Ethan Frome: themes and character analysis

Ethan Frome: A prisoner of the coldness of nature

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton tells the story of an unhappy, lonely man who seeks comfort in emotional (although not physical) adultery, as a relief from the isolated experience of caring for his sick wife. Frome's natural circumstances define his isolation -- he is located in a remote, New England town named Starkville which makes it difficult for him to meet other people, and when his wife's cousin Mattie Silver comes to care for his ailing wife Zenobia (called Zeena), Mattie is like a drink of fresh water to a thirsty man. But Ethan cannot entirely alter his life for the better, and ridden by guilt because of moral convention -- he calls himself bound by hand and foot, despite his mistreatment by his wife -- Ethan symbolically hobbles himself rather than breaks free of social constraints. This illustrates how Ethan is a prisoner of his town's morality. Even a relatively unfeeling Starkfield resident Harmon Gow confides to the first-person narrator of the beginning chapter, regarding Ethan's broken appearance: "Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters" (Wharton 7)

Upon meeting Frome for the first time the narrator himself observes that Frome seemed to have "lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters" (Wharton 13). In other words, Frome's chill is not simply internal, as a result of misery, but it is because of the physical and social constraints that have emotionally, spiritually, and physically broken him. In Wharton's novel, the environment 'creates' Frome's broken life and body, and vice versa, a town's geographic and social nature and human nature cannot be separated.

However, this was not always the case. When the reader first encounters Ethan as a young man, in the section of the story told in the third person, Ethan is described as almost too sensitive, even artistic: "He had always been more sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty" (Wharton 29). It is this sensitivity that makes him fall in love with is wife's cousin, because he cannot bear Zeena's coarse nature, her depression, and her hypochondria. At the beginning of the book, although quiet, unlike Zeena, Ethan looks for the best in life and the beauty of the world, even though he cannot put aside the social attidues that tell him a wife and husband cannot be parted. This is despite the fact that the reader discovers at the end of the novel, Zeena can easily put aside her manipulative use of her illness when necessary.

Ethan's lack of harmony with his surroundings because of his intelligence and gentleness makes him miserable, yet he does not have the moral will to rise above the chill that is everywhere. Because of this he eventually becomes a part of the cold landscape, as he is unable to force himself to leave Starkfield while he still can. Instead, he chooses death in the snow over change, but hesitates even in 'choosing' death with Mattie, and subjects the both of them to a far worse fate. Even the conventional Mrs. Hale says as much: "they all thought Mattie couldn't live. Well, I say it's a pity she did," noting that it is Ethan who suffers most of all, living with his wife and a crippled Mattie (Wharton 157).

Ethan becomes a prisoner of his own indecision, the inability to choose life or death, and instead lives a kind of 'living death,' which is symbolized in the coldness of the town, and the ways that the spruce trees make a kind of coffin around Mattie and Ethan, in their final ride together (Wharton 144). Ethan becomes a caregiver, ironically, despite the weakness of his will, just like Mattie Silver, who ironically first joins the Frome household to care for Zeena becomes the physically weakest member of the household. Ethan's life is initially defined by the needs of his wife's body to the point where he becomes unnaturally submissive as a husband, just as the youthful Mattie unnaturally becomes the sickest member of the household before her time. Ethan becomes a captive of his body, and the bodies of the women around him, as he is lame and unable to die, yet despite his apparent age Ethan's physical frame is as strong as the morality of the town and religion that deems it sacrilege to say it would have been better had Mattie died. His accident was "More'n enough to kill most men. But the Fromes are tough. Ethan'll likely touch a hundred" (Wharton 5). Gow's prophesy functions as a kind of a curse, not a blessing for Ethan.

Ethan's life journey is similar to the progression of the seasons in Starkville itself, cold with a brief period of false warmth, with a brief "phase of crystal clearness followed by long stretches of sunless cold" (Wharton 8). Warmth is only a memory for Ethan, just like it is in the town that keeps Ethan's future frozen and imprisoned. When the first-person narrator tells him about an engineering job he had "in Florida, and of the contrast between the winter landscape about us and that in which I had found myself the year before...to my surprise Frome said suddenly: 'Yes: I was down there once, and for a good while afterward I could call up the sight of it in winter. But now it's all snowed under'" (Wharton 13). The memory of warmth and love, in other words, is snowed under in Ethan's mind, just like the world around him and despite Ethan's ability to remember happiness for awhile, he cannot sustain it.