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Ethan Frome
Ethan desperately wants to be with Mattie. He's struck by her vibrancy, lust for life, and intellectual curiosity, none of which are shared by Zeena, Ethan's wife and Mattie's cousin. Ethan is in...
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Ethan Frome
The beginning of Ethan Frome is full of foreshadowing, setting up for the reveal about Ethan, Mattie, and Zeena's ironic and unfortunate past. The narrator's first descriptions of Ethan indicate...
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Ethan Frome
The first thing that came to mind were personality traits that Ethan has, but if he really wanted to, he could probably control those aspects of himself, or subvert them to stronger desires. For...
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Ethan Frome
Simply put, the sled in Edith Wharton's novel Ethan Frome represents freedom in more ways than one. However, it will later become a symbol of oppression and despair. The story takes place in the...
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Ethan Frome
Zeena's health problems serve her well in several ways. The first is that she uses it as a tool to manipulate attention and pity from those around her. She gets a lot of attention from various...
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Ethan Frome
Ethan's tragedy lies in what his life could have become had he been able to free himself from Starkfield, first as a very young man and then later at the age of 28. When he was very young, Ethan...
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Ethan Frome
The lack of communication is a major motif in the novel. Wharton explores it in terms of both literal physical communication and the more subtle aspects of emotional communication between and among...
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Ethan Frome
The connection between Ethan and Mattie as it is presented in the novel surpasses the physical. They are drawn to each other as soul mates, finding in each other their own deepest emotions. When...
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Ethan Frome
Ethan Frome is a man who is a victim of circumstance. From the very beginning of his life story, we find that he has endured obstacle after obstacle in aims to make a good life for himself, to no...
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Ethan Frome
This event is ironic because both the cat and the pickle dish are symbolic of Zeena Frome, but the breaking of the dish occurs while Mattie and Ethan are having their private dinner on a night...
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Ethan Frome
In Chapter IV after Zeena rather unexpectedly informs Ethan that she needs to see some new doctors in Springfield about her "shooting pains," Ethan is relieved to know that Jotham Powell will drive...
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Ethan Frome
To really understand the significance of setting in any novel, you might ask yourself what the author might have intended by creating the setting that she did. Edith Wharton didn't set Ethan Frome...
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Ethan Frome
The eponymous character Ethan Frome is a tragic hero because he is flawed and because fate is against him. A tragic hero is described as a character with either great traits, or with promising...
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Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton is an amazing woman to study. Her writing focuses on everything from home decoration to satirizing the American situation in the late 1800's early 1900's. Edith was a member of the...
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Ethan Frome
At the beginning of the book, the narrator describes Ethan Frome as "the ruin of a man." Ethan is very tall, and stands out in contrast to the majority of the other denizens of the area, who tend...
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Ethan Frome
The theme of communication is a central one to this novel. As your post suggests, communication has its positives and its negatives. On the positive side, good communication fosters a tighter...
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Ethan Frome
While Ethan's downfall comes from a series of unfortunate and almost needless events, they all seem to stem from the two most important tragedies in Ethan's life: the deaths of his father and...
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Ethan Frome
I am not entirely certain about the intent of your question. How is their affection made so apparent in the chapter, or why is their love emphasized so strongly in this chapter? I will discuss both...
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Ethan Frome
Chapter Five of this short novel is the pivotal chapter in which Mattie and Ethan share their solitary dinner together and seem to pretend what life would be like if the two of them were the...
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Ethan Frome
This passage touches upon several of the novel's motiffs. The description communicates the ideas of coldness, loneliness, isolation, and sterility--the absence of warmth and life. The land is...
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Ethan Frome
One of the central themes in Ethan Frome is the inevitability of tragedy, particularly when fate simply seems to put specific variables that work against one's best laid plans. Yet, all these...
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Ethan Frome
Ethan does not like Denis Eady as he is jealous of him. Unlike Ethan, who is shy, unhappily married, and struggles to make a living, Eady is a confident, successful young businessman, like his...
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Ethan Frome
Good question, but I'd rephrase it. If we ask "why," we can get stuck speculating about her psychology, and the reasoning behind it. However, if we ask "What is the effect of doing so?" and "How...
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Ethan Frome
In the final chapter, Ethan Frome takes Mattie to Shadow Pond so that they can relive some fond memories. After attempting to write to his wife in order to inform her that he is leaving her, Ethan...
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Ethan Frome
An adequate summary of a novel explicates both character and plot with the two tied together by a theme. With regard to the tragic tale of Ethan Frome, you may wish to tie together the plot and...
