1. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

2. Introduction What happens if people miss a chance to find happiness?
Will they get another chance?
What if they don’t?

3. In Ethan Frome,
An unnamed narrator is spending the winter in a small New England town.
The deep snow keeps people trapped inside and squashes most signs of life.
There is little to do except watch the other people in the town—and wonder about them.

4. One of the people he observes is Ethan Frome, a tall man with a dramatic limp and a scar on his face.
Ethan lives on a bleak, poor farm.
He seems to have given up all personal interests and finds no joy in life.

5. He lives with his wife, Zeena, and her cousin, Mattie Silver—who is paralyzed.
Both women seem unhappy and full of complaints about their situation in life.

6. to destroy these people’s lives?
What has happened
to destroy these people’s lives?
Why are they all trapped in misery?

7. Have you ever made up the life story of someone you’ve observed?
If yes, why did you want to do so? And what did you imagine for/about that person?
If no, of whom can you think that would be an interesting topic? Why?

8. Ethan Frome: Introduction
The unnamed narrator tries to figure it out and offers his own version of a story….
Ethan, Zeena, and Mattie form a hopeless love triangle in which each attempts to find happiness or to escape, both of which only end in tragedy….

9. Ethan Frome is a frame story.
Background
Ethan Frome is a frame story.
Story One
Story Two
Story One
In a frame story,
one story introduces another then returns to the original story at the conclusion.

10. The narrator begins the story with his own experiences,
Narrator’s life
Ethan’s story
Narrator’s life
then he describes what he thinks
happened to Ethan Frome,
and finally returns to his own perspective
at the end of the novel.

11. Discussion
Of what other stories do you know that contain a frame story?
Why do you think an author might choose to tell a story in this way?

12. About the author:
Edith Wharton was born into a rich and socially prominent New York family in 1862.
Wharton’s grandfather was a general in the Revolutionary War; therefore, she grew up familiar with all that goes along with prestigious military families.
* private tutors
* studied in Europe
* learned language and literature
of French, German, and Italian

13. Wharton’s first novel, The House of Mirth, focused on the same wealthy and sophisticated society that she knew so well.

14. Despite her wealth, she did experience difficulty in her life:
Her husband, who suffered from a mental disease, did not appreciate her writing, embezzled money from her to spend on another woman, and was abusive.
It is said that her parents discovered and destroyed a book she had composed and printed secretly because they thought it unladylike for a young woman to write.

15. Eventually, Wharton took bold steps for a woman of her time and background: *She left and eventually divorced her husband. *She moved to Paris, where she had an affair of her own. *She continued writing and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 for her novel The Age of Innocence.

16. When Ethan Frome was published in 1911, some reviewers and readers were skeptical that Wharton could write realistically about poor farmers.
Wharton responded that she wanted to show life as it really was in the poor villages of New England.
She felt that many other writers had romanticized the poverty and toil that people in these towns faced.

17. In the 1880s, life for New England farmers was extremely difficult, filled with backbreaking labor for little reward.
Life was often worse for their wives, who were extremely isolated, working at home alone with no television, radio, or telephone.
Relationships between husbands and wives were dependent on one another, as the farm’s success required the work of both.

18. Characteristics of Wharton’s Writing:
A moral conflict most often between an individual and a social group
The appreciation of life through art
The symbolism of the supernatural
Irony throughout
Characters are victims of social pressures and norms of society. They are hungry for emotional and intellectual experience and end up dying by beating their heads against the wall or by suffering a living death of resignation.