Ethan Frome is unique among Edith Wharton’s works in that it tells the tale of an isolated drama, far from the urban and societal concerns of her longer novels. It is also distinctive in that it is a “framework story,” that is, a story within a story. Wharton’s “frame” takes the form of a narrator who introduces the end of the story (Ethan is seen in the present, at age fifty-two) and then provides a “vision” of prior events that becomes the story proper. Although some framework stories never return to the frame, such as Henry James’s novel The Turn of the Screw (1898), Wharton’s narrator concludes the book with a return to the present and a chilling denouement that apparently explains the enigma of Ethan Frome and the hidden story of his past.

The narrator’s story is simultaneously a flashback and a re-creation. The reader never knows the “truth”—that is, the story from a source that took part in it (Ethan, Zeena, or Mattie)—but instead receives data through the filter of the nameless narrator, who surmises the events and pieces together a tale from the comments of other minor characters and from his own imagination. Ostensibly, though, the story of Ethan Frome is a tragic and dramatic portrayal of irony, both as a literary technique and an authorial worldview.

The first version of Ethan Frome was in French, which Wharton abandoned and then rewrote in English during a period of personal turmoil. She did not consider it her best work, despite critical acclaim, but did view it as “the fruition of her long search for technical mastery and artistic maturity” according to critic Margaret B. McDowell. This particular work’s relation to women’s issues is problematical because it does not address them directly. Instead, it presents a total and enclosed universe of restrictive forces for both its female figures of Mattie and Zeena and its central male Ethan, who as a figure caught between these two extremes of vitality and sterility expresses the meaning of the story. Nevertheless, the female “role” as caretaker is a perception that is manipulated by Wharton in Ethan Frome to comment on female issues generally.

The narrator, an engineer, comes to Starkfield in the dead of winter on a work assignment that requires he lodge in Starkfield and commute daily to his work site. When a local epidemic sickens the town’s horses, he works out an agreement with the reticent and crippled Frome to drive him. On one of these occasions, they are caught in a snowstorm and must stop halfway on their return at the Fromes’ desolated farmhouse. As the narrator hears a “droning” and “querulous” voice at the threshold of the farm kitchen, he leaves the present and plunges the reader into the tale of Frome’s marriage to Zenobia, her subsequent transformation into a sort of “helpless” and immutably complaining dictator, and the natural attraction of Ethan to her younger, destitute cousin who comes to live with them as helpmate. Zeena, in her dictatorial manipulations, decides to send Mattie away. Ethan cannot justify keeping Mattie, who is Zeena’s cousin, not his; nor can he blithely throw away all the moral strictures that have heretofore regulated his life. Although Zeena is powerful through her helplessness, controlling and frustrating Ethan at every turn, he knows that abandoning her will destroy her. On the way to the train station, Mattie and Ethan take a detour to sled down a dangerous hill, both tacitly and subconsciously abandoning themselves to the moment and a possible (but not explicit) suicide. While speeding down the snow-covered hill, Ethan has a fleeting and “monstrous” vision of his wife’s face which seems to deter him from his goal. At the last moment, he tries to right the sled’s direction, but it crashes into a gigantic elm.

The tale now returns to the frame, to the present, and to the beginning of the story. The narrator steps over the threshold and finds not what he expects—a querulous Zeena and a crippled, even innocently maimed Mattie—but instead the reverse of their roles: Zeena acts as ministering angel and caretaker, while Mattie, with the eyes of a “witch” and a high whiny voice, has become the alter ego of Zeena. It is at this point that Mrs. Hale tells the narrator that it is Ethan who truly suffers the most—and then makes her chilling observation that there is little difference between the Fromes in the farmhouse and the Fromes in the graveyard.

Starkfield

Starkfield. Fictional village in the hills of western Massachusetts’s Berkshire County, where Wharton herself lived for many years. Small and rural, Starkfield lives up to its harsh name. Though connected by trolley to the larger town of Bettsbridge—which has libraries and theaters—Starkfield is isolated and lonely during the long New England winters. The village has a post office and a Congregational church. It also has one mansion, Lawyer Varnum’s house, in which the narrator boards during his enforced residency in the community. The narrator refers to the “deadness” of the community only two pages after describing Ethan Frome as looking dead.

