Edith Wharton

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 c

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t of power in their interior, domestic spaces, and because their realms are so small take every possible advantage that they can. In Ethan Frome this domestic space is contested by the two women, both of which dream of love, and both of which have a claim to Frome's love. Zeena has the formal claim to his love and devotion both because she is his legal wife and because her physical weakness should inspire his (and our) pity. Mattie has a claim to Frome's love because she is well and beautiful and is sexually available to him in a way that Zeena is not. Ethan serves as the locus of dreams, as the symbol of possible enduring happiness, for both of the women, although each one of them conceives of love and happiness in a different way. Conversely, each of the two women serves as a symbol of the kind of love that he believes may bring him enduring happiness in the future. There is not enough love or loyalty to go around to keep all three of these people happy, although for much of the first part of the book Ethan is able to convince himself that he can balance his two different dreams of himself, the two different lives that he might have with these two different women: Mattie, and Zeena, with more leisure to devote to her complex
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Approximate Word count = 1288
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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