Book 684: Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton

Similar to my reading of The Age of Innocence two years ago, I was pleasantly surprised by my reading of this. I read it in high school, but of course was not impressed and definitely didn’t enjoy it, but now almost 20 years later, I get it. I’m going to keep slowly working through all the books I read in high school.

Not only was I able to appreciate the beautiful prose and stark setting thanks to living in Massachusetts now, I was also able to make connections from this to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a connection I made last time I read Wharton too! The biggest parallel of the two works was the structure of the novel, a visiting traveler/worker has an interaction of some type with the protagonists and then gets the rest of the story from the locals. It’s all third party he said she said with some basic observations, and it works.

Ethan Frome is the tragic story of Ethan Frome, Zenobia Frome and Mattie Silver and the weird/tragic love triangle they end up stuck in forever. I knew I would understand the tragedies better, having lived more of my life at this point, but I didn’t expect the beauty of the novel to really shine through as much as it did this time. I guess the life experience also shows on that too.

Wharton’s prose is incredibly beautiful and even though there were a couple of moments where I was like uh . . . this is awkward, it sort of worked in a rudimentary way, mostly because of how Wharton wrote Ethan’s character.

“He kept his eyes fixed on her, marvelling [sic] at the way her face changed with each turn of their talk, like a wheat-field under a summer breeze. It was intoxicating to find such magic in his clumsy words, and he longed to try new ways of using it.” (66)

But, where her prose really shone was the (sexual) tension between Ethan and Mattie, many of the passages were so incredibly beautiful and continued to build throughout the work until the crescendo of the sledding accident. As the story moved forward, Wharton showed the shared intimacy of the two within the confines of Zenobia’s watchful gaze with incredibly subtle descriptions of stolen glances and feelings shared through what wouldn’t seem intimate in today’s society instances of shared experience.

Recommendation: This was definitely worth a re-read all these years later. The fact that it’s a fairly short novel without relatively simple prose makes it an easy and digestible read. I’m sure it can be read on so many different levels and I’d be interested in a comparison of Zenobia Frome to Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, but that’ll have to be for another day. I will say that I preferred The Age of Innocence slightly more than this, but I’m still interested in reading more of Wharton’s work.

Opening Line: “I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.”

Closing Line: “. . . And I say, if she’d ha” died, Ethan might ha’ lived; and the way they are now, I don’t see’s there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; ‘cept that down there they’re all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)