Suicide
Ethan Frome was pure straight-line-down hopeless tragedy. Ethan is trapped by his farm work and responsibilities to his helpless women, then condemned by an impossible love affair and related attempt at lovers’ suicide to an existence which is the punishment for an obviously unreasonable dream (1998). On a miserable New England farm Ethan Frome is trapped by his work and his responsibilities to the women of his family. After a hopeless love affair undertaken to salve the pain of his empty marriage, Ethan and his lover attempt suicide. Ethan finally realizes that Zeena is the obstacle that has blocked all of his goals (for instance, becoming an engineer and moving to the city; she divides him from “his kind” that is, from men and engineers, from the narrator. To Ethan Frome “all the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way” Zeena’s face appears one more time to block Frome from his final goal. In the narrator’s vision Frome and Mattie decide to commit suicide because they cannot bear the idea of parting. As they speed down the hill in a sled aiming for a tree, Frome swerves momentarily because he suddenly imagines the barrier of his wife’s image: “Suddenly his wife’s face with its twisted horrible lineaments thrust itself between him and his goal and he made an instinctive movement to brush it aside” This apparition of Zeena thwarts the suicide, leaving Frome and Mattie crippled to live out a death in life.
Surrounded by images that recall and repeat the images that Frome has seen framed throughout the narrative vision, Frome and Mattie decide to kill themselves. After Zeena decides to send Mattie away, Mattie fears a future in which she will be replaced by a new servant girl, just as she had seemed to replace Zeena.
Suicide is not and will never be the right option to solve Frome and Mattie’s problem. They just made their life more miserable. After the unsuccessful suicide attempt they just gave Zeena an opportunity to put barriers on their relationships There are other choices that Frome and Mattie should have made. The first option is Frome to tell Zeena that he is not the same man who married her anymore. That so many things had happened and they already outgrow each other. Frome should have been man enough to tell his wife that he is in love with Mattie, her cousin and they want to live together. Zeena should face this as a mature adult and should have moved. The suicide attempt also made her life locked down in taking care of two invalids that betrayed her. On the part of Mattie, she should have talked to her cousin and asked for forgiveness and tell her that she had an affair with his husband. Whatever, the confessions resulted to, both Frome and Mattie should have faced the consequences.
Winter Loneliness
All the way through the novel, the characters and setting reflect each other. Starkfield is overwhelmed by long winters in which all covered with thick, freezing layer of snow. At the same time, Ethan “looks like a member of the voiceless miserable countryside, a manifestation of its ice-covered despair, with all that was humid and responsive in him swift bounce beneath the facade.”
Winter is the unproductive time of year, when nothing nurtures, like the marriage of Ethan and Zeena, they do not have a child. Zeena is deficient of the freshness that is related to fertility: her breasts are drawn, her face is scrawny, her skin pale. In the novel, winter has been used to symbolize everything that’s happening to Ethan, especially when his mother died. Winter has been characterized as vivacity of the climate, with its burning blue skies and sparkling white snow, with “the numbness of the neighborhood”. The community remains sluggish and retard. In the novel, during winter, the people in the Starkfield were force to surrender. Winter is always connected to Ethan, the frozenness of the snow is associated with his numbness, isolation linked to his choice to be alone and the snow’s rigidity is connected to his deadened and defeated strength as a person.
Winter is also interlinked to his marriage to Zeena, the girl who took care of Ethan’s mother. Ethan does not want to spend winter alone, after his mother died, he asked Zeena to marry her. Ethan does not want to splurge a winter by himself in the quiet farmhouse. However, right after Zeena too falls silent, her coldness is becoming an annex of the painkilling influence Ethan had frightened. This is where the famous line came from “ if his mother died during the spring he would not have asked Zeena to marry her. Simply because winter also brings depression to people living alone, spring is associated to the beauty of life. If he have not married Zeena, yes it is true that his life would have been different; however, it cannot be a guarantee that he can marry Mattie.
Ethan Frome, the novel’s central character, is described to be as witnessing the too many winters in Starkfield. As the novel develops, the reader, and the narrator, begins to appreciate more deeply the connotation of this statement. Even though a freezing mood grasps Ethan Frome from the start even the name Starkfield summons imageries of northern winters the speaker be grateful for the winter’s extra attractiveness at first. On the other hand, he ultimately realizes that Starkfield and its populace use up much of each year in what sums to a condition of blockade by the basics. Ethan Frome proposes that vulnerable souls like Ethan become obscured emotionally underneath the winter their determination and very sense of self exhausted by the cruel power of the six-month-long cold season. Physical environment is distinguished as fate, and the chilly air of the place appears to have leaked into the Starkfield residents’ very bones.
Starkfield
Ethan tried to run away Starkfield; when he was younger, he wished to leave his family farm and work as an engineer in a larger town. Even though Zeena and scarcity are both forces that keep Ethan from satisfying his dream, the novel again and again places the climate as a main obstruction to both Ethan and his neigbours.
