Ethan Frome

Ethan Frome

In author Edith Wharton’s most acclaimed novel, Ethan Frome, Wharton paints a picture illustrating a despairing life that a man named Ethan Frome finds himself in. Edith Wharton masterfully uses setting to create an atmosphere of isolation and sorrow, drawing the audience into the tragedy which is Ethan Frome.

In this novel, Wharton uses the misfortune of poverty as a powerful tool that helps to convey the intense feelings of sorrow and entrapment that Ethan Frome experiences in his life to the reader. Near the end of the novel, Frome attempts to escape his life as a poor farmer and husband to the sick, cynical Zeena by buying passage to the West for himself and a young woman named Mattie Silver. But when Frome discovers that the price of that passage would be much too great a sum for him to manage, he collapses in despair, knowing that his imprisonment on the farm was inescapable. At another point, Frome approaches the man whom he delivers lumber, Andrew Hale, to and asks for an advance payment but is refused not only because it is not Hale’s usual policy to pay that early, but because Hale himself is experiencing hard times as well. As a reader, it is a tense moment because you know that Frome needs the money to get out of a squeeze with his wife. Unfortunately for Frome, poverty is not his only worry. (31, 57)

Sadly enough, Frome is a man who is part of a very unhappy marriage, a marriage that is devoid of any love between Frome and Zeena, and lacking any emotional connection. This part of the setting Frome finds himself a piece of is perhaps the most prominent source of all the stories troubles. It is mostly because of this marriage that the last seven years of young Frome’s life have been full of increasingly bitter and dark times. Frome and his wife obviously do not understand each other, do not at all comprehend how to communicate with each other and are always dead-locked in a domestic struggle that has Frome always wondering, fearing, what might be the motivation behind everything Zeena says and does, all vividly shown in a fight they have mid-way through the novel. Another part of the marriage which puts distress into Frome’s mind is the way in which it came about. It was not a marriage initially founded on love or any feeling sufficient to support a happy marriage. It was a marriage that Frome became a part of because he was seeking a balm for his utter loneliness, a loneliness that wasn’t healed by Zeena’s presence; instead it grew and seemed to consume Zeena as well. It seems reasonable to conclude that Frome dwelt on thoughts about the marriage’s beginnings, and regretted it, causing him pain when he looked at the pretty, vibrant Mattie. Frome’s