Ethan Frome | "Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome and the Question of Meaning"
Addressing the opposing viewpoints of fellow critics, Ammons gives evidence supporting Ethan Frome as a modern but inverted fairy tale of substance, moral content, and theme.
In her Introduction Wharton is careful to label her piece a "tale" as distinct from a "novel." The haunting fiction draws on archetypes of the fairy tale—the witch, the silvery maiden, the honest woodcutter—and brings them to life in the landscape and social structure of rural New England.... Ethan Frome is as moral as the classic fairy tale, and as rich. First it works as a modern fairy story, a deliberately inverted one, second it functions as realistic social criticism; third, by virtue of its narrative frame, it dramatizes a particular, and deeply rooted, male fear of...
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