Introduction to the Edition by Damiano Consilvio (editor)
The version of Ethan Frome that Wharton would write over the course of these meetings was, unfortunately, not regarded by Wharton as a work of significance at the time. Rather, it was treated by its writer only as a learning tool, and not a serious creative exploit. After the conclusion of these meetings, Wharton says that “the copy-book containing my ‘exercise’ vanished forever” (293). For years the notebook containing the French version of Ethan Frome sat dormant in a drawer. In the meantime, Wharton wrote other more serious works, beginning her rise to literary fame, while the original story of Ethan Frome almost vanished from her memory. It was not until years later that she decided to revisit the old idea and begin writing the story again in English.
Interest in Ethan Frome was reawakened during her time spent one summer at the Mount—a landscape which became the center of the story’s themes. “During one of our summer sojourns at the Mount,” she says, “a distant glimpse of Bear Mountain brought Ethan back to my memory” (295). The following winter, back in Paris, Wharton wrote the story as it appears today, setting out to “draw life as it really was in the derelict mountain villages of New England” (295). A story begun strictly for exercise would go on to become one of the richest and most gratifying stories Wharton had ever written.
In attempting to paint New England the way it appears in Ethan Frome, Wharton claims to have “suddenly felt the artisan’s full control of his implements” (209). She experienced a sense of creative maturity (a coming of age, perhaps) when she completed the English version of Ethan Frome. In 1911 it was serialized by Charles Scribner’s Sons, and after its initial success it was published in hardback by Scribner’s the same year. The book would endure for ten years before being revised for a second edition by Scribner’s in 1922.
In her introduction to the 1922 edition of Ethan Frome, Wharton suggests that she felt such gratitude in writing the story because she was channeling a deeper more genuine realism than she had seen in other writers: “I had an uneasy sense that the New England of fiction bore little—except a vague botanical and dialectical—resemblance to the harsh and beautiful land as I had seen it” (v). Wharton felt that her imagery of “paintless wooden house-fronts of the long village street,” or “the isolated farm-houses on the neighboring hills” was more authentic than the romanticized conceptions of the New England landscape as written by her contemporaries and predecessors. Contrary to what Wharton had seen depicted in most fiction, she felt that the villages of Western Massachusetts were truly dark in nature: “grim places, morally and psychically.” Wharton had a vested passion in creating this vision of New England. It was a vision that she felt strongly about, because of the time she spent living within it, and the memories that she held there.
Wharton saw the oppressive cold and overwhelming snowfall of the Massachusetts winter as imprisoning, as isolating a person deep within a barren environment. The grim landscape represents a pollution of the home environment. Ethan’s barren farm that barely makes ends meet for him and the consequential loss of the home’s “L” symbolizes how the barren landscape strips the home of its vitality with each passing winter. The Frome farm is impoverished because of the lifeless landscape on which it stands, and this impoverishment also affects the self: all of the characters are a physical as well as a mental representation of the dead landscape. Wharton’s depiction suggests a duality of mind and environment in the setting of Ethan Frome, an environmental theme that connotes the emotional states of its characters.
Fear of isolation and inactivity was a point of anxiety in Wharton’s life, suggested throughout her biography with her irrational childhood fears, her constant appetite for travel, and her romantic difficulties. The story, along with being a creative climax for Wharton as an artist, is also significant in how deeply it signifies the emotional trauma that affected Wharton throughout her growth as a woman. It embodies a pessimistic sadness towards the home, and the chemistry of human companionship.
In his biography of Edith Wharton, R.W.B. Lewis suggests that “into no earlier work of fiction, not even The House of Mirth, had she poured such deep and intense private emotions” (308). Ethan Frome is an allegory of Wharton’s romantic life, one that focuses on her parents, her lovers, and her friends, and the emotional tensions that persisted among them. Rebecca Gould says that “the autobiographical dimension to Ethan Frome reveals how the writing process crystalizes experience and transmutes it into literary form in order to distill suffering” (417). Cynthia Griffin Wolff, as well, says that in Ethan Frome especially “the confluence of real world problems found direct expression in her work” (231). Wharton used the writing of Ethan Frome to do more than what she admits in her own primary material. The composition of Ethan Frome served Wharton as an intellectual landscape where she could express and come to terms with the feelings that she had for the familial relationships experienced throughout her lifetime.