Ethan lives outside Starkfield on his own infertile farm, where he ekes out a meager living by the force of his labor in the fields and in the sawmill that he has inherited from his father. Ethan is the embodiment of the landscape, an “incarnation” of its frozen woes. Even as Wharton describes the loneliness and the accumulated cold of the hard, lean winters in the Berkshire Hills, she is also describing her protagonist. His life is as harsh as the climate, and his world as desolate as the village in winter.

Frome farm

Frome farm. Ethan’s farm outside Starkfield, with a lonely New England farmhouse that seems to make the landscape even lonelier. Its starving apple trees grow out of a hillside on which slate is more visible than cleared fields. The ugly house is made of thin wooden walls in need of paint. It is smaller than it was in Ethan’s father’s time because Ethan has removed the “L,” which the narrator describes as the center or “hearthstone” of the New England farm. This suggests to readers how Ethan’s life has narrowed, while the narrator sees in the “diminished dwelling” an image of Ethan’s “shrunken body.” The barren land reflects Ethan and his wife Zeena’s childless marriage, and his unsuccessful sawmill serves as a reminder of Ethan’s inability to get ahead.

The farmhouse is homelike only on the night that Zeena is absent. When Mattie decorates the table with Zeena’s treasured red glass pickle dish, a wedding gift that Zeena herself refuses to use even for guests, Mattie transforms the drab house with that single little bit of color. When she and Ethan share their evening meal free of the misery caused by the whining Zeena, they briefly experience warmth and conversation that contrasts tragically with their normally cold, silent meals.

Ethan’s property also includes a graveyard, which serves as a focal point for all the novel’s images of death. A dead cucumber-vine dangles from the porch like a crepe streamer tied to a door for mourning. Other farmhouses dot the landscape like gravestones; the graves of Ethan’s ancestors mock any momentary desire for happiness. Indeed, there is even one headstone with the name Ethan Frome—the ancestor for whom the protagonist was named—that serves as a silent reminder of the death in life that pervades the novel.

School House Hill

School House Hill. Hill overlooking Starkfield that is the location of the climactic scene of the novel. The hill is also the site of sledding parties and moonlight kisses, but its hint of happiness and romance is always tempered by a dangerous curve at its base, where one mistake can mean serious injury or death. Here in the black and silent shadow of tall spruce trees that give Ethan and Mattie the feeling of being in “coffins underground,” the two make the suicide pact that leads to the bleak and bitter ending in which there is little difference between the Fromes on the farm and the Fromes in the graveyard.

Bettsbridge

Bettsbridge. Sounding like a combination of the names “Berkshire,” “Pittsfield,” and “Stockbridge”—all actual names from the western Massachusetts region, Bettsbridge is the fictional city that Zeena goes to when she feels the need to see another medical specialist. She also refers to visiting Springfield, a real city in central Massachusetts, where she consults doctors whose recommendations invariably require expenditures that further stretch the Fromes’ insufficient income.

*Worcester

*Worcester (WEW-ster). City in the east-central portion of Massachusetts where Ethan attends college (perhaps Worcester Polytechnic Institute) and studies engineering. This site represents Ethan’s lost opportunity. Now only a reminder of what Ethan wants out of life—intellectual stimulation and freedom to see the world—the memory of his life in the city provides a bitter contrast to his impoverished existence on the hardscrabble farm.