Ethan Frome hates Starkfield very much because of its being sluggish and very long winter, Zeena had always been what Starkfield called ‘sickly,’ and Frome had to admit that, if she were as ailing as she believed, she needed the help of a stronger arm than the one which lay so lightly in his during the night walks to the farm ( 1998). Mattie had no natural turn for house-keeping, and her training had done nothing to remedy the defect. She was quick to learn, but forgetful and dreamy, and not disposed to take the matter seriously. Ethan had an idea that if she were to marry a man she was affectionate of the inactive instinct would wake, and her pies and biscuits become the pride of the county; but domesticity in the abstract did not interest her. At first she was so awkward that he could not help laughing at her; but she laughed with him and that made them better friends (1998). He did his best to extra her unskilled efforts, getting up earlier than usual to light the kitchen fire, carrying in the wood overnight, and neglecting the mill for the farm that he might help her about the house during the day. He even crept down on Saturday nights to scrub the kitchen floor after the women had gone to bed; and Zeena, one day, had surprised him at the churn and had turned away silently, with one of her queer looks. Well, there two several angles why Ethan chose to stay to Starkfield with Zeena. First, he had learned to live a life with Zeena in Starkfield. She had helped her a lot in Starkfield. She gave her company during the downside of his life especially when his mother died. Another possible reason is that Ethan had learned in some ways to love Zeena.
The Narrator
Ethan Frome is the only one of Wharton’s novels with a first-person narrator, but she uses the technique in a number of her short stories, and when she does, the narrator is almost always male (1998). These male narrators are educated bachelors with professional careers, outsiders who are socially and intellectually superior to the characters they describe. The main narrator of Ethan Frome is an unnamed male engineer who visits the town of Starkfield twenty-four years after the tragic events of the novel have taken place. He has come to work at the electric power-house at Corbury Junction, but a carpenter’s strike ties him down to Starkfield for a long winter, where he comes to understand the deadly hypnotic pull of isolation and exhaustion, the chill that destroys initiative and even desire.
The narrator gets the story ‘bit by bit, from various people’, but ultimately gives us his own ‘vision’ of the past, as he pieces it together from hearsay, his experience at the Frome farm, and his own imagination. It is marked by silences, hints, and ellipses inviting the reader to fill in the blanks, especially the extended ellipsis that marks the transition between the narrator’s entrance to Ethan Frome’s kitchen, and the rebuilding of the tragedy of twenty-four years before ( 1994).
The technique of using the first person point of view was Wharton’s success. It helps the readers to understand Ethan Frome easily because it allows the reader to go inside the characters minds. But it is not necessary.
The novel begins with him, begins insistently and obtrusively ( 1998).
“I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happen in such cases, each time it was a different story.
If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade; and you must have asked who he was.
It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp.”
It is a decidedly unusual way to open a fiction. Wharton’s techniques suggest that she may have had an unusually literary self-consciousness. Second, a focus on the narrator for however intricate the story is, however compelling narrator’s vision, it is the narrator’s reaction that must be deemed the ultimate “subject” in the novel ( 1998).
In the novel there is a “real subject” who is generally assumed to begin. An amazing discovery awaits us: the man whom we come to know as the young Ethan Frome is no more than a section of the narrator’s imagination. Wharton’s method of description leaves no doubt. We are not consented to believe that the narrator is recounting a history of something that actually happened;
Certainly he demands it. It is his story, ultimately his “vision” of Ethan Frome that we will get. His vision is as good as any other so he persuasively assures us at the beginning for “each time it was a different story, and therefore his story has as much claim to truth as any other. And yet, he is a nervous fellow (1998). The speech pattern is totally unlike Wharton’s own narrative style short sentences, jagged prose rhythms, absolutely no sense of ironic control over the language, no distance from it.
Foreshadowing
Wharton had used numerous foreshadowing in the story. The prologue provides to foreshadow what might have become Ethan. Ethan’s appearance at the end of this prologue shows the he tried very hard to avoid in the novel a tragic ending. In order to justify this prologue, there is a need to quote from the novel “He looks as if he was dead and in hell now. Ethan’s world is dark despair after the accident. He realizes that there is no escape from Starkfield and the harsh reality of the dead winters (1998). The foreshadowing also helped Wharton to describe Ethan’s hopelessness. There were contrasting images of cold, dark, winter and light, warm spring, help create sharply contrasting portraits of two women of Ethan
The ending of the novel is unexpected because Zeena opted to take care of Ethan and Mattie when they become invalid after the suicide attempt. Even if she knows that the two is having an affair. A typical would have left his husband with his lover and will not take care of them or Zeena will just take care of her husband and abandon her cousin Mattie (1994). The novel ended during winter, the sun faded and snow prevails. This symbolizes Ethan’s life and how miserable and lonely the life of these three characters will be after the suicide attempt.
The technique only proves that Wharton can be considered as a modernist. Furthermore, modernism also involves a rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist designs and a rejection, in large part, of formal aesthetic theories, in favor of spontaneity and discovery in creation. Lastly, for Lesch modernism encompasses
Wharton accordingly illustrated that modernism tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history, These include the view that modernism put an emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing and an emphasis on how seeing takes place, rather than on what is perceived. This perception can be seen on stream-of-consciousness writings. Another view is that modernism include a movement away from the apparent objectivity provided by omniscient third-person narrators, fixed narrative point of view, and clear-cut moral positions. It also involves a blurring of distinctions between genres that poetry seems more biopic in version and prose seems more poetic.
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