This is a novel of cold and reflections of the cold. There is the surface and the sub-surface, “inner needs” and “outer situation” (8), the desolate landscape of the soul and the desolate landscape of winter, and and each doubles the other. Chill is heaped on chill, in an endless winter, the same as all other winters, all inexorable, silent, and deadening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps the most succinct analysis of Ethan Frome’s fate comes from the novel’s garrulous coachmen, Harmon Gow, “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters” (2-3). To no little extent, the villain of this tale is the landscape and its influences, its bitterness, the “hypnotizing effect of [its] routine” (3)\u2014the inexorable will of winter to penetrate and reproduce itself in all it touches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The lives of the Frome household are grimly doubled outside the house, in the “shaded knoll where, enclosed in a low fence, the Frome grave-stones slanted at crazy angles through the snow” (26). The novel ends with Mrs. Hale’s comment, “I don’t see there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard” (99), an insight that reverberates quietly and insistently throughout the novel. Ethan himself resonates with it, as he looks at the gravestones with full realization of their reflective power. In their silence, they speak to him, and he to them, about the possibility of change:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nEthan looked at them curiously. For years that quiet company had mocked his restlessness, his desire for change and freedom. “We never got away\u2014how should you?” seemed to be written on every headstone; and whenever he went in or out of his gate he thought with a shiver: “I shall just go on living here till I join them.” (26)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Ethan’s “living” was a mode of intensifying withdrawal and silence. His early hope of escape at school failed him, and he was propelled into his desolate spiral of being. By nature, Ethan is “grave and inarticulate,” even before the misfortunes of experience and landscape produced their doubles in him. But there are pointings toward other possibilities in the brief, fleeting vision of Ethan at school:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThere was in him a slumbering spark of sociability which the long Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished. By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in others and was warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse. At Worcester, though he had the name of keeping to himself and not being much of a hand at good time, he had secretly gloried in being clapped on the back and hailed as “Old Ethe” or “Old Stiff”; and the cessation of such familiarities had increased the chill of his return to Starkfield.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There the silence had deepened about him year by year. (37)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
One might say, with sardonic whimsy, that the doubling theme of Ethan Frome points to some moralistic exploration of the ill effects of the “double-cross” of infidelity. But this is not a novel to condemn the love that grows in this barren environment. The tender romance of Ethan and Mattie is delicate to excruciating extremes. The two kiss, and there are satisfactions there, but most of this romance is left to the ethereal realm of possibility (and impossibility):<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n. . . all their intercourse [pun intended?] had been made up of such inarticulate flashes, when they seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the wintry woods . . . .
\n(84)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\nBut there are no butterflies in winter, certainly not in a Starkfield winter. Even so, the doubling theme re-doubles back to something positive in the context of Mattie and Ethan’s love. The height\u2014or depth\u2014of their love is conveyed in terms of reflecting back\u2014echoing\u2014<\/em>lover-to-lover and lover-within-lover:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nShe had an eye to see and an ear to hear: he could show her things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of feeling that all he imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at will. (16-17)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
One of the more chilling echoes (in this most wintry novel) occurs the night of Ethan and Mattie’s “date,” they’re one night together. Ethan’s anticipation for the evening can only but mildly match the reader’s, and Wharton’s description of Ethan’s approach to Mattie is tantalizing for its delays and complications. The narration here is at once archetypal<\/em> (the “expectant lover,” who must court ritualistically, must practice restraint, and must follow proprieties despite the motives calling for intense and sudden action), suspenseful <\/em>(is Mattie there?), passionate<\/em> (Ethan, locked out, “rattled the handle violently”), and, most of all, eerily foreshadowing<\/em> of the most poignant and ultimate doubling of the story, the doubling of Zeena’s soul into Mattie:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nHe reached the kitchen-porch and turned the door-handle; but the door did not yield to his touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Startled at finding it locked he rattled the handle violently; then he reflected that Mattie was alone and that it was natural she should barricade herself at nightfall. He stood in the darkness expecting to hear her step. It did not come, and after vainly straining his ears he called out in a voice that shook with joy: “Hello, Matt!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Silence answered; but in a minute or two he caught a sound on the stairs and saw a line of light about the door-frame, as he had seen it the night before. So strange was the precision with which the incidents of the previous evening were repeating themselves that he half expected, when he heard the key turn, to see his wife before him on the threshold; but the door opened, and Mattie faced him. (43)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
After dinner, another doubling occurrence caused Ethan to confuse Mattie and Zeena:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nZeena’s empty rocking-chair stood facing him. Mattie rose [. . .] and seated herself in it. As her young brown head detached itself against the patch-work cushion that habitually framed his wife’s gaunt countenance, Ethan had a momentary shock. It was almost as if the other face, the face of the superseded woman, had obliterated that of the intruder. (48)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
One might easily list other instances of the doubling theme: Ethan’s laughter “echoes” Mattie’s laughter; the naming of Zeena causes “repercussions of sound” that cause Mattie to wait “to give the echo time to drop” (51), a momentary blush arises in Mattie “like the reflection of a thought stealing slowly across her heart” (51).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In all, the doubling brings Zeena and Mattie together, in a way not fully consummated until the novel’s end when we discover Mattie has become<\/em> Zeena in the most awful intensification of the dull “smash up” of Ethan Frome’s life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before that, Wharton’s narrator characterizes Zeena, at her ugliest moment when she sends Mattie away, as the incarnation of, the reflection of, the doubling of all the misfortune, failure, and silent death of Ethan’s life: “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” (65). The ultimate doubling of this incarnation is Ethan Frome’s fate\u2014horrible enough under any circumstances, but unthinkable in its zero-sum effect of negating all the possibility, light, charm, warmth, and freedom that Mattie had presented to Ethan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a novel of cold and reflections of the cold. There is the surface and the sub-surface, “inner needs” and “outer situation” (8), the desolate landscape of the soul and the desolate landscape of winter, and and each doubles the other. Chill is heaped on chill, in an endless winter, the same as all other winters, all inexorable, … Continue reading S.O.S. Times Two: Wry Reflections on\/in Ethan Frome<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts-on-teaching-and-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1027,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions\/1027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}