Ethan Frome

Summary

Ethan Frome is a short novel by Edith Wharton, serialized in Scribner's Magazine and published as a book in 1911. Set in the fictional village of Starkfield, Massachusetts, it is framed by the account of an unnamed engineer who spends a winter there and becomes curious about Ethan Frome, a striking, silent farmer whose body is twisted and lamed by what the villagers call 'the smash-up' of twenty-four years before. When a snowstorm forces him to take shelter at Ethan's farmhouse, the narrator imagines the story that follows. As a young man, Ethan had hoped to study engineering, but the illness and death of his parents kept him on the farm, and he married his cousin Zenobia, called Zeena, who had nursed his mother. Zeena has since become a sickly, complaining wife, devoted to doctors and patent medicines. Her young cousin Mattie Silver, left penniless, comes to live with them as a helper, and Ethan and Mattie fall quietly in love. When Zeena spends a night away to consult a new doctor in Bettsbridge, Ethan and Mattie share a supper in which nothing improper happens, but the cat breaks Zeena's prized red pickle dish, a wedding present she never uses. Zeena returns with orders to hire a servant and send Mattie away. Ethan thinks of running west with Mattie, but he has no money and cannot bring himself to deceive neighbors to obtain it. As he drives Mattie to the train, they take a last sled ride down School House Hill, and Mattie begs him to steer them into the great elm at the bottom so that they need never part. He agrees, but both survive. In the epilogue the narrator enters the farmhouse kitchen and finds Zeena caring for Mattie, who has been paralyzed for more than twenty years and has become querulous, while Ethan lives on with both of them. A neighbor, Mrs. Hale, remarks that she sees little difference between the Fromes at the farm and those in the graveyard. Wharton, best known for novels of New York society, drew on her years in the Berkshire hills for the book, and later wrote that she wished to show New England life as it actually was. Its spare style, symbolic winter landscape and irony have made it a frequent school text.

Top Lessons

• Duty and desire

  Ethan stays bound to the farm and to Zeena by poverty and conscience. The novel asks what a person owes to others when duty conflicts with happiness.

• Setting as character

  Wharton's frozen landscape mirrors the lives of the Fromes. Students can examine how weather and place carry meaning.

• Framing and point of view

  The story is reconstructed by a stranger from fragments. Readers can consider how the frame shapes the tale's reliability.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Zeena's chronic complaints and reliance on patent medicines and a new doctor, the attempted double suicide and the long aftermath of disability and caregiving are central to the plot.

• Chapter II

  Zeena's ailments and her habit of sending for patent medicines.

• Chapter IX

  The sled ride toward the elm.

• Epilogue

  Mattie's paralysis and Zeena's role as her caregiver.