Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
by CarolineOh, trapped-man fiction! Narratives about trapped people (woe is me, my loveless marriage, dead-end job, enormous personal burdens) cover well trodden ground and can only ring true if they’re really well done. A writer like Chuck Palahniuk establishes a niche by pushing trapped-man out into the narrow extremes of the bell-shaped curve, but Ethan Frome represents a much more subtle version of the stock plot.
Edith Wharton, typically a literary voyeur on the bourgeois, shook up her routine with this short, sharp novel. It may as well be titled What’s Eating Ethan Frome? because his unhappiness is the bricks and the mortar of the story: We are told what has made him unhappy over the course of a framed flashback then see the same unhappiness after decades of steeping.
The frame itself is interesting: An unrelated observer meets Ethan Frome after hearing a lot of stories about him, because Frome has a small town kind of tragic fame for the way his life turned out. In other words, it echoes the style of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but with an element of rumor more consistent with Wharton’s other work.
You won’t walk away from Ethan Frome feeling upbeat, not even remotely, but it’s a very thoughtful, pragmatic kind of bummer. The relentless tragedy of Shakespeare or the Greeks, or in certain weepy movies, can feel meaningless because of the plain unavoidability of the fate. It’s a lesson from the getgo. There is no real lesson for Ethan Frome, and this grays up the story in a wonderful way.
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