Reading Order
Ethan Frome Reading Order
Ethan Frome (1911) by Edith Wharton is a short novel — more a novella — about a taciturn New England farmer named Ethan Frome, told by a narrator who has pieced together Ethan's story from fragments of conversation and observation during a winter visit to the fictional village of Starkfield, Massachusetts. Ethan is trapped in a loveless marriage to the older, sickly, hypochondriac Zeena, who has taken in her cousin Mattie Silver as a household helper. Ethan falls in love with Mattie; Zeena perceives this and arranges to send Mattie away; and in the moments before Mattie's departure, Ethan and Mattie attempt a suicide pact by sledding into an elm tree that will end their lives and free them from their situation. They survive, horribly maimed. Wharton's novel is one of the most perfectly constructed in American fiction — spare, cold, and precisely organized, structured around the contrast between the winter landscape's beauty and the human misery it contains.
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Ethan Frome (1911)
Complete Ethan Frome Book List
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Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton·1911
Ethan Frome — Frequently Asked Questions
Who is the narrator of Ethan Frome and how do we learn the story?
The narrator is an unnamed engineer who has come to Starkfield, Massachusetts, on business during the winter and who becomes curious about Ethan Frome — a striking, ruined figure whom he sees in the village and who gives him a ride during a snowstorm. The narrator pieces together Ethan's story from the brief conversations he has had with various villagers and from what he observes during the one night he spends at the Frome farmhouse. The main body of the novel — the flashback to the winter twenty years earlier when the catastrophe happened — is presented as the narrator's reconstruction, explicitly identified as imaginative completion of fragmentary evidence. This framing device is one of the novel's most admired formal achievements: it creates a gap between the narrator's limited knowledge and the full story, and it positions the reader as a co-reconstructor of events.
What is the 'smash-up' in Ethan Frome?
The 'smash-up' is the toboggan accident that Ethan and Mattie engineer as a suicide pact in the moments before Mattie is to be sent away by Zeena. They have taken a final slide down a hill on a borrowed sled; at the bottom of the hill is an elm tree, and Ethan steers the sled into it deliberately. They survive — both seriously injured, Mattie paralyzed, Ethan crippled — and the epilogue shows them twenty years later, both living with Zeena in the farmhouse, Mattie having become a querulous invalid and Zeena having become her caretaker. The smash-up is the novel's central structural irony: the attempt to escape their situation has permanently fixed them in it.
How does Ethan Frome compare to Wharton's other novels?
Ethan Frome is atypical among Wharton's novels — it is set in rural New England rather than in the New York upper class that is Wharton's primary social world, it is written in a spare, stripped prose style rather than the more expansive prose of The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence, and it deals with poverty and physical privation rather than social constraint and economic anxiety. Wharton has said that she wrote the novel partly as a reaction to what she felt was the sentimental treatment of New England local color in the fiction she had read — she wanted to show the 'granite outcroppings' of New England rural life, the bleakness and isolation that the sentimental tradition prettified. The result is a novel that feels unlike Wharton's other work while also being entirely characteristic of her interest in trapped protagonists and inescapable social or psychological predicaments.
Is Ethan Frome based on a true story?
Ethan Frome was inspired in part by a real sledding accident that occurred in Lenox, Massachusetts, in 1904, in which five young people sliding down a steep hill in the center of town collided with a lamp-post. One of the victims, a young woman named Hazel Crosby, died; another was badly injured. Wharton lived in Lenox at the time and knew people who were involved in or witnessed the accident. She transformed the incident significantly — changing the context from a group accident to an attempted suicide pact, changing the survivors' fates to a much darker outcome — but the local event is the documented seed of the novel.
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