On the interesting layers to Edith Wharton’s winter tale.
I’m not exactly sure why so many high school students (including this
AmericanStudier) read Ethan Frome
(1911), but I have a few guesses: it’s technically a novel but is pretty short
and reads very quickly; it’s by a canonical author who looks good on a reading
list but is significantly less complex than many of her works; it features a doomed
love triangle and a climactic sledding (!) scene; it was made into a film
starring Liam Neeson, Joan Allen, and Patricia Arquette. Lots there for high
school students to grab onto, no doubt about it. But I’ll admit that on both my
original reading of the novel and in initially considering it for this post, I
had thought of it as pretty slight, as significantly less worth attention and
analysis than most of Wharton’s novels.
I haven’t re-read it, and maybe if I did I’d still feel that way. But the
more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that the novel’s frame story—in
which the narrator, an unnamed traveler, is trapped by a New England snowstorm
and forced to stay in Ethan’s house and thus learn about his tragic past—adds
some very interesting layers to that more slight plot. For one thing, the
narrator’s situation eerily parallels that of Ethan as well as the novel’s
other two main characters, Zeena and Mattie: all three are likewise trapped in
this house, for different reasons but all related to the snowstorm in which
Ethan and Mattie met their tragic sled-induced fate. And for another, given
that we assume (or at least I do) that the first-person narrator is the one who
writes the novel’s third-person middle section, in which Ethan’s story is told
as an extended flashback, the question
of memory and accuracy, of truth and fiction, becomes more complex than it
otherwise would. Are we reading the version of the story that the narrator
learned? If so, is he only imagining the characters’ perspectives? If not, who
is narrating this section, and to what end?
All of those layers made Ethan Frome more interesting within its
pages. But they also, I would argue, allow us to consider more explicitly the
novel itself, and its place in Wharton’s career. Apparently Wharton based the
novel, or at least the climactic sledding scene, on real
events from Lenox, Massachusetts; events that she, like her narrator,
learned about after the fact from one of the participants (in this case a girl named
Kate Spencer who worked with Wharton for a time at the Lenox Library). That
helps explain why Wharton wrote the novel at all, given how different it is in
setting and world from virtually every other of her works. But it might also indicate
that the novel served for Wharton as a kind of reflection on story-telling, on
the role of a writer in relationship to the places where she travels—since Wharton
was a lifelong New Yorker before she moved to Lenox and built her estate there—and the people
she both meets and constructs there. Wharton stayed in Lenox far longer than
her narrator seems like too in the fictional town of Starkfield, but as a
writer, she was perhaps never entirely at home. Neither was Ethan, for that
matter.
Next wintry post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Cultural images of winter you’d highlight?
11/27 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two pioneering,
talented,
and influential
20th century American
writers, Charles
Beard and James
Agee.
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