Understanding the significant biographical events during and before the time of the story’s writing can help to explain why Wharton’s New England realism is as dark as it is, and why she wanted to write such a gloomy tale in comparison to the already-existing fiction of New England. Wharton wrote the tale as dark and as mortifying as it is because that is the nature of the emotions that informed it. Ethan Frome is a story—and expression—of the anguish that Wharton herself experienced at the hands of the unhealthy familial relationships that occurred during her childhood and as an adult. Reading it this way, and observing the results of the relationship dynamic as depicted in the story, can give a richer understanding of the biographical events that parallel it.
The deep and intense private emotions that inform Ethan Frome were formed first at the beginning of Wharton’s life, starting with the good parent-bad parent dynamic (Klein) in her adoring father George Frederick Jones, whom she lost young, and her harshly unaffectionate mother, Lucretia Jones. Wharton warmly recounts walking with her father in Fifth Avenue as one of her earliest feelings of womanhood, how it “was always an event in the little girl’s life to take a walk with her father”:
"and more particularly so today, because she had on her new winter bonnet, which was so beautiful (and so becoming) that for the first time she woke to the importance of dress, and of herself as a subject of adornment—so that I may date from that hour the birth of the conscious and feminine me in the little girl’s vague soul." (A Backward Glance 5)
This is different as compared to her mother, whom she remembers being “exaggeratedly scrupulous about the books [she] read” (5), never forgetting the cold and discouraging comment on young Edith’s first presentation of a story to her. This binary of good father and bad mother is configured into the dynamic Ethan faces before Mattie and Zeena. It represents how Wharton saw the toxic familial bonds that disrupt one’s ability to enjoy the other.
To elucidate the relationship between the author and the work, Ethan Frome can be read as manifest content of a dream, as discussed by Freud, and the biographical resemblance is the latent content of the dreamer. This perspective on the work is what most effectively reveals the connection between the author and the content. It is the suggestion of many that Wharton used the writing of Ethan Frome, more-so than any other story, to mentally work through the emotions stemming from her relationship with her parents, as well as the romantic men of her life. In writing Ethan Frome Wharton contemplated the familial relationship which she was the child of, and then the romantic relationships which she was the center of. Ethan Frome, then, is an especially significant story: it embodies a testament of Wharton’s emotional development, and the conflicting feelings she had about love, familial duty, passion, and desire.
Ferda Asya sees the kind of psychoanalytic reading that presents the story as Wharton’s contemplation of her relationship with her parents. To Asya, Wharton “unconsciously recreated camouflaged incidents and circumstances of her life in order to express, without guilt feelings, her genuine feelings for her parents” (24). The story is a dream where Wharton vets the suppressed feelings she had for her parents while growing up, and the ones that stayed with her throughout her adult life.
Ethan Frome is an allegory of familial relationships. Ethan represents the young Edith Jones, who is bound to the care of a cold and unaffectionate mother figure embodied in the character Zeena. Ethan finds solace in the interaction with another kinder and warmer individual: Mattie. The warmth that Ethan feels at the swaying of Mattie’s hair as she walks up the staircase is likened to the affection that Wharton took from her father in spite of her mother. Wharton’s reversal of the gender in this story is a point of interest, for it suggests, as Ferda Asya argues, an attempt to reconcile unresolved feelings that she had for her father. Mattie is a glimmer of light in an otherwise dark home environment. The Frome household is then an allegory of the Jones household that young Edith grew up in.
There is another frame to the manifest content of Ethan Frome, in which it is a more literal embodiment of Edith Wharton’s feelings towards her parents’ relationship with one another. It is not just a reminiscence of young Edith Jones speaking from behind the text of Ethan Frome—it is also the adult, reflecting upon herself, and how the two resemble each other. This gives the story a dual psychological viewpoint: From the perspective of the child watching her parents, Ethan can stand for George Frederick Jones, married to Zeena (or, Lucretia), the antithesis of his warmth and affection, and the witch standing between him—Mattie—and their harmonious love for one another. In this scenario, the rides spent picking Mattie up from church that Ethan savored so much can be likened to those walks in central park. They were harmonious situations for both, but were sadly short-lived once they arrived in the presence of the mother.
