Edith Wharton published Ethan Frome in 1911. The story is told through a frame narrator, an engineer working temporarily in Starkfield, Massachusetts, who assembles the history of Ethan Frome from multiple sources. Ethan, now scarred and limping, is a farmer whose life has been narrowed by a series of circumstances, his parents' illness, financial pressures, and an isolated location that kept him from the engineering education he wanted. He married Zeena, an older woman who nursed his mother and whom he married out of inertia and fear of solitude. When Zeena's cousin Mattie Silver comes to help in the house, Ethan and Mattie develop an attachment that Zeena eventually moves to prevent by sending Mattie away.
Wharton constructs the novel's emotional logic around constriction. Each chapter closes a possibility that the previous one had opened; the winter landscape is not merely atmospheric but a physical embodiment of the novel's social and psychological conditions. Ethan's inability to act is not weakness of will so much as it is the consequence of accumulated obligations, financial, familial, moral, that leave him no legitimate exit from his situation. The coasting accident that ends the novel, which Ethan and Mattie attempt as a kind of mutual destruction, fails at the last moment, producing instead the worst possible outcome: survival with permanent injury, returned to the care of the two women, now both disabled.
The novel is one of the most formally compressed things Wharton wrote, almost a novella, and it demonstrates what she could do with constraint as a governing principle of both form and subject. The frame narrative, which turns the entire story into an assemblage of partial accounts rather than a direct narrative, places the reader in the position of the engineer: knowing roughly what happened, uncertain about the interior life that explains it. The ending is among the bleakest in American fiction, and the bleakness is earned rather than imposed.
Charles Dickens walked up to 20 miles a night through London streets gathering material for his novels.
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