The work was adapted into a popular 1993 film of the same name. Edith Wharton would have learned of the event while working at the Lenox library with Kate Spencer, a survivor of the actual accident.

Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. It is likely that the accident in the story is based on a real life incident that occurred in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1904 when five children were killed when they crashed into a lamppost while sliding down Courthouse Hill. The classic novel of despair, forbidden emotions, and sexual undercurrents set against the austere New England countryside. The novel was published in 1911, set in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts, whose naming is a subtle overture to the book's mood.įeatured in our collection of 25 Great American Novels By denying Zeena a single positive attribute while presenting Mattie as the epitome of glowing, youthful attractiveness, Wharton. At one point, Ethan describes his relationship with his wife saying, 'Shes always had her way' (61). The constraint social and moral concerns place on individual desire is perhaps the novel’s most prominent theme, since Ethan Frome’ s plot is concerned with Ethan’s desire for a woman who is not his wife. Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is a classic of American Literature, with compelling characters trapped in circumstances from which they seem unable to escape. Hes stuck there over the winter and meets Ethan Frome by chance, ending up a guest in Ethans house one evening when theyre snowed in. Ethan Frome, the most predominant character, exhibits his codependence throughout the story and consistently requires other people to either make or help him with decisions that affect his life. His life is transformed as he falls in love with Mattie, but their fate is doomed by the stifling conventions of the era. A ray of hope enters Ethan's life of despair when his wife's cousin Mattie arrives to help. Ethan Frome is an isolated farmer trying to scrape out a meager living while also tending to his frigid, demanding and ungrateful wife, Zeena. Ethan Frome takes place against a backdrop of the cold, gray, bleakness of a New England winter.

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