Morality, Life, and Endurance – Ethan Frome
by Debra H. Goldstein
Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Age of Innocence, is best known for her many works that addressed the lives and behaviors of the “Gilded Age.” These novels and short stories reflect her own high societal upbringing. As engaging and educating as those pieces are, it is her 1911 novella, Ethan Frome, that deals with the pain of everyday life and the enduring impact of moral decisions that I find more intriguing.
The story is simple. A male narrator finds himself, because of business obligations, stuck for the winter in Wharton’s imaginary town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. Ethan Frome, a man with a severe limp, drives the narrator to work each day. After the narrator discovers that Frome’s limp was the result of an accident twenty-four years earlier, the story flashes back to that time in Frome’s life.
We learn that Frome is married to Zeena, an irascible, sickly woman. Although Frome and Zeena don’t have much money, they take in his wife’s cousin, Mattie. Ethan and Mattie fall in love. Although it is never revealed whether Zeena knows of their relationship, she announces that because of her failing health her doctor recommended hiring a live-in maid and that as the maid will be arriving soon, Mattie must leave.
Devastated by this news, Ethan and Mattie consider running away, but Ethan can’t go through with the would-be swindle of a customer to get the money they will need. Instead, the lovers go sledding. After the first run, they make a pact to die together by steering their sled into a giant elm tree. Unfortunately, their plan goes awry. Ethan is left with a permanent limp and Mattie is paralyzed.
The story jumps back to current times, with the narrator being forced by a blizzard to spend the night in the Frome’s home. He is the first stranger, in more than twenty years, to enter the house where Zeena, Mattie, and Ethan still live together. What he observes is that Zeena has become the caretaker whose everyday existence balances Mattie’s now cantankerous personality and how Ethan must navigate between the two.
Without needing to be the length of a novel, Wharton manages in Ethan Frome to convey the themes of morality, the way life can change in a moment, and endurance. Her work is powerful and not one to be easily forgotten.