Although Ethan Frome does not directly posit an opinion on women’s issues, it implicitly describes the terrible restrictions and limitations of the world of its female characters. Unlike some of Wharton’s other female heroines who operate in highly complex social structures—for example, Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (1905) or Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence (1920)—Mattie and Zeena attempt to function in a closed, black-and-white, bleak microcosm. Mattie would never blatantly rebel against Zeena and functions, if at all, through her inarticulateness. It is in the gaps of her silences that Ethan projects all his romantic longings and envisionings. Zeena, on the other hand, too insecure to operate in a big city, probably manufactures her illnesses out of sheer boredom. It is her way of providing diversion, and ultimately a means of controlling the household. Thus, the women in this work must sabotage both themselves and Ethan in order to gain power, feel secure, and function in such a restrictive framework. They live in an inflexible society that seems as ossified as the granite outcroppings of the landscape. It is also a society in which their deemed roles seem limited as one kind of a caretaker or another: Mattie as servant and helpmate, Zeena as nurse after the accident.

Edith Wharton, on the other hand, was personally breaking out of women’s supposed models and roles by ending her marriage in an age when divorce was not yet quite acceptable and by becoming an expatriate woman writer. McDowell terms Wharton “probably the most distinguished woman writer of fiction America produced before World War II.” Wharton was not only a prolific writer but also the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale University and the first woman to be awarded the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She won a Pulitzer Price in 1920 for The Age of Innocence. Therefore, through her active role as model and her depiction of women in either stratified and depersonalized or stifling and limited roles, Wharton expanded the awareness of the diversity and possibilities in the modern woman’s lifestyle. Wharton is one of the preeminent models for women writers who wish to examine the defining restrictions and ironies of being one half of a male-female dichotomy. She has left a body of work that ruthlessly examines the limiting effect of convention on the development and fulfillment of the individual.

Expansion and Reform in the 1910s
The 1910s, the decade when Edith Wharton penned Ethan Frome, marked a period of economic growth in the United States and rising global political influence, particularly as the nation endured and emerged victorious from World War I. During this time, America's identity was increasingly defined by its freedom, though these values were also challenged by ongoing issues such as women's suffrage. The era also saw conflicting values between labor and capitalism, often manifesting violently through riots and strikes, such as the "long-drawn carpenters' strike" that brought the narrator to Starkfield.

The tensions between conservative and liberal ideals, which had been growing since the 1890s, reached a peak in the 1910s. The progressive movement transcended party lines, championed by figures like former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, Democratic president Woodrow Wilson elected in 1912, and Socialist party candidate Eugene V. Debs. Wilson's administration significantly advanced the progressive agenda through landmark legislation, including the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, regulation of trusts, farmer credit provisions, child labor restrictions, and the introduction of a graduated income tax. Additionally, constitutional amendments were passed to govern the direct election of senators, federal income tax, women's suffrage, and Prohibition. These reforms laid the groundwork for the New Deal in the 1930s and the Great Society in the 1960s.

Innovation in Industry and the Arts
The explosive economic growth of the 1910s was driven by industrial expansion and new technologies. In 1911, the same year Ethan Frome was published, the first direct telephone link between New York and Denver was established. The narrator's observations about Starkfield's "degenerate day of trolley, bicycle and rural delivery" and improved communication between mountain villages highlight these technological advancements, contrasting them with conditions from twenty-four years earlier. While Ethan Frome still uses a horse-drawn buggy, innovations like Ford Motor Company's moving assembly line exemplified the automotive industry's progress, making the United States a global leader in car production. Productivity in various industries was further boosted by scientific management theory and new manufacturing techniques. The "personnel management" practices of the 1910s evolved into the welfare capitalism of the 1920s, which sought to improve worker-employer relations through measures like profit-sharing plans and grievance procedures. This era of prosperity primarily benefited a new middle class of professionals and managers, while the poor, including rural Southerners, urban immigrants, and African Americans, remained largely unaffected.

A thriving middle class greatly benefited the arts, which experienced a vibrant period in the 1910s. Drawing inspiration from European modernists like Vaslav Nijinsky, Igor Stravinsky, Marc Chagall, Gabriele D'Annunzio, and Walter Adolf Gropius, American artists—including painters, photographers, poets, dramatists, writers, and dancers—began to break away from tradition, experimenting with new forms and subjects. Publications such as The Masses and The New Republic mirrored this generation's radical vision. In Ethan Frome, the narrator's sarcastic recounting of Mattie's cultural achievements underscores the 1910s rebels' disdain for their parents' tastes.

