Ethan Frome

by Edith Wharton

bit by bit,

you

Starkfield,

Stark field. Straightforward meaning to the name.

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It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the "natives" were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed:

Natives to Starkfield?

"He's looked that way ever since he had his smash–up; and that's twenty–four years ago come next February,"

addressed to Mrs. Zenobia—or Mrs. Zeena–Frome, and usually bearing conspicuously in the upper left–hand corner the address of some manufacturer of patent medicine and the name of his specific.

His wife gets regular medicine

also with a druggist's label on it—which

He looks as if he was dead and in hell now!"

"Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away."

"Somebody had to stay and care for the folks.

"Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters."

But when winter shut down on Starkfield and the village lay under a sheet of snow perpetually renewed from the pale skies, I began to see what life there—or rather its negation—must have been in Ethan Frome's young manhood.

strike

Context

I chafed at first, and then, under the hypnotising effect of routine, gradually began to find a grim satisfaction in the life.

One would have supposed that such an atmosphere must quicken the emotions as well as the blood; but it seemed to produce no change except that of retarding still more the sluggish pulse of Starkfield. When I had been there a little longer, and had seen this phase of crystal clearness followed by long stretches of sunless cold; when the storms of February had pitched their white tents about the devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their support; I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its six months' siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter.

War metaphor

how could any combination of obstacles have hindered the flight of a man like Ethan Frome?

The question thenovel will answer

It was clear that the Varnum fortunes were at the ebb, but the two women did what they could to preserve a decent dignity; and Mrs. Hale, in particular, had a certain wan refinement not out of keeping with her pale old–fashioned house.

it was only that the accident of a finer sensibility and a little more education had put just enough distance between herself and her neighbours to enable her to judge them with detachment.

but on the subject of Ethan Frome I found her unexpectedly reticent.

All the dwellers in Starkfield, as in more notable communities, had had troubles enough of their own to make them comparatively indifferent to those of their neighbours; and though all conceded that Ethan Frome's had been beyond the common measure, no one gave me an explanation of the look in his face which, as I persisted in thinking, neither poverty nor physical suffering could have put there.

I had been told that Frome was poor, and that the saw–mill and the arid acres of his farm yielded scarcely enough to keep his household through the winter; but I had not supposed him to be in such want as Harmon's words implied, and I expressed my wonder.

but his folks ate up most everything, even then, and I don't see how he makes out now. Fust his father got a kick, out haying, and went soft in the brain, and gave away money like Bible texts afore he died. Then his mother got queer and dragged along for years as weak as a baby; and his wife Zeena, she's always been the greatest hand at doctoring in the county. Sickness and trouble: that's what Ethan's had his plate full up with, ever since the very first helping."

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence.

Connected to the land. Extension of the land.

"There are things in that book that I didn't know the first word about," he said. I wondered less at his words than at the queer note of resentment in his voice. He was evidently surprised and slightly aggrieved at his own ignorance. "Does that sort of thing interest you?" I asked. "It used to." "There are one or two rather new things in the book: there have been some big strides lately in that particular line of research." I waited a moment for an answer that did not come; then I said: "If you'd like to look the book through I'd be glad to leave it with you." He hesitated, and I had the impression that he felt himself about to yield to a stealing tide of inertia; then, "Thank you—I'll take it," he answered shortly.

Such tastes and acquirements in a man of his condition made the contrast more poignant between his outer situation and his inner needs,

had apparently driven him too deeply into himself for any casual impulse to draw him back to his kind.

plaintive ugliness. The black wraith of a deciduous creeper flapped from the porch, and the thin wooden walls, under their worn coat of paint, seemed to shiver in the wind that had risen with the ceasing of the snow.

"The house was bigger in my father's time: I had to take down the 'L,' a while back,"

Deminished. A life in decline

I saw then that the unusually forlorn and stunted look of the house was partly due to the loss of what is known in New England as the "L": that long deep–roofed adjunct usually built at right angles to the main house, and connecting it, by way of storerooms and tool–house, with the wood–shed and cow–barn. Whether because of its symbolic sense, the image it presents of a life linked with the soil, and enclosing in itself the chief sources of warmth and nourishment, or whether merely because of the consolatory thought that it enables the dwellers in that harsh climate to get to their morning's work without facing the weather, it is certain that the "L" rather than the house itself seems to be the centre, the actual hearth–stone of the New England farm. Perhaps this connection of ideas, which had often occurred to me in my rambles about Starkfield, caused me to hear a wistful note in Frome's words, and to see in the diminished dwelling the image of his own shrunken body.

side–tracked

Out of the way. Far from society

that.

Because they are far from town

stage

Stage coach?

to get down to the gate most days to see him.

Gave her a reason to move about

But after the trains begun running nobody ever come by...

No need for a stage coach. Better transportation. Who gets left behind when technology afvances? Cp. The book Ethan boirrowed.

mother never could get it through her head what had happened, and it preyed on her right along till she died."

Stuck in the past.

the old veil of reticence.

to my inexperienced eye

Foreshadowing

But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind,

horse's side ticking like a clock under my hand.

and behind the door I heard a woman's voice droning querulously.

Frome's wife introduced through voice first

the droning voice grew still…

had put a premature end to Ethan's studies;

made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.

Unfulfilled intellectual

straight

This must be before the accident?

communion. He had always been more sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty. His unfinished studies had given form to this sensibility and even in his unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful persuasion.