Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome is an infamous wintry novel[la], which I chose to read on the cusp of spring, as the English weather around me [inevitably] took a sudden drop back towards a Wintry chill, once again making glove-free outdoor texting impossible… This has forced me me to return to blogging via initial voice-to-text annotation, which basically means I then have to spend five times the normal amount of time editing these things than ordinarily, which is frustrating. (My baby doesn’t let me blog in the daytime and these days I’m focused on performance practice at night.)

I haven’t read any Edith Wharton for a while, and I haven’t read a huge amount of her work in total.

I suppose Wharton’s books are kinda an “either/or” with Henry James’s books (at least as a UK English literature reader), and (alas) I was the other kinda person, innit, i.e. I read several Henry Jameses in my early twenties.

Ethan Frome is a novella, a famous novella, and it is set in rural New England in a unspecified time towards the turn of the 20th century.

It features a framing narrative a la Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, from a guy who is dealing with a Carpenters Union strike at an electricity power station. He encounters and then semi-retells or semi-re-imagines the tragedy of a man called Ethan Frome, an unhappy, impoverished man in his forties or early ’50s, whose life once held promise and now no longer does.

Ethan Frome was in a shit marriage in his late twenties with a cousin of his who had moved in to help nurse his dying parents a few years earlier.

His dying parents own a shit farm and a shit sawmill and since moving in and the old-timers dying, Ethan’s wife has basically never left. She became an invalid, of sorts, soon, herself. (This novel[la] (and its setting) is just old enough for no medical detail to be needed or expected, regardless of how central to the plot it might be).

The marriage is shit the farm is shit, the sawmill is shit, however, some respite arrives when, a few years into their shit marriage, the wife’s cousin, Mattie, arrives and moves in after her con man father died (after bankrupting himself and all the rest of the extended family who weren’t poor before), leaving her frivolous, penniless, entitled and impoverished and with nowhere else to go…

Mattie is a breath of fresh air for Ethan Frome, and they become friends with a frisson of romance, which grows and grows and grows as time passes.

Obviously, this is a text from 100 years ago about extramarital desire, so it of course ends in tragedy, with everyone unhappy, of course.

Are they unhappy because they are poor?

Or are they unhappy simply because they were born in a different time?

What and who are people responsible for and why?

Does Ethan bear no responsibility to himself to enjoy life and take some joy in it at some point, or is he entirely beholden to other people?

It’s a sad, sad, joyless text that paints a bleak and bitter depiction of humanity, though one that is sadly realistic for many people, particularly people in the self-hating, self-flagellating, deeply repressed Protestant Christian parts of the World. Misery is expected, deserved, normal and something that must be accepted. It is incredibly unhappily true to life…

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Did I weep and cry reading this? No, which surprised me, as it had been flagged to me as one of the saddest books in the world, but I think the inevitability and the – I won’t tell you what it is – shock twist at the end made this something that is far more bleak and upsetting than merely sad.

This is a deeply tragic text, especially because of its twist, which elevates and escalates the misery within it, making it far more than a tear-jerking sad morality play, and transforming it into something significant, serious and worthy of longer-term study…

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What does the framing narrative add to this?

Are we meant to take all of the narrative outside of the framing narrative as mere speculation by this unnamed Lockwood type figure?

Or are we meant to presume, in a more simplistic mode, than what he is regaling us with is “the truth”, rather than his [mere] invention based on rumour and one evening with Ethan Frome and his household?

I don’t know, but the fact that this very small book (it’s only about 70 pages in total) continues to beguile and be treated as worthy of attention and import a century on from its publication probably speaks to the fact that it does achieve its aims, and does evoke some kind of familiar misery for people to explore.

Maybe for some people Ethan Frome offers comfort due to its narrative world being a sizeable distance from their own, while for others it maybe offers a grimly familiar acknowledgement of their own miserable, lonely lives…

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Beautiful prose, evocative landscape descriptions, and a sick, sad, tragedy that probably isn’t all that far away from possible tragedies of the contemporary age, especially in parts of the world without socialised care and healthcare.

If you haven’t read it, Ethan Frome is well worth the hour to 90 minutes it takes to read.

See you next time!