Term paper on Ethan Frome
Ethan Frome Essays
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The Wicked Witch and Snow White
Edith Wharton presents two memorable characters in her novel, Ethan Frome. The reader is presented with Mattie Silver who is young, and good-natured, and Zeena Frome, who is a bitter hypochondriac seven years her husband’s senior. Upon a first inspection, Zeena Frome and Mattie Silver of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome seem to be extreme opposites in every respect, but upon closer scrutiny, one finds though they are indeed different in character, though they eventually share great similarities. Zeena and Mattie’s differences in appearance and character, but similarity of fate, all contribute to the theme of the novel which is that one cannot escape the social class one is born in.
Edith Wharton first describes Zeena in Chapter II as a woman who is but 37 years old, yet appears more elderly than her biological age. Zeena is associated with the dimness and grey of the winter landscape of Ethan Frome. There is no beauty or warmth coupled with the character of Zeena:
“Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast… The light… drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the hand that clutched the quilt, deepening fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face under its ring of crimping pins.”
(35)
Mattie Silver, on the other hand, is associated with what little light and warmth there is in the cold setting of the novel. Wharton describes Mattie as “taller, fuller, more womanly in shape and motion.” (53) She goes to relate Mattie’s appearance on that same page:
“She held the light… and it drew out with the same distinctness her slim young throat and the brown wrist no bigger than a child’s. Then, striking upward, it threw a lustrous fleck on her lips, edged her eyes a shade of velvet, and laid a milky whiteness above the black curve of her brows.
(53)
Within the first five chapters, Edith Wharton establishes the stark physical differences between young, gay Mattie Silver and unattractive, gloomy Zeena Frome.
Mattie and Zeena differ in character as much as they differ in appearance. A great hobby of Zenna’s was to find faults with others, though her “fault-finding was of the silent kind, but not the less penetrating for that.” (39) Zeena also had an “obstinate silence” (39) that frightened Mattie as well as...
Wharton, Edith. Ethan Frome. Evanston, Ill: McDougal Little, 1997.MLA Style
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