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Ethan Frome
Money is a very important element in this story, because it drives a lot of the frustrations and unhappiness of the characters. Ethan's mill never makes very much money, so he doesn't have the...
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Ethan Frome
In her Author's Note to Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton explains that she deliberated on how to tell the story of Frome as she felt that she must not "elaborate and complicate" the feelings of the...
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Ethan Frome
Chapter two of Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, we discover Ethan's feelings for Mattie Silver are certainly more than platonic, though it is equally clear that he has done virtually nothing about...
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Ethan Frome
Ethan and Zeena had been married for seven years when Mattie came to keep house for them. Zeena had "fallen silent" after the first year of their marriage, and during the remainder of those seven...
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Ethan Frome
Ethan and Mattie's love for each other is not selfish or carnal; it represents instead the deep human longing for spiritual connection with another. When Ethan and Mattie first meet, each lives in...
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Ethan Frome
Let's first define ambivalence in itself. It is a state of doubt where the individual experiences conflicting emotions due to his or her own uncertain feelings about a situation. Main character...
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Ethan Frome
Chapter 7 is generally not identified as the novel's climax since Ethan Frome belongs to modern American literature, but if you were to examine it as such, you should consider Shakespeare's...
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Ethan Frome
The basic situational analysis lays in the irony of the situation itself. The author brings us to the present time, when the complete story is revealed to us. At first, we found out that Ethan had...
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Ethan Frome
Perhaps two of the most recurring themes in Edith Wharton's novelEthan Frome are isolation and loneliness. We see that these two elements seem to permeate the novel and give it its frigid and sad...
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Ethan Frome
In the conclusion of Ethan Frome, the narrator entered Ethan's house as a courtesy from Ethan considering that he had been the man's driver for a while. He had known the story of Ethan as the...
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Ethan Frome
The pickle dish is significant for several reasons. The first is that it is a fancy dish that was very special to Zeena. She treasured it, because it was a wedding gift, and she only brought it...
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Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is the story of a very unfortunate man. Ethan Frome lives in a place called Starkfield, a city which tends to suck the very life out of those who live there. Ethan has...
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Ethan Frome
Not in my opinion! He basically does whatever the women in his life tell him to do...including to attempt suicide! People generally consider him to be spineless and weak--he basically wants to...
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Ethan Frome
Ethan Frome is not a Gothic novel in the classic tradition of Poe, for instance, who almost always uses the elements of the supernatural, fear, darkness, ghosts, horror, death, decay, madness,...
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Ethan Frome
"Ethan Frome" is a novel by Edith Wharton about a man, Ethan, his wife, Zeena, and her cousin, Mattie Silver. Ethan is obsessed with Mattie but married to Zeena. The story opens with Ethan...
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Ethan Frome
This is novel is rich in imagery, and sometimes personfication adds to the picture that is created for the reader. Personficaiton is the assigning of human qualites or abilities to non-human...
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Ethan Frome
In American history--specifically that of New England where Wharton's narrative is also set--the elm tree holds much significance. For, in Boston there was a large, tall elm tree which came to be...
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Ethan Frome
Little is known of Ethan Frome's father as he is only mentioned in Chapter I and later in Chapter 4 as having died of an accident, presumably on the farm or in the sawmill, when Ethan was a...
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Ethan Frome
Ethan Frome’s house is very bare and stark, old and run-down, and missing the “L.” Described as a lonely New England farmhouse, the “Frome farm was always ’bout as bare's a milkpan when...
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Ethan Frome
Harmon Gow, known as the town's "oracle" is known in such a way because of the in-depth knowledge and experiences that he has lived through in Starkfield. As he claims, he had been living there...
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Ethan Frome
With a sickliness that has "made her notable, Zeena Frome announces to Ethan that in the morning she will stay at her aunt's and then consult her doctor. Relieved that she would trust him so...
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Ethan Frome
An argument can certainly be made for this moral of warning against the assuming of responsibilities to which a person cannot resign himself. For, in a moment of weakness in his fear of living...
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Ethan Frome
The setting of Ethan Frome is New England, specifically the town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. While the town is fictional, the description that accompanies it very much resembles a traditional...
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Ethan Frome
Even though the narrator of Edith Wharton'sEthan Frome,as well as the main character, are males, the novel could fall under the genre of Feminist literature due to its presentation of women as...
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Ethan Frome
You bring up a very interesting point about this novel, and you kind of answered your own question in your posting. The narrator of the novel is an outsider to the world of Ethan Frome. He is in...
