Theme in Ethan Frome Essay

The novel Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton tells the story of Ethan Frome, a man trapped in the small village of Starkfield. Ethan desperately wishes to escape the dreary town and his equally dreary wife, Zeena (He has always wanted to be an engineer, and to live in towns where there were lectures and big libraries and fellows doing things). However, Ethans attempts to escape his damnation and achieve happiness are only met with misfortune. This conveys the theme that individuals are bound by powers that we cant control. In Ethan Frome, Ethan finds himself trapped by his physical surroundings, his sense of moral duty, and unpredictable fate.

Ethan Frome is first introduced to the reader as having been in Starkfield too many winters. Edith Wharton uses environment as a tool to portray Ethan to the reader. A persons character is very much shaped by the environment they live in. Wharton describes the Frome orchard as one with starved apple trees writhing over a hillside among outcroppings of slate that nuzzled up through the snow like animals pushing out their noses to breathe (15). This description hardly gives a pleasant aftertaste. It seems to reflect Ethans state after the accident; used and tired as if he was in hell now (5). Wharton wants our first insight on the protagonist and his life to be dark and cold. Ethan became frigid like the cold New England winter the story takes place in. The land also seems to age at Ethans pace; as Ethan get more decrepit, the descriptions of his environment became bleaker. The environment is a powerful shaper of mens fate, and the novel describes this relationship by constantly mentioning the severity of Starkfields winter.

Perhaps the most prominent theme in Ethan Frome appears to be the constraint ones morals have on their desires, considering that the main conflict in the story is Ethans yearning for another woman. Wharton never describes a positive attribute about Zeena (She sat opposite the window, and the pale light reflected from the banks of snow made her face look more than usually drawn and bloodless, sharpened the three parallel creases between ear and cheek, and drew querulous lines from her thin nose to the corners of her mouth), while portraying Mattie as a sort of spring in Ethans life(it threw a lustrous fleck on her lips, edged her eyes with velvet shade, and laid a milky whiteness above the black curve of her brows). This makes Ethans conflict between them perfectly understandable to the reader. Although Ethan has just one night alone with Mattie, he cant get his domestic duties to his wife out of his mind. He plans to run away with her, but he cant bring himself to lie to his neighbors in order to get the necessary funds. In the end, Ethan opts for suicide to escape his burdens as opposed to overcoming the moral limits he has set for himself.