Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Maggie Morse

Ethan Frome Essay

Miss Elliot

December 6, 2002

“Ethan Frome” by Edith Wharton is about a man named Ethan and his struggle to find happiness. He lives in a run down farm with his wife Zeena who thinks that she is sick. After Taking care of Zeena for six years they hire Mattie to help around the house, Ethan falls in love with her and they have a relationship suspicious to Zeena. This novel is quite similar to “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathanial Hawthorne. Some of the main similarities are, affairs outside their marriages and physical memories resulting from them as well as unhappy endings.

With Ethan’s mother very sick, his cousin Zeena came to relieve Ethan and become her aunts nurse. Ethan’s mother died and after the funeral after moving out Ethan asked Zeena to marry her out of his fear of being alone in the farm house. After the marriage Zeena became sick and nobody knew with what and when Mattie came to help around the house. Ethan fell in love with her having another relationship while he was married. In the Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne had an arranged marriage with Roger Chillingworth who sent her to a colony in Massachusetts before him. After two years of not seeing her husband she had an affair with her minister Reverend Dimmsdale, while she was married.

After some time Zeena became suspicious of Mattie and Ethan and sent Mattie away, saying she needed hired help. Ethan confessed his love to Mattie who felt the same way. They wanted to run away together but Ethan was a poor man and could not afford a train ticket, suicide seemed to be the only solution of getting away from Zeena. Ethan and Mattie planned

on crashing their sled into a tree suspecting it would kill them, but it only left Mattie Crippled from the neck down and Ethan with a horrible limp. In