Ethan From

Today, in the United States, about half of marriages end in divorce, revealing an instability and lack of companionship present in most marriages. Men and women, in nature, starve for love and yearn for a true companion to spend their lives with. Love for a spouse can change like the wind, but in the novel Ethan Frome love changes for the worse over time. Ethan Frome, set in an isolated New England town, epitomizes the depressed and grotesque lives of three young people caught in a triangle of distorted love.

Ethan, the protagonist of the novel, loves his wife Zeena and wants to take care of her throughout her so-called illness. Lovers lost one might call the two of them; they share an internal hatred for one another that keeps their lives so tightly intertwined that no single person could separate them. Not a single person could come between them except the third variable of the love triangle, Zeena's cousin, Mattie Silver. A young vibrant 21-yearold is all it takes to stir up the emotions for Ethan. Liveliness of heart, spirit and mind catch Ethan's attention the second Mattie stepped off the train to come live with the two lovebirds. During a year of hope and hopelessness for Mattie and Ethan, a turn for the worse a tragedy no one could have ever expected has paralyzed the two. The narrator, a stranger to Starkfield, meets Ethan about twenty years after the tragedy only to find him in shambles.

"A winter-bound stranger in an out-of-the way Massachusetts hamlet recognizes in the limping figure of Ethan Frome 'the ruin of a man', and apprehends some singular misfortunes behind an obvious plight" (). As Lockwood, the narrator hears Ethan's tragic story he interprets feelings and specific details through his own mind. It is possible that the true story of Ethan Frome and his love triangle could have felt the effects of a complete stranger to the story. However distorted and fabricated the story of Ethan Frome's love might turn out the basic structure of love and loss has already taken shape. In Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton suggests that there is no escaping the maladies of the world such as love. She emphasizes motifs of a morbid rural life, of loneliness and of death to make her theme clear.

In a place like Starkfield, it is inevitable that Ethan would feel isolated. A town so dead to the rest of the world that one stranger could cause so many to talk about him. The landscape was so melancholy and lifeless that when the stranger arrived he saw the sky was pale and sheets of snow covered the land. Wharton embodies the town of Starkfield as a place where only people in suffering could coexist together. She writes "One would have supposed that such an atmosphere must quicken emotions as well as the blood; but it seemed to produce no change except that of retarding still more the sluggish pulse of Starkfield" (Wharton 11).

The happiness rating in this town must have been extremely low the day Lockwood strolled into Starkfield. The mentioning of Ethan Frome to anyone in the town seemed depressing to all that knew him. The population of this morbid town only weakened its emotional strength. McDowell writes about the narrator's frustration living in Starkfield. "Distressed by the duration into late spring of snow drifts and intense cold, he imagines himself in the place of these people in the recent past when hardship was even more acute and isolation was more complete" (67).

The narrator can see how the rural life has impoverished written all over it. Ethan's pale, dark, and lanky figure reveals that Ethan was struggling to make it through the winter. The way Wharton describes Ethan's arid farm and a sawmill in shambles is parallel to his condition in life. New England is supposed to be a beautiful place to live not a region where all is lost during a snowy winter and over time. Ethan, once a youthful and caring man, has been lost in his snowy mess of a life. Cynthia Wolf writes, "New England life can be impoverished- and the picturesque, romantic vistas offered by much of the American regional fiction of the period certainly presented a grotesquely distorted version of that life" (Print out page 1).

Wharton satirizes New England life. A life in Starkfield carries with it a certain fate: a fate of suffering. There is no way in and no way out. Ethan's world after all of his hardships illustrates misery and pain. Wharton accentuates Ethan's home by focusing on how every part of it has a worn down feel to it. "...in all its plaintive ugliness. The black wraith of the deciduous creeper flapped from the porch, and the thin wooden wall, under their worn coat of paint seemed to shiver in the wind..." (Wharton 17). All that surrounds him including Zeena and Mattie have shut Ethan in.

The narrator can see Ethan's pain from the minute he lays eyes on him. The way he looks and his lack of self-esteem seems to make the narrator believe that there is more to the story of old Ethan Frome. The narrator has the tendency of misconstruing the story where he had a few pieces missing. For instance, Lockwood never really states that he actually had a full conversation with Ethan about his misfortunes. Lockwood only says "...that night when I found the clue to Ethan Frome, and began to put together this vision of his story..." (22). Details may not really be details at all. The true feelings and emotions of Ethan could have changed from the way Ethan really felt about his wife and Mattie to the way Lockwood felt about his wife and Mattie. Wharton wrote Ethan Frome to make the reader think about who was really telling the story and if it is fabricated by "...a man with a rich, overly active imagination. It is a dangerous possession...He is fascinated by what 'seemed' to be so, by why he 'felt' to be true" (Wolf 1).

The narrator describes Ethan as a man with a lost hope. The contrast between the younger Ethan and the Ethan in a state of complete depression is quite remarkable. Once a man caught up in a beautiful young woman to a man that only lives with two old women. Zeena had also changed quite a bit: a bitter young woman to a caring old woman. The way the characters feelings and emotions fluctuated between past and present remains one of the biggest issues of the novel. Ethan, Mattie, and Zeena all share one single thing in common with one another; they all appear to be lonely and dissatisfied with their lives.

Zeena only lives for Ethan to take care of her in her sickly state. Her body and mind is the center of loneliness of which she would like to spread onto Ethan and Mattie. Her sickness is the tool that will create all power over Ethan. As uncongenial as she