Ethan’s disabled father is an almost invisible figure in the story, but his mother’s life, just touched in, is desolating. A woman who once kept her home ‘spruce’ and shining has had to watch her husband go ‘soft in the brain’, their farm and saw-mill run down, and the road by the farm-house go quiet after the railway took the traffic away: ‘And mother never could get it through her head what had happened, and it preyed on her right along till she died.’ In illness and solitude she became more and more silent:
Sometimes, in the long winter evenings, when in desperation her son asked her why she didn’t ‘say something’, she would lift a finger and answer: ‘Because I’m listening’; and on stormy nights, when the loud wind was about the house, she would complain, if he spoke to her: ‘They’re talking so loud out there that I can’t hear you.’
That loud silence is echoed in the wretched marriage Ethan makes to the older cousin, Zenobia, who comes to look after his mother and who, after her death, seems a preferable alternative to utter loneliness. (‘He had often thought since that it would not have happened if his mother had died in spring instead of winter.’) Over seven years, Zeena Frome turns from an efficient manager into a joyless hypochondriac, and she too falls silent; because, as she spoke ‘only to complain’, Ethan has developed a habit of never listening or replying. Under her ‘taciturnity’, ‘suspicions and resentments’ fester.
Into this hostile household, summed up by the word ‘exanimate’, Mattie Silver, Zeena’s orphaned twenty-year old cousin (everything in these villages is a family matter) arrives to help keep house. Mattie is ardent, sensual, innocent, and fragile (it
is one of the novella’s triumphs that she is touching and plausible, too) and Ethan falls deeply and silently in love with her. In the one year she spends with the Fromes, the tender, inarticulate relationship that grows up between them is marked by the rhythms of rural life, as in a novel by Hardy or Gaskell: the village dance, church picnics, walks home in the starry night. Ethan fantasizes a life with Mattie, and he finds himself longing for his lawful spouse to die. But such visions of release are instantly replaced by that of ‘his wife lying in their bedroom asleep, her mouth slightly open, her false teeth in a tumbler by the bed.’ The climax comes on the night that Zeena leaves them in the house, and they spend the quiet evening as if they were husband and wife, yet without touching each other. This sweet ‘illusion of long-established intimacy’ is disrupted when Zeena’s special red-glass pickle-dish, which Mattie has got down from its secret place to ‘make the supper-table pretty’ is broken by the cat, Zeena’s baleful familiar. So deep and sure is the tone of the book that this little, homely accident seems as great a tragedy to us as to the characters. Zeena returns, discovers the breakage, and bitterly laments her loss:
‘You waited till my back was turned, and took the thing I set most store by of anything I’ve got … You’re a bad girl, Mattie Silver … I was warned of it when I took you, and I tried to keep my things where you couldn’t get at ’em – and now you’ve took from me the one I cared for most of all –’
It is one of the places in the novel where the pressure of feeling bursts through the silence. And though all our sympathies go to Ethan and Mattie, Zeena’s own suffering – sick, lonely, unloved, betrayed – rushes onto the page.
Zeena’s ‘inexorable’ will and the force of circumstances mean that there is no way out for the unconsummated lovers: Mattie must go and Ethan must stay. Their passion finally breaks through their shyness in intense, pared-down, simple utterances, words ‘like fragments torn from’ the heart:
‘Ethan, where’ll I go if I leave you? I don’t know how to get along alone. You said so yourself just now. Nobody but you was ever good to me. And there’ll be that strange girl in the house … and she’ll sleep in my bed, where I used to lay nights and listen to hear you come up the stairs …’
Urged by Mattie (Ethan’s role throughout is to be at the service of his women), they take what they hope will be a fatal sled-ride, a scene written with the utmost intensity. And because what is meant to be their farewell scene together is told with such concentrated lyricism, the coda to the novella, where we find out what has become of these three, nearly thirty years later, is one of the most quietly horrifying moments in all fiction, cruelly powerful and done with brilliant, ruthless economy. One of the village witnesses to Ethan’s life-long incarceration concludes, grimly: ‘The way they are now, I don’t see’s there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; ’cept that down there they’re all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.’
