Ethan Frome

Ethan Frome is a 1911 novella by American author Edith Wharton. It details the story of a man who falls in love with his wife's cousin and the tragedies which result from the ensuing love triangle. The novel has been adapted into a film of the same name.

Plot
An unnamed male narrator spending a winter in Starkfield, Massachusetts spots a limping, quiet man around the village. This is Ethan Frome, a lifelong resident and a local fixture of the community. The narrator learns that Frome's limp arose from having been injured in an accident. The narrator hires Frome as his driver and the story flashes back 24 years to detail Frome's past.

Previously, Frome was married to a sickly woman named Zeena (Zenobia), who became jealous when Frome fell in love with her cousin Mattie. Zeena plans to send Mattie away and has already hired another girl to replace her, claiming that she needs someone more efficient because her health is failing more rapidly than ever. Ethan, miserable at the thought of losing Mattie, considers running away with her, but he lacks the money to do so.

The next morning, Ethan rushes into town to try to get a cash advance from a customer for a load of lumber in order to have the money with which to abscond with Mattie. His plan is unhinged by guilt, however, when his customer's wife expresses compassion for Ethan. He realizes that he cannot cheat this kindly woman and her husband out of money.

Ethan comes back to the farm and picks up Mattie to take her to the train station. They stop at a hill upon which they had once planned to go sledding and decide to sled together as a way of delaying their sad parting. After their first run, Mattie suggests a suicide pact: that they go down again, and steer the sled directly into a tree, so they will never be parted and so that they may spend their last moments together. The resulting crash leaves both of them alive, Ethan with a permanent limp and Mattie paralyzed.

The narrative returns to the present, where it is revealed that Mattie now lives with the Fromes with Zeena as her caregiver. Ironically, Ethan and Mattie have gotten their wish to stay together, but in mutual unhappiness and discontent, with Mattie helpless, and Zeena as a constant presence between the two of them.

Development
The story of Ethan Frome had initially begun as a French-language composition that Wharton had to write while studying the language in Paris, but several years later she took the story up again and transformed it into the novel it now is, basing her sense of New England culture and place on her ten years of living at The Mount, her home in Lenox, Massachusetts. She would read portions of her novel-in-progress each day to her good friend Walter Berry, who was an international lawyer. Wharton likely based the story of Ethan and Mattie's sledding experience on an accident that she had heard about in 1904 in Lenox. Five people total were involved in the real-life accident, four girls and one boy. They crashed into a lamppost while sledding down Courthouse Hill in Lenox. A girl named Emily Hazel Crosby was killed in the accident. Wharton learned of the accident from one of the girls who survived, Kate Spencer, when the two became friends while both worked at the Lenox Library. Kate Spencer suffered from a hip injury in the accident and also had facial injuries. It is among the few works by Wharton with a rural setting. Wharton found the notion of the tragic sledding crash to be irresistible as a potential extended metaphor for the wrongdoings of a secret love affair.

Lenox is also where Wharton had traveled extensively and had come into contact with at least one of the victims of the accident; victims of the accident are buried in graves nearby Wharton family members. In her introduction to the novel, Wharton talks of the "outcropping granite" of New England, the austerity of its land and the stoicism of its people. The connection between land and people is very much a part of naturalism; the environment is a powerful shaper of man's fate, and the novel dwells insistently on the cruelty of Starkfield's winters.

Reception
The New York Times called Ethan Frome "a compelling and haunting story." Wharton was able to write an appealing book and separate it from her other works, where her characters in Ethan Frome are not of the elite upper class. However, the problems that the characters endure are still consistently the same, where the protagonist has to decide whether or not to fulfill their duty or follow their heart. She began writing Ethan Frome in the early 1900s when she was still married. The novel was criticized by Lionel Trilling as lacking in moral or ethical significance. Trilling wrote that the ending is "terrible to contemplate," but that "the mind can do nothing with it, can only endure it."

Jeffrey Lilburn notes that some find "the suffering endured by Wharton's characters is quite bleak and makes for a dull read," but others see the difficult moral questions addressed and note that it "provides insightful commentary on the American economic and cultural realities that produced and allowed such suffering." Wharton was always careful to label Ethan Frome as a brief reminiscence rather than a novel. Critics did take note of this when reviewing the book, some in more candor than others. Elizabeth Ammons reflected that reading Wharton's novel compelled her to reminisce upon when literature was more enthralling. She found a story that functions as a "realistic social criticism," a reminder that some are willing to indulge in dull prose based solely upon the name of the author. Despite her obvious quarrels with the work, Ammons proceeded to analyze the text. The moral concepts, as described by Ammons, are revealed with all of the brutality of Starkfield's winters. Comparing Mattie Silver and Zeena Frome, Ammons suggests that Mattie would grow as frigid and crippled as Zeena, so long as such women remain isolated and dependent. Wharton cripples Mattie, says Lilburn, but has her survive in order to demonstrate the cruelty of the culture surrounding women in that period.

Adaptations
The book was adapted to the 1993 film of the same name, directed by John Madden, and starring Liam Neeson, Patricia Arquette, Joan Allen and Tate Donovan.

Cathy Marston adapted the book to a one-act ballet titled Snowblind for the San Francisco Ballet. The ballet premiered in 2018, with Ulrik Birkkjaer as Ethan, Sarah Van Patten as Zeena and Mathilde Froustey as Mattie.