The First World War (1914-1918)
America's efforts at neutrality became moot as American manufacturers' attempts to dominate global markets entangled the United States in international affairs. U.S. economic interests were notably strong in Latin America and the Caribbean, highlighted by Bethlehem Steel's acquisition of Chile's Tofo Iron Mines in 1911 and the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914. Interventionist policies from presidents like Roosevelt and Taft contrasted with those of Woodrow Wilson. However, Wilson was aware of global realities and the necessity for U.S. industries to access open markets. American economic interests prompted U.S. involvement in the Mexican Revolution of 1911 and the deployment of U.S. Marines to Honduras, Cuba, and Nicaragua that same year. These interests also ultimately led the United States into the First World War.

The war generated tensions among an immigrant-rich nation, where immigrants made up a quarter of the U.S. population in all regions except the South by 1911. However, the war also created opportunities for American bankers and businessmen. Additionally, the conscription of millions of men for military service opened job opportunities for women and African Americans. Four hundred thousand African Americans moved from the South to the North for jobs, initiating the "Great Migration" that significantly impacted African American life and American culture as a whole. Nearly a million American women entered the workforce for the first time, a move with profound economic implications. The government became increasingly involved in Americans' lives, especially in economic policy, production decisions, and labor disputes. Government-promoted xenophobia, supported by the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918, led to the mistreatment of German Americans, anarchists, communists, and socialists, particularly after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in November 1917.

The end of the war brought not the anticipated peace but widespread turmoil. President Wilson's vision for the League of Nations failed. Workers and employers were frequently at odds. The Red Scare led to the deportation of foreign radicals and the removal of radical labor organizers from the New York State legislature. Conflicts between returning African American soldiers and other southern migrant workers, and their white counterparts in the North, sparked race riots in several major northern cities.

Point of View
Critics regard Ethan Frome as Wharton's most meticulously crafted novel. The narrative recounts events that happened twenty-four years earlier, framed within a present-day context, much like Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Addressing this story-within-a-story format, the Nation remarked in 1911, "Such an approach could not be improved." An unnamed narrator delivers the entire tale. Wharton openly admitted that she adopted the technique of the omniscient narrator from Honore de Balzac's La Grande Bretche. The fragments of the story that the narrator gathers from the residents of Starkfield are presented within this narrative framework. Critics stress that the story the reader encounters is, at most, the narrator's interpretation of events. As biographer Cynthia Wolff notes, "Everything that the reader can accept as reliably true can be found in the narrative frame; everything else bears the imprint of the narrator's own interpretation." The inherent challenge in such a complex structure is that it renders the story ambiguous. As Allen F. Stein asserts, "One cannot be sure that the real Ethan Frome ever felt anything akin to what the narrator attributes to him or did the things he did for the reasons the narrator either consciously or inadvertently offers."

Imagery
Wharton's use of imagery and symbolism is widely celebrated as a significant strength of the novel. Critic Kenneth Bernard points out that these elements, especially the harmony between setting and character, reveal the novel's "true dimensions." Like the frozen landscape surrounding him, Ethan is cold and distant. The narrator notes that Ethan "seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface." Numerous references to darkness align with Ethan's nature. For instance, when he goes to fetch Mattie from a dance, he lingers in the shadows, watching her through a window. Later, he wishes he could "stand there with her all night in the blackness." Upon their return to the farmhouse, the windows are dark, and they struggle to see each other "through the icy darkness." On the night of the accident, Mattie reveals to Ethan that she first dreamed of leaving with him during a picnic at Shadow Pond. Images of warmth and brightness in the novel are linked to Mattie and contrasted with Ethan's frozen demeanor and Zeena's lack of vitality. Even Mattie's name, Mattie Silver, suggests something bright. Her "fresh lips and cheeks" and "slim young throat" are juxtaposed with Zeena's "gaunt countenance," "puckered throat," and "flat breast."

