Ethan Frome

Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome:

The tragic consequences of separate spheres ideology and sexual parasitism

One conventional way of reading Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is to interpret it as a tale of an intelligent and sensitive man brought down by women. The protagonist Frome marries the querulous Zeena while he is still a young man. Frome is distraught that for rest of his life he will be hostage to a failing farm and mill, and to a wife who does not love him. Then he falls in love with the young woman who tends to his ailing wife. After foolishly trying to commit suicide together, both Mattie and Ethan are injured, and Ethan is shackled to caring for both women, not just his wife, and loses the ability to escape his circumstances. However, it also possible to view the book as a tragic chronicle of a fate common to many women of the era. Neither Mattie nor Zeena have any apparent recourse other than domestic servitude. The ideology of the 'angel at the hearth' or 'separate spheres' ideology is shown to be just as detrimental for males as it is for females in Ethan Frome. Frome is overburdened with the dependency of his mother, wife, and his lover upon him, and eventually cracks under the pressure when he concocts his suicide pact with Mattie.

According to the early 20th century feminist Olive Schreiner: "The position of the unemployed modern female is one wholly different [than that of her male counterpart]. The choice before her, as her ancient fields of domestic labour slip from her, is not generally or often at the present day the choice between finding new fields of labour, or death; but one far more serious in its ultimate reaction on humanity as a whole -- it is the choice between finding new forms of labour or sinking slowly into a condition of more or less complete and passive sex-parasitism" (Schreiner 1911). 'Sex parasitism,' as defined by Schreiner, was relying solely upon a man for financial support, and not developing one's own personal talents. Middle-class women employed others to care for them and to do their 'dirty work,' just like Zeena does with Mattie at the beginning of the story. Frustrated socially and financially, Zeena takes on the persona of the idle, middle-class woman she aspires to be. Zeena is fragile and sickly as the ideal 19th century 'invalid' woman.

Both Mattie and Zeena represent the two extremes of female passivity -- Zeena is a domestic tyrant; Mattie has no ability to act as a housekeeper and merely exists as a decorative object. Ethan is forced to cover up for Mattie's incompetency, so as not to antagonize his wife. He must work hard, regardless of his feelings or inclination to support them both. "Whether beneficially or unbeneficially, the human male must, generally speaking, employ his intellect, or his muscle, or die" (Schreiner 1911). By the end of the novel, Ethan's strength is portrayed as a kind of a curse, as it enables him to survive the accident relatively intact, and to live a miserable and long existence.

Ethan is shown to make the same mistakes with women, over and over again. He grows enchanted with their domesticity, and then he falls out of love with them, as they began to sicken under the tedium and toil of housekeeping (in the case of Zeena) or become physically wrecked when they indulge in a dream of a romantic death (like Mattie). Ethan takes on the figure of a caretaker again and again. In this sense, Ethan is feminized, yet he makes a masculine mistake of believing in the ideal of the angel of the house. This pattern originated while he was taking care of his mother after she became ill, and Zeena helped him during her final months. "After the mortal silence of his long imprisonment Zeena's volubility was music in his ears. He felt that he might have 'gone like his mother' if the sound of a new voice had not come to steady him. Zeena seemed to understand his case at a glance. She laughed at him for not knowing the simplest sick-bed duties and told him to 'go right along out' and leave her to see to things" (Wharton, Chapter 4).

Zeena snares Ethan, having great ambitions to leave the area, but when it becomes clear that it is not easy to sell his inherited property, Zeena grows frustrated and claims to be ill, even though she once seemed the picture of health. This becomes her way of acting like a fine lady: "in place of the active labouring woman, upholding society by her toil, has come the effete wife" (Schreiner 1911). But when Ethan falls in love again, he falls for a woman who is, in her own way, just as physically fragile as Zeena claims to be. Ethan fantasizes about leaving for the west, but Mattie's delicacy holds him back: "Once in the West he was sure of picking up work -- he would not have feared to try his chance alone. But with Mattie depending on him the case was different" (Wharton, Chapter 8). Ethan remembers a man from the area who did 'make good' after divorcing his wife and marrying another woman, but he is not emotionally strong enough to shake off the moral constraints he labors under, and knows that Mattie and Zeena will not be able to bear the change.

