Edith Wharton’s 1911 novella Ethan Frome is a tale of the rural poor, set in the fictional town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. Wharton is known for her upper class New York novels, but lived for ten years in her home called “The Mount” in Lenox, Western Massachusetts, which quieter country residence supplied the model for the “white earth” and “metallic dome overhead” evoked in Ethan Frome. It’s a very simple story, made vivid by the relationship between character and environment.
There are only really three characters: the titular farmer and part time driver, his wife Zeena (Zenobia), and her cousin, Mattie Silver, whom they have hired to help with the housework. Zeena is chronically ill, at least according to her selected doctors, and Ethan falls in love with the lively younger woman. Wharton crams the love triangle into her typically claustrophobic interiors, “one of those lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier.” But Ethan and Mattie are outdoorsy, snow-bedraggled types, with passions which forced together by the hearth become unbearable. They have no affections for anyone else, no real continuity from family or friendship outside the house. In her introduction to the work Wharton outright identifies them with the “outcroppings of slate that nuzzled up through the snow like animals pushing out their noses to breathe.” They get a vision of a kind of freedom near the end, and there’s a lot of heavy breathing, but it can only lead them back under. Zeena has some inkling of what their feelings are, and despite her infirmity, she is consummate mistress of the house; she finds “oblique ways of attracting attention to the girl’s inefficiency”, and threatens to have Mattie replaced. In her impossible demands on Ethan, she resembles the manipulative hypochondriac Marie St. Clare from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but we learn too that she nursed with great care her mother in law, the elder Mrs. Frome, during the final years. She was brought in as nurse before Ethan’s proposal, and he suspects that if his mother’s death had only occurred in the Spring, rather than the vicious mid-winter, he could have faced solitude, and not made that offer.
The colder part of the year in Starkfield is called a “six month siege”, and it is understood that anyone with much ambition, romantic or professional, has left town. But the place has, yes, stark beauty, as when “Slowly the the rim of the rainy vapours caught fire and burned away, and a pure moon swung into the blue.” Much as Ethan wishes to abscond with some borrowed money, taking Mattie with him, their love surely won’t survive transit. So the tale is less tragic in the common sense, more in the proper. It is the very situation, stuck in the landscape, which constitutes their relationship: “Now, in the bright morning air, her face still before him. It was part of the sun’s red and of the pure glitter of the snow.” One evening, Zeena is staying over at her Aunt’s in Bettsbridge to see a new doctor. Ethan and Mattie are left to dine together, and in recalling her to the kitchen he discovers his command over her, but the feeling can only be compared, clumsily, to something in his own experience of Starkfield: “Except when he was steering a big log down the mountain to his mill he had never known such a thrilling sense of mastery.” In a later kitchen scene she is doing the dishes, and he has a more charming vision of “the steam from the hot water beading her forehead and tightening her rough hair into little brown rings like the tendrils on the traveller’s joy.” It’s as much about the intimacy of the walks home from the church dances (where Mattie had been properly introduced) as the light Ethan can see under Mattie’s door across the hallway. On the way to the village, “Every yard of the road was alive with Mattie’s presence, and there was hardly a branch against the sky or a tangle of brambles on the bank in which some bright shred of memory was not caught.” They can’t be everything to each other just anywhere; it is Starkfield or nowhere.
Ethan and Mattie may be trapped, but the difficulty of their station brings something like empathy out of the scenery. A fallacy maybe, or just the appearance of things to a half deranged mind, but when she speculates, painfully for her, that he might want her to leave the Frome household, “The cry was balm to his warm wound. The iron heavens seemed to melt and rain down sweetness.” Later, with Mattie pushed out by Zeena, and now almost time to say goodbye, the road dips into a hollow, and “as they descended the darkness descended with them, dropping down like a black veil from the heavy hemlock boughs.” Mother nature knows when her children need a little privacy.
But after the compact made by the pair, and the surprise which also won’t be narrated here, once-compassionate nature betrays them by veiling them in confusion; the hour arrives “when the last clearness from the upper sky is merged with the rising night in a blur that disguises landmarks and falsifies distances.” Or it may be that underneath Ethan’s audacity in agreeing to that compact, he is all uncertainty and fear, with the night sky changing to produce the corresponding visual effect. Whether the reader concludes that this obscurity benefits Ethan and Mattie or not depends on how special they are understood to be.
We learn little of the other villagers, but the unnamed narrator who frames the entire story through his acquaintanceship with Ethan decades later tells us that he “had been struck by the contrast between the vitality of the climate and the deadness of the community.” Mattie, whose hair was “soft yet springy, like certain mosses on warm slopes,” was certainly vital enough in the earlier days. And Ethan, with the “careless powerful look he had” even at the later date, the same. The two are too alive for their cramped circumstances, too sensitive, maybe, but it’s nature and circumstance which have formed them to fit ill; they haven’t been created and dropped into the wrong place at the wrong time. On their walks back to the farm, they look into the transfiguring mirror Wharton has designed for them. Ethan does the pointing and talking, holding Mattie “entranced before a ledge of granite thrusting up through the fern while he unrolled the huge panorama of the ice age, and the long dim stretches of succeeding time.” They share this sight in a kind of self-knowing rapture; they can see themselves, and their way past (and into the same faint future), but it’s an unending age which holds no history or lineage connecting them to their betters or elders, nor any promise for them and their own bond.