Mattie is frequently linked with bird imagery. Wharton often mentions voices. Initially, Zeena's outgoing nature was a pleasant change from his mother's silence for Ethan. However, Zeena's voice has now turned into a "flat whine," contrasting with Mattie's "sweet treble." Yet, by the novel's conclusion, Mattie's voice also transforms into a querulous drone. The kitchen itself highlights the differences between the two women. It is described as a "poor place, not 'spruce' and shining as his mother had kept it in his boyhood; but it was surprising what a homelike look the mere fact of Zeena's absence gave it." Death imagery is evident in the "black wraith of a deciduous creeper flagged on the porch," the missing "L" in Ethan's farmhouse, and a "dead cucumber-vine" hanging from the porch.

Symbolism
Critic R. Baird Shuman states that "there is probably no more pervasive single element in Ethan Frome than the symbolism." The landscape and farmhouse are closely linked to the story's events. For instance, the missing "L" in Ethan's farmhouse gives it a "forlorn and stunted" appearance, symbolizing the lack of life within. An evident symbol is the name of the town, Starkfield, which Shuman describes as "a cemetery for those who are still physically living."

Numerous critics have highlighted the sexual symbols in the novel. Dramatist and critic Kenneth Bernard claims that "Barrenness, infertility, is at the heart of Frome's frozen woe." The red pickle dish, for example, symbolizes the Fromes' marriage when it is unbroken and unused. Once shattered, it represents Mattie and Ethan's betrayal. Shuman notes the "Freudian overtones of the shutterless windows and of the dead cucumber-vine." Additionally, biographer Cynthia Griffin Wolff describes Frome and the narrator entering the kitchen through a small, dark back hallway at the novel's end as "a perverse and grotesque inversion of the terms of birth." The elm tree serves as both a plant and a symbol. Shuman candidly views it as a phallic symbol, "a representation of sexual temptation." The sled that Mattie and Ethan ride into the elm is borrowed, symbolizing their passion, which "technically they have no right to."

Setting
The setting of Ethan Frome is the imaginary town of Starkfield, nestled in the mountains of western Massachusetts. Edith Wharton describes it as a place where "Insanity, incest and slow mental and moral starvation were hidden away behind the paintless wooden housefronts of the long village street, or in the isolated farm-houses on the neighbouring hills." The relentless cold and snow profoundly affect the residents. One of the first comments the narrator hears about Ethan Frome comes from Harmon Gow: "Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters." Initially, the narrator does not grasp the arduousness of winter in this region. After the December snow is followed by "crystal clearness," he observes the "vitality of the climate and the deadness of the community." However, after enduring a winter there and witnessing the "crystal clearness" giving way to prolonged periods of sunless cold, he sees how February storms pitch their "white tents about the devoted village" and March winds charge in support. This experience helps him understand why Starkfield emerges from its six-month siege like a starved garrison surrendering unconditionally.

The Frome farm itself is somewhat "side-tracked." Traffic that once passed by ceased when the railroad was extended through to Corbury Flats, an area three miles away, taking an hour by horse and carriage. The Frome farmhouse is described as having a "plaintive ugliness." It has lost its "L," a deep-roofed section that typically connects the main house with the woodshed and cow barn, allowing residents to avoid going outside to reach their work. The setting is so integral to the novel's action that a 1911 review in the Nation credited Wharton with capturing "a consciousness of depleted resources, a reticence and self-contained endurance that even the houses know how to express, retired from the public way, or turned sideways to preserve a secluded entrance."