In itself this story, with its grim final twist, is powerful enough. But (unlike in
Bunner Sisters
or
Summer
) we come at it through a frame narrator, who sets up the flashback into Ethan’s story, signalled by several lines of dots. He acts as the conduit between the reticence of Starkfield and the eloquent piece of literature we are reading. Wharton’s models for
Ethan Frome
were Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
and – for their use of competing narrative versions – Browning’s
The Ring and the Book
and Balzac’s story ‘La Grande Bretèche’. Ethan and Mattie owe something, too, to Hardy’s Jude and Tess; Nietzsche, one of Wharton’s most admired philosophers, lies behind Ethan’s lost ‘will to power’. Another acknowledged debt, as in all these novellas, was to Hawthorne. Ethan’s name comes from Hawthorne’s guilt-ridden, isolated hero Ethan Brand, and Zenobia’s from the doomed feminist heroine of his satire on a New England utopia,
The Blithedale Romance
. That novel is told from the viewpoint of a cynical, semi-detached observer, Coverdale. Wharton’s nameless narrator, like Coverdale or like Brontë’s Mr Lockwood, seems to belong to another world. He is a man of progress, bringing electricity and communication with the outside world to Starkfield. But after a winter there, he begins to understand the isolation and deprivations of the natives a little better.
The narrator allows Wharton to be both outside of, and inward with, her subject. Like a biographer, he collects the evidence, listens to the different versions, and makes up his
own story of the past. Like his author, he is as interested in the conditions of New England life as in the personal story. Wharton would say more than once, for instance in her introduction to a 1922 edition of
Ethan Frome
, that she wanted to present a truer picture of the ‘snow-bound villages of Western Massachusetts’, with their grim facts of ‘insanity, incest and slow mental and moral starvation’, than she had ever found in the ‘rose-coloured’ versions of earlier New England writers (she meant, rather unfairly, Mary Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett). She was always extremely irritated by critics who accused her of remoteness from or condescension towards this material. During her years at the Mount in Lenox, she was vividly aware of the bleakness of the surrounding landscape. The grimness of lives in remote New England farms and desolate little hill villages, particularly in winter, and the hard times of the industrial workers in the region, stirred Wharton’s imagination as much as the life of the wealthy ‘cottagers’ in their opulent houses in Lenox or Stockbridge. There were violent contrasts in this environment between that wealth and the deprivation of the rural poor, between the romance of the landscape and the development of local industries. Lenox Dale, not far from the Mount, was an industrial centre. The Lenox Iron Works were founded in 1848. Clocks, carriages, china, and muskets were made in Pittsfield. Dalton, the industrial town on the banks of the Housatonic, had the thriving Crane Paper Mills, and there was a paper-making factory at Lee, near Lenox. Further north, in Adams and North Adams, there were shoe factories and cotton and wool mills. Technological advances like railway lines and tunnels and the influx of trolley cars and motors were changing the landscape. Wharton had written about these aspects of life in the Berkshires in
The Fruit of the Tree
(1907), which set ‘the great glare of leisure’ of the wealthy houses against the needs of the mill-workers. In
Ethan Frome –
and a few years later in
Summer –
she took the wealthy houses right out of the picture.
Her story had its specific factual origins in a terrible sledding-accident in Lenox in 1904, and in the lingering, fatal paralysis of a Lenox friend, Ethel Cram, after an injury in 1905. More broadly, it provides, by inference, a factual, sociological
account of this bleak slice of American life. We learn, through the narrator, about the transactions between local farmers and builders, the effects of the railway, attitudes to debt and the status of doctors, the inadequate education of girls, and levels of rural unemployment. Occasionally her narrator uses a phrase which opens up the distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’: ‘the hard compulsions of the poor’, ‘a community rich in pathological instances’. So, as she often does, Wharton uses a unique, pitiful story for a generalized, determinist account of environmental pressures, and holds romance and realism brilliantly in balance.
