Historical Context
Published
in 1911, Ethan Frome is one of Wharton’s masterpieces and her most
famous novella. It is, in fact, the work by which Wharton is most widely known,
and it is a perfect example of the way in which Wharton’s painstakingly
detailed portrait of a community and its landscape proves that the environment
decides an individual’s behavior, personality, and ultimate fate. In Ethan
Frome, Wharton revolutionized the concept of American “realism” by
capturing seamlessly the cold, hard, fatalistic bareness of the New England
landscape and the bleak, slow, hopeless existence of the individuals who inhabit
it and who assume the environment’s air of pessimism and solitude.
You have to
wonder how someone as fabulously wealthy, intelligent, and privileged as Edith
Wharton came up with the idea of Ethan Frome, which will probably be the
most depressing, heart wrenching story that you will ever read in your lifetime.
As socially gifted and outwardly happy as Wharton may have seemed, however, both
the political conditions surrounding the nation and the private traumas that
affected her own life can help to explain how she created such a cynical,
fatalistic piece of fiction.
The America at
the turn of the century was radically different from the America of the
1930’s. Prior to the nation’s involvement in World War I, many Americans
were optimistic do-gooders who honestly believed that world peace could be a
reality instead of an ideal. As you may remember, Woodrow Wilson’s League of
Nations was the perfect example of how Americans thought that they could change
the world, through compromise and negotiation -- but this altruism and hope soon
was soon replaced by cynicism and bitterness. However, when the war went into
full swing during the 1910’s, this optimism had faded as millions of soldiers
and innocent civilians were brutally killed. As a result of the violence and
cruelty that soon came to define the First World War, Americans quickly became
disillusioned and fatalistic, and Wharton was not immune to this pessimism, a
feeling that pervades Ethan Frome. In fact, Wharton was one of many
American expatriates who fled to France during the war because of their
disillusionment with American society.
Unlike her
other novels, Ethan Frome describes a small, economically stagnant
community in which the citizens seek financial stability instead of intellectual
advancement and social position. However, even in this seemingly bleak setting,
Wharton still toys with the idea of forbidden love because she, as a result of
her own unhappy marriage, was fascinated with the complications of unfulfilling
marriages, and stimulating, exciting extramarital affairs.
Many have
suggested that Ethan Frome is really Edith Wharton. This novella is one
of the most depressing and thought-provoking books that you will ever read in
your lifetime, and the author who produced it tapped into her own suffering and
unhappiness to create it. Like Ethan, Wharton was also involved in an extremely
unhappy marriage with a sickly, needy spouse and often dreamed of finding an
escape in the name of love. In fact, just as Ethan finally finds comfort in
Mattie, so too did Wharton carry on an affair with a journalist named Morton
Fullerton because she sought intellectual excitement. Wharton’s husband,
Teddy, who was thirteen years older, shared none of her many intellectual
interests, and even though he was deeply in love with her (he often followed her
around with his pockets bulging with cash in case she saw something in a store
window that she wanted), he did not satisfy her intellectually. Teddy’s
father, who had been a close friend of Edith’s parents, had had a mental
illness, and shortly before 1911, the year that Edith wrote Ethan Frome,
he suffered his first nervous breakdown. He never recovered after his third
breakdown, and in the character of Ethan, we can see the same suffering and
bitterness that Edith herself must have felt after caring for a man who she
never even loved.