Irony
Irony occurs when there is a stark difference between the actual outcome of events and what we would typically anticipate. Margaret B. McDowell identifies numerous instances of irony in Ethan Frome: "The cherished dish is the one that gets broken; the joy of Ethan and Mattie's solitary meal ends in sorrow; the thrill of sledding culminates in agony; the dramatic moment when Ethan and Mattie choose suicide over elopement results not in a noble death but in years of suffering." Upon its release, the Nation highlighted "the profound irony of [Ethan's] situation is that his own goodness was necessary to complete [Zeena's] parasitic dominance over him." When Ethan visits the widow Homan's store to purchase glue for the shattered pickle dish, the widow remarks, "I hope Zeena ain't broken anything she sets store by." There are several other ironies in the story. Beautiful Mattie turns ugly and irritable. Zeena ends up having to care for her adversary. Critics have pointed out the irony in the narrator's description of Mattie's efforts to earn a living. Kenneth Bernard notes Ethan's dream that he and Mattie would spend their evenings together as they did the night Zeena was away. "Ironically, he achieves this, albeit through crippling rather than killing himself and Mattie."

Wharton utilizes a first-person narrator in this narrative, an outsider who has settled in Starkfield and reconstructs the tale of Ethan Frome. The narrator barely acts as a character, but as an educated outsider, he has the necessary skills to recount the story. According to Wharton, "only the narrator of the tale has scope enough to see it all, to resolve it back into simplicity, and to put it in its rightful place among his larger categories."

1880s: Residents of New England farming communities endured a harsh and culturally barren life.

1911: Advances in transportation facilitated easier communication between villages and allowed residents to enjoy recreational activities in larger towns.

Today: Technologies such as videocassettes, radio, cable television, and the Internet have transformed the world into a global village.

1880s: The surge in railroad construction rendered earlier modes of transportation in the United States mostly obsolete.

1911: Automobiles, and later buses and trucks, began to surpass the railroad in significance.

Today: Jet travel enables people to reach almost any destination in the world within a day, while supersonic transport significantly reduces the time needed for long-distance air travel.

1880s: Despite Thomas Edison patenting an incandescent lamp in 1879, most lighting was still provided by candles, oil lamps, or gas jets.

1911: Electricity became more accessible in homes, which adopted incandescent lighting. Additionally, French physicist Georges Claude invented the neon lamp, used in commercial signage.

Today: Variations of Thomas Edison's incandescent lamp are still used in homes, while factories, offices, stores, and public buildings generally utilize fluorescent lighting. Street and highway lighting technology continues to evolve.

1880s: Techniques based on photography and spectroscopy (a method for measuring the wavelength and intensity of spectral lines) revolutionized the field of astronomy.

1911: The fundamental concepts regarding the evolution and life history of stars began to emerge.

Today: Since its launch from the shuttle Atlantis in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has delivered a wealth of new images of the universe. It has captured star clusters 2.2 million light years away, springtime dust storms at the Martian north pole, and, for the first time, the surface of Pluto.

In her introduction to Ethan Frome, Wharton expresses her gratitude to Balzac's "La Grande Breteche" and Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1869) for inspiring the structure of her novella. Particularly, Balzac employs a similar scenario (an inquisitive outsider in a rural setting) as the framework for his story.

Some critics also detect elements of Nathaniel Hawthorne's influence in Wharton's work. For instance, Elizabeth Ammons identifies a connection between Ethan Frome and Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand" and The Blithedale Romance (1852), highlighting the character names (Ethan and Zenobia), the stark New England backdrop, and the theme of "male fear of woman."

In 1917, Wharton released Summer. Serving as a counterpart to Ethan Frome, this novel also takes place in the Berkshire region. However, the story unfolds during the summer season and is notably darker and more melodramatic.