All the harsh matter-of-factness of life in Starkfield – dogged conversations about money and work, details of journeys, luggage, buildings, medicines, farming, the omnipresent but useless church, the ingrown, watchful community, the practical difficulties created by the weather – are mixed with suppressed romantic emotions, passionately invested in nature. What to the narrator seems a blank and desolate wilderness becomes, when we see it through Ethan and Mattie’s eyes, a landscape full of detail and beauty. The emotions that are so ‘kept down’ come through in an intense sensual language straight out of Keats (one of Wharton’s favourite poets). Ethan’s awareness of ‘huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things’ calls up ‘Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance’ in Keats’s anguished farewell to life and love, ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’. The wintry romance of Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ is touched in everywhere. The snow beats ‘like hail against the loose-hinged windows’, as, in Keats’s poem, the ‘frost-wind’ blows the ‘quick pattering’ of the ‘flaw-blown sleet’ ‘against the window-panes’. The warm little feast in the kitchen is a homely version of Porphyro’s sensual banquet; the ‘lustrous fleck’ on Mattie’s lip in the lamplight is like the ‘lustrous’ light of Madeline and Porphyro’s encounter, lit by moonlight. Mattie’s erotic trance (‘She looked up at him languidly, as though her lids were weighted with sleep and it cost her an effort to raise them’) is like Madeline’s tranced sleep. Ethan’s ‘ache’ of cold weariness echoes Keats’s knights in armour aching in their ‘icy hoods and mails’. These lovers make a doomed attempt, like Keats’s lovers, to flee away for ever into the storm; but the story, like the poem, ends with the crippled paralysis
of an old ‘beldame’, who dies ‘palsy-twitched, with meagre face deform’. In both there is the sense of it all having happened ‘ages long ago’.
The ‘high romance’ in
Ethan Frome
speaks through nature:
Slowly the rim of the rainy vapours caught fire and burnt away, and a pure moon swung into the blue. Ethan, rising on his elbow, watched the landscape whiten and shape itself under the sculpture of the moon.… He looked out at the slopes bathed in lustre, the silver-edged darkness of the woods, the spectral purple of the hills against the sky, and it seemed as though all the beauty of the night had been poured out to mock his wretchedness …
Wharton told Berenson that it gave her ‘the greatest joy and fullest ease’ to write this story. She knew that distance can create closeness, and that transforming painful materials can produce creative joy.
Ethan Frome
was an anguished elegy to love, and a description of being incarcerated in a terrible marriage. It was also a farewell to New England, written a long way away from it, and published as she would be leaving it for ever.
*
When Wharton returned to the landscape of
Ethan Frome
, five years later, she again used the word ‘joy’ to describe the process of writing about pain and loss.
Summer
, written in the summer of 1916 and published in 1917, was, she told Berenson in May 1917, written at ‘a high pitch of creative joy’. It was her escape from the pressures and demands of her war-work in France, as much of an antidote as possible to refugees and hospitals. It is a high-coloured, full-blooded, sensual narrative with an intense appetite for life. But it is shadowed by violence and death and by dark emotions about nationhood, civilization, and savagery.
The idea for it suddenly came into focus, but she had had it in mind since
Ethan Frome
. She often mentioned them together, famously calling
Summer
the ‘hot Ethan’. Like
Ethan Frome, Summer
is a novella set in the poorest and remotest part of New England, in which an inarticulate, untravelled character with an obscure sense that there might be some preferable life elsewhere has a brief moment of idyllic love and joy but is pulled back to the harsh realities of the place she lives in.
Summer
’s
romance is fulfilled, not thwarted like Ethan’s. It is one of the few Wharton fictions in which a love affair is acted out rather than denied. But, as elsewhere in her fiction, pain, loss, and grief rush up behind it.
The novel is brim-full of, and best known for, a sensual evocation of the New England countryside in heat, felt through the perceptions of a young woman close to nature: uneducated, speechless, throbbing with awakening eroticism. She feels and thinks through her blood, she lies on the ground like an animal, ‘her face pressed to the earth and the warm currents of the grass running through her’. She feels earth and water, heat and light, sun and the colour of skies (
Summer
is full of fine sunsets) and the ‘long wheeling fires’ of stars on her pulses. She is all sap, growth and passive, sun-warmed earth-life, and Wharton piles this on with a Whitmanesque feel for minute, creaturely animalism. Heroine and author seem far apart, but Wharton gives her her own passionate feeling for nature and her nostalgia for her lost New England countryside, so remote from the war-bound rue de Varenne.