic freedom, and the reality that, usually, th...

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Edith Wharton. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 13:25, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1688284.html