Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (1911)

The tale of a man caught between two women.

Classics Review: Ethan Frome is short but carries within its stark and desperate pages an amazing history of literature in English. Edith Wharton (1862-1937) began writing when her doctor prescribed it as a remedy for her stress -- the opposite prescription to that of the heroine of "The Yellow Wallpaper" (written by Wharton's almost exact contemporary, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)) who is confined to bed doing nothing until she goes mad. Wharton gives her story a framing device parallel to that of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1818-48). We meet our three characters, Frome himself, his older, "crippled," and bitter wife Zeena (Zenobia), and their young servant girl Mattie Silver, living the harsh, wintry, brutal life (both economically and literally) of New England. Wharton's tale of illicit love exists on a plane somewhere between the harsh early-American puritan judgment of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804-64) and the Job-like physical and mental suffering commonly imposed on his protagonists by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Wharton's story, both morality tale and tragedy, moves on to the inexorable poetic justice and punishment (trebly destructive) of its conclusion. There's never a dull moment in this simple tale, each paragraph has its job to to do. Oddly, the tragic flaw of its essentially good eponymous hero, is that as he was submissive to the needs of his crippled parents before they died, he is then too-submissive to the demands of his wife. The reader cannot stop railing at Ethan Frome for failing to stand up for himself. Rather than employ the patriarchal "be a man" (although it occurred to me), I think the proper literary exhortation would be "have some agency, darn you!" But Ethan Frome's only act of agency leads to the self-destruction that fate decreed. Despite the more appealing characters of Mattie and Ethan, the most complex character of the tale is the wife, Zenobia, who has depths to explore as her role changes dramatically for reasons apparently unexplained.  [4½★]