In A Feast of Words Cynthia Griffin Wolff reads Ethan Frome alongside Wharton’s mature life, involving the Frome family dynamic with Wharton’s relationship experiences, both platonic as well as romantic. Wolff points to what she calls a theme of “deux malades,” “the helpless invalids who were both seeking her care with such importunity” (401). These “two diseases” occurred in Wharton’s watching the decline and death of two important men of her life: first her husband Teddy Wharton, whom she formed distain for during their marriage, and then her close fiend Henry James. Both of their declines in mental and physical health are represented in the character of Zeena: a person wrought with a debilitating illness that distorts body and mind, turning them into malignant creatures whose own pain affects those around them.
Wharton’s marriage to Teddy Wharton was plagued with emotional strain. In A Backward Glance Wharton recounts his “neurasthenia” (326), or the manic-depressive episodes that he would suffer from, which went virtually unaddressed during his life. Today it is likely he would have been diagnosed with manic depression, but the state of modern psychology during Wharton’s time instead left Teddy undiagnosed and untreated. Wharton and Teddy had little in common already besides an appreciation of travel and a love for animals, so the marriage was already perceived as unfulfilling. Teddy’s neurotic fits must then have been another weight on Wharton’s emotional well-being, which found its way into the character of Zeena, and the “droning voice” (Ethan Frome 25) that fills the air of the Frome house.
Stuck in a painful, loveless, and unfulfilling marriage, Wharton eventually began an affair with London Times journalist Morton Fullerton, in search of an escape from her unending emotional strain. Carol J. Singley suggests that Wharton “composed” Ethan Frome “during a time of conflict between duty and passion” (108). From the perspective of Wharton’s marital difficulties, Ethan is Wharton herself. Ethan Frome tells the story of Wharton as she was stuck between a sickly and overbearing partner and an illicit lover. Whereas Teddy’s depressive episodes would form the ambience of illness and despair, Wharton reached to Fullerton to “taste the bliss of feeling” that Ethan finds in Mattie. Ethan Frome then becomes a story about an individual who is bound to a spouse through the sacred law of marriage, but whose spouse takes ill and ceases to be what they once were; instead the spouse is a deformed shadow of their former self. Like the diseased woman in Edgar Allan Poe’s short-story “Berenice” “disturbing even the very identity of her person” (333), the spouse that the person once cared for turns into a perpetual monster. Ethan perversely becomes attracted to Mattie. Seeking solace in an illicit affair, Ethan turns to Mattie to attain all that he cannot have with Zeena, just as Wharton did in her movement away from Teddy and toward Fullerton.
The conclusion of Wharton’s extramarital affairs is reflected in the conclusion of Ethan Frome as well. The tragic sleigh ride and the fate of Ethan and Mattie are likened to the way in which, despite Wharton’s romantic exploits, she never really experienced the fulfillment she sought for in a partner; not from Teddy, Morton, or even Henry James. The love affair was anything but enjoyable for Wharton, it was a sublimated struggle for desires that couldn’t be met by any man she went to. Teddy, as is known, was a source of constant stress and animosity; her friendship with James’ was fulfilling, until that too was wrought by disease; and her affair with Fullerton, while a reach for something more, did not equate to the bliss that Wharton felt she needed. Ironically, Wharton saw herself clinging helplessly to Fullerton, much as Teddy and James clung to her in their own emotional poverty. Sadly, Fullerton did not entirely reciprocate Wharton’s affection to the degree that she needed. She remarks in a letter to him on the “utter silence” and “utter indifference” with which she felt he regarded her emotions:
"You told me once I should write better for this experience of loving. I felt it to be so, & I come home so fired by the desire that my work should please you! But this incomprehensible silence, the sense of your utter indifference to everything that concerns me, has stunned me. It has come so suddenly…"
Emotional pleadings such as this one frame the tone of much of Wharton’s final letters to Fullerton. Singley points to the affair in her reading Ethan Frome as well, saying that “The unending bleakness of all three main characters’ lives reflects Wharton’s sense that she would never extricate herself from this romantic triangle” (108). And she never quite did find relief from the feelings experienced throughout the tumultuous affair. The triangle remained self-destructive until it met an eventual end.