In 1993, the novella Ethan Frome was adapted into a film written by Richard Nelson, directed by James Madden, and featuring Liam Neeson as Ethan, Patricia Arquette as Mattie, and Joan Allen as Zeena. The movie effectively captures the frosty ambiance and the bleak poverty of the Frome family, leaving viewers with a profound sense of lives wasted or consumed by harsh circumstances. However, it is not a direct translation of Wharton's novella; numerous alterations have been made in the adaptation. The stranger in the film is no longer a visiting engineer spending a winter in Starkfield but a young minister who has come to serve at the local Congregational Church and is trying to establish roots in the town. The story of Ethan Frome is presented not as an outsider's reconstruction from various sources but as a confession made by Ruth Hale to the minister. Ruth, who is about the same age as Mattie Silver and has known the Frome family her entire life, recounts the tale. Her version differs in many details from the engineer's account in the novella. Some changes are minor, such as Ethan asking Andrew Hale for a thirty-dollar advance on his lumber deal instead of fifty dollars. Other modifications introduce new elements that might have been considered more cinematic or dramatic. For instance, in the novella, Ethan sees young Denis Eady with his cutter on the day Zeena goes to Bettsbridge and jealously imagines Denis visiting Mattie. In the film, Ethan stops at Eady's shop to buy sweets for Mattie, and Denis asks him to deliver a pink ribbon to her as a gift. Significant changes also occur in the relationship between Ethan and Mattie. In the film, they become lovers and make love on two occasions, whereas in the novella, such opportunities for intimacy are explicitly excluded from the narrator's perspective. In the movie, Zeena sleeps in the room across from the lovers, and the next morning, she attributes the noises she heard during the night to the dying moans of a fox Ethan had been trying to poison for preying on chickens. Later, Mattie attempts suicide in the barn using the fox poison, a scenario absent from the novella. In summary, the film amplifies the physical and outwardly emotional aspects of Ethan and Mattie's relationship. Wharton's characters are portrayed with such severity and restraint in their emotional displays that a literal adaptation might have failed to convey the intense underlying feelings central to their story. The film benefits greatly from its cast, particularly Joan Allen's portrayal of Zeena.

Ethan Frome was successfully adapted for the stage in 1936 by Owen and Donald Davis. The production featured Raymond Massey as Ethan, Pauline Lord as Zeena, and Ruth Gordon as Mattie. Wharton reviewed this adaptation and commended it for its fidelity to the original novella. Similar to the film adaptation, several changes were made to effectively translate the internal drama into a stage performance. Notably, the play expands and intensifies the relationship between Zeena and Ethan. For a comprehensive analysis of the differences between the play and the novella, refer to Marlene Springer's Ethan Frome: A Nightmare of Need (1993).

A dramatization of Ethan Frome by Owen and Donald Davis was staged in New York in 1936.

In 1993, a film adaptation directed by John Madden featured Liam Neeson as Ethan, Joan Allen as Zeena, and Patricia Arquette as Mattie. This version was a coproduction between American Playhouse, Companion Productions, and BBC Films, and was distributed by Miramax.

Richard Krausnick adapted and directed the novel into a full-length stage play for Shakespeare and Company. The play premiered in 1995 in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Wharton once resided.

An unabridged audio recording of the novel, narrated by C. M. Herbert, is available from Blackstone Audio-books.

Sources
Kenneth Bernard, "Imagery and Symbolism in 'Ethan Frome,'" in College English, Vol. 23, No. 3, December 1961, pp. 182-84.

Manus Bewley, "Mrs. Wharton's Mask," in the New York Review of Books, Vol. 3, No. 3, September 24, 1964, pp. 7-9.

David Eggenschwiler, "The Ordered Disorder of 'Ethan Frome,'" in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 9, No. 3, Fall 1977, pp. 237-45.

K. R. Srinivisa Iyengar, "A Note on 'Ethan Frome,'" in Literary Criterion, Vol. 5, No. 3, Winter 1962, pp. 168-78.

Margaret B. McDowell, in Edith Wharton, Twayne Publishers, 1976, pp. 67-69.

The Nation, Vol. 93, No. 2147, October 26, 1911, pp. 67-69.

Blake Nevius, "'Ethan Frome' and the Themes of Edith Wharton's Fiction," in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 2, June 1951, pp. 197-207.

"Three Lives in Supreme Torture," in New York Times Book Review, Vol. 16, No. 40, October 8, 1911, p. 603.

The Saturday Review, Vol. 112, No. 2925, November 18, 1911, p. 650.

