Ethan Frome, novella that is perhaps the best-known work by American author Edith Wharton. First published in 1911, Ethan Frome is a departure from Wharton’s other works, which take place among the upper echelons of society, in that it is set in an impoverished New England farming community.
The story begins as a first-person account by a nameless narrator who is spending the winter in the fictional town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. He begins asking questions about a tall, taciturn man with a scarred face and a pronounced limp and is told that the man is Ethan Frome and that he had been injured in a “smashup” some 20 years earlier. The narrator later hires Frome as a driver, and during a snowstorm he spends the night at Frome’s farmhouse. At this point, the account becomes a third-person narrative telling Ethan Frome’s story.
Ethan had married Zeena, who had helped him care for his mother, after his mother’s death. Though he had intended to sell the farm and move to town with her, Zeena quickly falls ill, making that dream impossible to achieve. Zeena’s orphaned cousin Mattie comes to help care for Zeena, and Ethan soon develops romantic feelings toward Mattie. After going to see a new doctor, Zeena informs Ethan that she is terribly ill and has hired a woman to serve as her nurse in place of Mattie. Ethan is distraught at the prospect of losing Mattie, who reciprocates his feelings. He considers eloping with Mattie but concludes that he cannot. He insists, over Zeena’s objections, on driving Mattie to the train when it is time for her to leave. They decide to go sledding together before going to the train station, and then Mattie proposes that they purposely sled into a tree so that they can die together. The crash, however, fails to kill them.
The story returns to the present, with the narrator stepping into the kitchen to find that Mattie is now an invalid living there under Zeena’s care. A victim of his own indecision as well as of circumstances, Ethan remains trapped in a situation of emotional isolation and hopelessness.
Ethan stands at the heart of the story; his withered personality is the bitter fruit of a harsh environment and an inward-looking community. He is a man of hidden depths who intuits an abundant reality beneath the surface of prosaic life, and whose sociability is granted no outlet in an isolated community. An interplay between external environment and inner psyche is dramatized here; the inarticulacy of the characters is central to the novel, which is framed by the words of a narrator whose knowledge of the history he recounts is incomplete. The reader is left with disconcerting questions about moral choice and agency, the role of environment in determining behavior, and the conflict between social mores and individual passions. Ethan Frome focuses primarily on the suffering of its eponymous protagonist, but it also depicts the social conditions that enable the formation and power of the manipulative Zeena.