Another relationship, albeit a platonic one, that affected Wharton with grief was that of her friendship with Henry James. At the end of his life James suffered from intestinal atrophy, coming on in his later years due to the poor diet and physical condition he accumulated throughout his life. His nervous system took serious damage from years of malnutrition, resulting in fits of depression that bordered on manic episodes. Wharton deeply empathized with James as she watched him deteriorate and slowly approach his death. What she took special note to was James’ own self-awareness of his impending demise, and the horror James felt during the ordeal. Wharton thought about what it was like to know that your body is dying, that your life is coming to an end, and you are trapped within your own broken physical frame. She elaborates: “Before James died he bore witness, in his own moving way, to the depth of his grief. … His devouring imagination was never at rest, and the agony was more than he could bear” (A Backward Glance 368). At the heart of Wharton’s contemplation of James’ disease is a fear of the disconnection between the body and the mind. Like Ethan and his debilitating “lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain” (Ethan Frome 3), or his inability to understand those newer details of the narrator’s chemistry textbook (“There were a few things in that book that I didn’t know the first word about” (16)). Like Ethan, James’ illness left him as “but the ruin of a man” (3); like Ethan, James could no longer live from the rich intellect and passionate soul that Wharton loved. He was something else, ruined and distorted by the fatal disease. His body became ravaged, and knowing this, he became the victim of his own impoverished mind. The destruction of his body caused the destruction of his very heart and soul.
The grim transformation of Ethan and Mattie at the end of the novel signifies Wharton’s entrapment within this emotional hell-storm. The irony of the situation was that, at the end-point of the affair, Wharton came to treat her lover Morton Fullerton much as Teddy and James had treated her: as needful and hungry for affection, but never appeasable. Cynthia Griffin Wolff remarks on this reversal of roles from exhausted care takerto helpless invalid: “The real horror, of course, is that she [Wharton] might seem to him [Morton Fullerton] what Henry James and Teddy Wharton now seemed to her—clinging, childlike, merely dependent” (235). This transition is reflected in the outcome of the sleigh crash: Ethan becomes to Zeena, and Mattie, what once caused him so much anger and pain.
Wharton may stand in the place of Ethan who, trying to run from the painful relationship with his sick wife, befriends Mattie Silver. But through Ethan’s attempt to love her, he only brings her into his painful lifestyle, much as Wharton’s depression—stemming from her need to distance herself from her husband—must have weighed on Fullerton. Mattie’s place at the very end is then a consideration by Wharton of what may have happened to Fullerton if she pulled him down with her. Ethan’s sad fate is testament as well to Wharton’s inability to ever escape or mend this emotional trauma.
Words like adultery and infidelity can be withheld from criticizing the actions of Ethan and Mattie (and just as well of Wharton and Fullerton) when the story is understood as a commentary on basic human relations. As a story about a person’s conflict between passion and social law, Ethan Frome challenges the notion of human connectedness, of human relation, in sight of these social laws.
Kenneth M. Price writes about Edith Wharton and Whitmanian comradeship in To Walt Whitman, America, and sees a strong connection between the two. Whitman’s pastoral romanticism in “Leaves of Grass” reconsiders the positioning of humankind in the world, and among his fellow men. Wharton observes Whitman’s deep consideration of when she sees him embracing basic human essence, imagining that human beings are but spears of grass that merely stand on a higher dialectical level of existence. In their work Whitman and Wharton each search for a humbler form of human connectedness not governed by social institution but by passion and feeling.
In considering human nature and human temporality so deeply, Wharton developed a fictive intention of her own, to search for, as Price posits it, “an altered sense of human connectedness—that would bring relations between men and women a new equality and depth of feeling” (47). From the voices of two artists who believed and knew that the social structures of their era were arbitrary, Wharton and Whitman bring humanity back down to its essence; their writings focus on the internal currents of a person’s heart while they struggle against the demands of their society. In Ethan Frome, then, one would suspect that Ethan, Mattie, and even Zeena, would have been able to find a more sensible resolution to their problems had they just forgotten about the expectations and regulations of their society.
