Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Jim and I are in Mexico supporting his mother as she recovers from surgery in a Guadalajara hospital. I had hoped that a book I put on hold at the library about black elite society during the Gilded Age would be available in time for me to bring it with me and read as we waited around. But the book is still on hold, so while I was at the library I picked up two other books: Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, and Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. I read The Great American Novel first. Coincidentally, in an early passage in Roth’s book where a character names several candidates that might claim the title of being the great American novel, he mentions Ethan Frome. I’ve already read two of Edith Wharton’s books: The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), either of which might legitimately take the title. (They’re great.) Ethan Frome (1911) is also great but it can’t be the great American novel, because it isn’t a novel, not just because of its short length. I read it in a day.

In a brief introduction to the book, Wharton calls what follows, variously, a “story”, “my tale”, a “tragedy”, “the tale” and “my small tale.” She explicitly states that her tale is not a novel and simultaneously defines a novel by writing, “I never thought this for a moment, for I had felt, at the same time, that the theme of my tale was not one on which many variations could be played. It must be treated as starkly and summarily as life had always presented itself to my protagonists; any attempt to elaborate and complicate their sentiments would necessarily have falsified the whole” (p. vi). So Ethan Frome is a stark tale, summarily told, without the thematic variations, elaborations and complications that define a novel.

But there is one complication that Edith Wharton can’t avoid, and which is the other subject of her introduction. She explains, “the dramatic climax, or rather the anti-climax, occurs a generation later than the first acts of the tragedy” (p. vi). So the tale requires, among the taciturn New England characters of her story, the means for a narrator to learn both the beginning and the end of the tale without adding unnecessary complications. She accomplishes this by introducing a narrator in an unnumbered and unnamed prefatory chapter, who arrives in the tiny western Massachusetts town of Starkfield one winter on a job he has to do in a neighboring village. He learns of a local man, Ethan Frome, an unsuccessful farmer, with an unsuccessful mill on his property, age fifty-two. Ethan is crippled on his left side resulting from a “smash up”, as the village folks call it, that occured twenty-four years earlier. By circumstance of several of the village horses falling ill, the narrator contracts with Ethan, whose horse is unaffected, to drive him to the train station each day where he takes a train to his work. As they drive together the unnamed narrator learns a little more of Ethan: he’s smart and ambitious but constrained in life by lack of education and poverty. Then, one day in a snow storm, the train stops running and Ethan drives the narrator all the way to his job site, waits for him, and brings him home. Then, with the storm severe and night falling, Ethan invites the narrator to spend the night at his farm, and from that experience the narrator puts together the tale he then proceeds to tell in nine numbered chapters.

The tale is simple and beautifully told, and unfolds over just a few days twenty-four years earlier. Ethan, age 28, healthy, is married to a woman named Zenobia, called Zeena. She is seven years older but looks older than her years and is persistently ill with a serious of vague illnesses that she treats with a series of vague patent medicines. Ethan is her caretaker, the same as he cared for his father and then his mother as they suffered illnesses and died previously. Caring for them is the cause of his curtailing his education (he had studied engineering) and returning to the farm. And caring for his parents is also how Ethan came to meet Zeena, when she came to assist In taking care of Ethan’s mother. When the mother died, Ethan rashly proposed marriage less from love than from fear of being alone.

About a year earlier, the daughter of a cousin of Zeena’s, named Mattie, came to live with them. Her father had died suddenly exposing that he was deep in debt. The revelation killed Mattie’s mother, and as her father had convinced other family members to invest in his failed business he impoverished all of them. Mattie is destitute and unskilled. I loved this description of her meager skills: “She could trim a hat, make molasses candy, recite “Curfew shall not ring to-night,” and play “The Lost Chord” and a pot-pourri from “Carmen” (p. 59). (Those references tell us that the year is about 1880). The family places Mattie with Zeena with the thought that Mattie could assist with the housework while Zeena is ill, but Zeena complains of the poor quality of Mattie’s work and considers the girl a charity case.

But where Zeena is sour, Mattie is sweet. Zeena is depressed and Mattie is full of life. Ethan and Mattie feel a mutual attraction. Their growing interest in each other is delightful to read, charming and romantic. He calls her, “Matt.” A happy future beckons, but the way is blocked by Ethan’s marriage to the dark and complaining Zeena.

Then Zeena goes away for a night to visit a doctor in a neighboring town. Ethan and Mattie have one evening alone together, chaste, of course, but giving them a glimpse of the life that could be theirs, if only…. But when Zeena returns, she announces that the doctor has insisted that she have complete rest and Zeena has made arrangements for a girl to come to the farm to do the housework properly meaning Mattie must go. The new girl will arrive the next day.

Mattie packs her bag. Ethan is desperate for her not to go. He imagines they might steal away together, but there’s no money for that. There’s no way out. To have a last few moments together, Ethan volunteers to drive Mattie to the train station. On the way, they confess their love, and they kiss. And then they decide, in one last romantic gesture, to take the sled ride together that they had wanted to enjoy earlier but put off. They find a sled left behind by the village children and take off down the hill, a wild, exhilarating trip, making a careful turn to avoid a huge elm tree in the path. As they walk back up the hill, despairing of the future, Mattie suggests they sled down once more, but this time, steer deliberately into the tree. Ethan agrees. They embrace again on the sled, and they kiss again, and off they go.

We know Ethan doesn’t die, because he’s still around twenty-four years later, though crippled from the “smash up.” It’s in the final, unnumbered and unnamed chapter (bookending the preparatory chapter) that we learn the rest of the tragedy as the narrator relates what he saw as he spent the night at the Frome farm. Mattie didn’t die either, but the “smash up” injured her spine and left her paralyzed. For twenty-four years, Ethan, Mattie, and Zeena have lived together; Zeena rousing from her vague illness to become caretaker of the other two poor souls.

It’s a punishment too terrible for the minor sin of Ethan and Mattie’s flirtation, which makes the book a downer and spoils its perfection in my estimation. Ethan and Mattie are good people. Their love affair is gentle. They don’t deserve their fate. Zeena is depicted in the darkest colors and her meanness serves nothing but her own selfishness. It really feels a betrayal of the reader’s expectations to give us the ending Wharton does, a punishment for the reader as well as for her characters.

This book is quite different from The Age of Innocence or The House of Mirth. Although all three involve love triangles of a sort (in The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer marries May Welland and never consummates his passion for Elena Olenska; in The House of Mirth, Lily Bart clearly should have married Lawrence Seldon; instead she pursues but fails to catch another match). All three end badly (real tragedy for Lily Bart, wistful regret for Newland Archer). But in Ethan Frome the tragedy stems from the small, cold life of rural New England, and the poverty of the characters, while the obstacles to happiness in The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth are attached to the social strictures of the wealthy gilded-age urban world of the characters. This is what Wharton means, in her introduction when she writes that her tale, “… must be treated as starkly and summarily as life had always presented itself to my protagonists” the characters and their setting defining their tale as well as the telling.