As a man, Ethan also feels a sense of responsibility for providing for his wife, even though he despises her and feels contempt for Zeena: "And what of Zeena's fate? Farm and mill were mortgaged to the limit of their value, and even if she found a purchaser- in itself an unlikely chance- it was doubtful if she could clear a thousand dollars on the sale. Meanwhile, how could she keep the farm going? It was only by incessant labour and personal supervision that Ethan drew a meagre living from his land, and his wife, even if she were in better health than she imagined, could never carry such a burden alone" (Wharton, Chapter 8). The irony of the situation is that Ethan's wife is ornamental, yet he is also dreaming of escaping with a woman who is similarly useless. Both are incapable of making a living, and both are incapable of effective housekeeping -- Ethan admits as much when Zeena tries to bully him into getting a hired girl.

According to the ideology of the 'separate spheres,' women were supposed to govern the home, allowing men to take over the administration of public affairs. For most of the novel, Zeena exercises a kind of domestic tyranny over Mattie and Ethan because of her perceived superiority as the 'lady of the house.' But Ethan is forced to perform the household duties as well as his outdoor duties, even though he at first felt empowered as a man during their courtship because Zeena acted as the domestic servant. According to true 'separate spheres' ideology, the middle class woman was supposed to direct servants without getting her hands dirty, but Ethan cannot afford a housekeeper, which makes Zeena feel betrayed. Her only means of showing her aggression is through her hypochondria and criticizing Mattie's admittedly weak skills. The 'separate spheres' ideology is shown to be a lie -- Zeena's supposed illness makes her lazy and petty in the home, while Mattie's upbringing has made her useless.

The adulterous feelings between Ethan and Zeena are expressed when Mattie accidentally leaves out Zeena's pickle dish, causing the cat to knock it over. Ethan's willingness to cover up Mattie's mistake is portrayed as a betrayal and a trivialization of what is important to Zeena -- her home. Zeena uses the broken dish as evidence of Mattie's incompetence and her husband's feelings for another woman. However, the crime is symbolic of how Zeena blames people for what is not their fault. All of the three characters are caught in a web not entirely of their own making. They are trapped in a judgmental web that makes it virtually impossible for a single woman like Mattie to earn a living, and gives Zeena false hopes for the easy life she hoped to lead once married. Their lives fall into disorder, partially because of their personal passivity but also because of the capriciousness of fate and life in a small, desolate town than cannot support ambitions larger than the constraining social roles of farmer and wife.

At the end of the novel, Zeena, Mattie, and Ethan are literally bound to the house, because of poverty and illness, in a state that is worse than death, as Mrs. Hale tells Ethan: "don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues" (Wharton, Chapter 9). This rather misogynistic expression portrays Ethan as the miserable captive of the wagging tongues of two, rather than one woman. Ethan is now 'married' to Maggie, but not in the way he desired -- he now effectively has two wives who cannot love him or escape the family house, rather than three. The existence for all three is a miserable one, and the women suffer as much as Ethan as they battle amongst one another.

The greatest humor of the novel is exhibited when Zeena is suddenly able to find the energy to care for Mattie and Ethan, despite her protests of ill health earlier in the novel. When forced, because of circumstances, to work (Zeena has nothing to live on, if Ethan dies) the 'angel at the hearth' is capable of toil. "Where the conditions of life rendered it inevitable that all the labour of a community should be performed by the members of that community for themselves, without the assistance of slaves or machinery, the tendency has always been rather to throw an excessive amount of social labour on the female" (Schneider 1911). A non-working female is a status symbol of the middle-class, when such labor is no longer inevitable.