The word at the root of this issue is “comradeship.” In a genteel society, there was a husband, and a wife, and no more. Ethan Frome is a story about what happens when that line becomes blurred, when the essence of wife, is no longer a wife, but rather something much less—and when the essence of friend, becomes something much more. But there is an area between the two definite notions: comrade. “Edith Wharton saw Whitman as a liberator of the psychically oppressed” (37), Price says, “a force who helped overthrow the burden of the genteel tradition.” A comrade was the social position—in Wharton’s mind—who could remedy the disparity that she saw between a husband and a friend. She rather argued for it, throughout her fiction, which tells of fruitful human relations that are thrawted because of some social law that prohibits it.
Comradeship—if not passionate love—may have been the thing Wharton was searching for in Morton Fullerton, in Henry James, and consequently what Ethan was reaching for in Mattie Silver. Comradeship takes human connection from a discussion of lawful matrimony, to a more platonic level of human relation. A comrade, in Wharton’s sense, may be a friend like Henry James, a constant confidant and sharer of the same fascinations. Perhaps more fulfilling than the gratification Wharton sought from Fullerton, this reach nonetheless by Wharton met a tragic end.
So not merely a depiction of tragedy, Ethan Frome also acts to renegotiate the parameters of human relation. It is through the vehicle of tragedy that the story asserts its point: that quality human relation is possible, but the current social structures make it nearly impossible. Whitman and Wharton argued to the same ends in their literature, it seems: Whitman wanted to humble man in sight of his world, and minimize human pride in sight of the great and omnipotent nature. No social structure, says Whitman, could ever supersede an aspect of human nature. Nature would always win the day. Wharton speaks directly to this issue of human relation and writes about instances where the human heart rises up against the arbitrary laws of its society.
In exploring the relationship between Edith Wharton’s personal life feelings and the story of Ethan Frome, other critics have looked at the text as an internal psychological representation of human feelings towards companionship, loss, and self-identity; others have looked at the landscape of Starkfield as a literal representation of the mind’s internal conditions, treating depictions of states of place as parallel to states of mind. This reading raises a discussion of how one’s internal mental processes affect their outward world view. What these ongoing discussions show is the depth of Ethan Frome as a deeply psychological tale rich in details that shed light on the human condition.
William Nesbitt and Melissa McFarland Pennell recognize the natural aesthetic of the town of Starkfield as directly related to the emotional conditions of the characters. Nesbitt says that “the cessation of activity and the sparseness of life in the external environment mirror Ethan’s internal, emotional climate as well” (161). Referring to the static and dead winter, Nesbitt sees a connection between the mind and the environment. Ethan Frome is “grave and inarticulate” and wears a “grave mien” wherever he goes. The dark and melancholy landscape then serves as a frame around Ethan’s dark figure. The title of Pennell’s article—“Frozen Lives”—runs parallel to this idea. In reading the “cold, inhospitable climate of Starkfield,” Pennell treats the sled crash at the end as Ethan’s attempt at a “Romantic escape in death” (1-2). Ethan felt death as the only escape because of how halted his life’s situation was. The dead inarticulateness of the land mirrors the stillness of Ethan’s emotional condition. The fact that death was the only escape from that world—both physically as well as emotionally—signifies the entrapment experienced at the levels of both body and mind.
The connection between body, mind, and environment can be carried further into the character construction. Tracy Wendt observes that “the characters’ representations are circumscribed through lack of education, finances, and communication reciprocated by their snowy, barren environment.” Wendt considers this environmental depiction a “rhetorical strategy” by Wharton, that “recast[s] the mental/emotional within physical terms to narrow her character’s psychological parameters.” “Environmental discourse” (155-6) as Wendt refers to Wharton’s composition pattern, is a way of deepening the content of her characters. It is tone setting to introduce the harsh environment before going into the complexes of the characters identities. As the character’s mentalities are explored throughout the tale, the aesthetic of the setting parallels the course of the story’s psychological themes.
Rebecca Gould and Ferda Asya, already mentioned, also connect the psychological atmospheres of Ethan Frome to Wharton’s life, reading the story as if it were an artifact of Wharton’s emotional trials. In two important works, Matters of Mind and Spirit, and “Calvinist Tortures in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome,” Carol J. Singley takes these psychological observations a step further, and considers how the story involves itself in spiritual philosophy. This reading takes the text of Ethan Frome from an allegory of emotion and mind to a statement of temporal philosophy. The bleak and unforgiving landscape of Starkfield and the tragedy within it is to Singley “a modernist allegory about irretrievably lost faith—in God, community, and self” (107). Singley attributes the bleakness of the story to Wharton’s “Calvinist sensibilities” that were channeled and heightened during her difficult emotional periods. The unemotional home environment that she knew in the form of her mother, the despair she felt after the loss of her father, and the other male relationships she had that were cursed with awkwardness, incompatibility, or sickness—Singley reads these instances as influencing an interest in Calvinist in Wharton’s world view.
It is easy now to see how the tenants of Calvinism are present in the story of Ethan Frome. Contextualizing Wharton’s Calvinism, Singley claims that the most intriguing aspects of the doctrine for Wharton in relation to Ethan Frome must have been
the abject sinfulness of human beings in the face of God’s grandeur, power, and love; the horror of hell and damnation in contrast with the glory of salvation; and the states of hope and despair that believers experienced as they alternately viewed themselves as damned or saved (163).
Unfortunately for Wharton, and apparently in Ethan Frome, is that Wharton’s perspective of the world in writing the story was vested in the latter end of those concepts. Ethan Frome is darkly deterministic, and such was what Wharton must have believed about life through the Calvinist doctrine. Ethan is so grave and inarticulate because he is destined to be so. Calvinism would suggest that a person is born with their fate already determined for them—much as Ethan was seemingly born into a lineage he was destined to follow. None of the Frome’s before him ever left Starkfield, and Ethan constantly considers when he will earn his eternal place among the rest of the Frome gravestones. There is no life beyond this possibility. It is written for him, and that is what it shall be.
The outcome of Ethan and Mattie’s attempted suicide is also largely Calvinist because of its deterministic aspects. Ethan lacks agency and remains inarticulate throughout the entire story. On the psychological level the tragedy is a representation of his feebleness as a man, but on the philosophical level it is Wharton’s statement about life’s inevitably negative determinism. Since Ethan was destined from birth to live out his life in Starkfield and follow in the footsteps of his crippled and sickly relatives, there is nothing that he could do to alter this fate. His life is a play on the kind of dramatic irony seen in Oedipus, or Macbeth, where in trying to emend or prevent his fate, Ethan merely ends up causing—and thus fulfilling—the grim prophesy. This is Calvinistic in the powerlessness that it connotes for the individual in light of their life circumstances. It is the ultimately negative view that one cannot change or alter their situation. Any human drive towards salvation or atonement will be met with a demise.
The bleak hopelessness depicted in Ethan Frome is Wharton’s interpretation of Calvinism. The dogma itself merely calls for predestination of life prior to a person ever being born. It is Wharton who adopts the concept and constantly depicts life and its events from this negative sense of Calvinist predestination. It is in Wharton’s Calvinism that life is always inclined towards hopelessness, a lack of atonement, and oppressed desires. The story of Ethan Frome, and the author’s own temporal outlook as embodied within it, are so darkly Calvinistic because of the feelings that informed it. Ethan Frome is a story of Wharton’s emotional and romantic life, but also a story of her spiritual coming of age, her understanding of life as an individual of her era. Ethan Frome is an embodiment of how Wharton felt about the experiences that shaped her; sadly, “No other fiction is so desolate in setting, theme, and tone,” says Singley, “because at no other time did Wharton wrestle so intensely with Calvinist issues such as salvation and damnation, free will versus fate and predestination, and the proper balance between pleasure and sacrifice” (178). Ethan Frome tells the story of Wharton’s personal battles with issues of passion, love, desire, all occupied within complicated networks of ambivalence. Even before, during, and after writing Ethan Frome, Wharton never forgot about the feelings that informed it. It is sad to say that Wharton typically had a melancholic outlook on life, as if it were destined for more hardship than pain, more suffering than happiness: “If I ever have children,” Wharton writes in her autobiography, “I shall deprive them of every pleasure, just to prepare them for the inevitable unhappiness of life!”
Damiano Consilvio
2017
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