R. Baird Shuman, "The Continued Popularity of 'Ethan Frome,'" in Revue des langues vivantes, Vol. 37, No. 3, 1971, pp. 257-63.

Allen F. Stein, "Edith Wharton: The Marriage of Entrapment," in After the Vows Were Spoken: Marriage in American Literary Realism, Ohio State University Press, 1984, pp. 209-30.

J. D. Thomas, "Marginalia or 'Ethan Frome,'" in American Literature, Vol. 27, No. 3, November 1955, pp. 405-09.

Lionel Trilling, "The Morality of Inertia," in A Gathering of Fugitives, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, pp. 34-44.

Geoffrey Walton, in Edith Wharton: A Critical Interpretation, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971, pp. 78-83.

Edith Wharton, in A Backward Glance, D. Appleton-Century, 1934, pp. 295-96.

Edith Wharton, in Ethan Frome, Penguin, 1987, p. xviu.

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, in A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 183-84.

Further Reading
Elizabeth Ammons, "Edith Wharton's 'Ethan Frome' and the Question of Meaning," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 7, 1979, pp. 127-40.
Ammons interprets "Ethan Frome" in the context of classic fairy tales, suggesting the novel functions both as a modern fairy tale and as social commentary, highlighting male anxieties about women.

Shan Benstock and Barbara Grossman, in No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton, Scribner's, 1994.
A detailed exploration of Wharton's literary output and personal life from a feminist viewpoint, utilizing many previously inaccessible sources.

Jean Frantz Blackall, "Edith Wharton's Art of Ellipsis," in 'Ethan Frome' - Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, edited by Kristin O. Lauer and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Norton, 1995, pp. 170-74.
Blackall examines Wharton's use of ellipses, suggesting they signify the unspoken or what a character refuses to articulate, and may also invite readers to engage imaginatively with the text.

Anthony Burgess, "Austere in Whalebone," in Spectator, No. 7171, December 3, 1965, p. 745.
A critique of three of Wharton's works, including Ethan Frome, where novelist and critic Burgess finds the narrative excessively pessimistic.

Dorothy Yost Deegan, "What Does the Reader Find: The Synthesis-Portrait in Miniature," in The Stereotype of the Single Woman in American Novels, King's Crown Press, 1951, pp. 40-126.
Analyzes Mattie Silver as a literary archetype, specifically the young, single woman who finds herself in a difficult situation due to her inability to achieve economic independence.

R. W. B. Lewis, "Ethan Frome and Other Dramas," in Edith Wharton: A Biography, Harper and Row, 1975, pp. 294-313.
Contends that Ethan Frome mirrors aspects of Wharton's own life, exaggerated and set in a bleak rural environment.

Orlene Murad, "Edith Wharton and Ethan Frome," in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3, Summer, 1983, pp. 90-103.
Murad investigates the biographical connections between Edith Wharton and her novel Ethan Frome.

Blake Nevius, "On 'Ethan Frome,'" in Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Irving Howe, Prentice-Hall, 1962, pp. 130-136.
An excerpt from Nevius's Edith Wharton discussing Ethan's potential heroism and Wharton's technique in handling point of view.

Alan Price, in The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War, St. Martin's Press, 1998.
A comprehensive account of Wharton's wartime humanitarian efforts and her writings during the First World War.

Marlene Springer, in Ethan Frome: A Nightmare of Need, Twayne, 1993.
A detailed study of Ethan Frome, covering the novel's literary and historical context, characterization, style, and symbolism.

Lionel Trilling, "The Morality of Inertia," in Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Irving Howe, Prentice-Hall, 1962, pp. 137-146.
Trilling asserts that a significant concept in Wharton's novel is that moral inertia, or the failure to make moral decisions, plays a substantial role in the moral life of humanity.

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, "The Narrator's Vision," in 'Ethan Frome': Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, edited by Kristin O. Lauer and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Norton, 1995, pp. 130-144.
Cynthia Griffin Wolff argues that Ethan Frome centers on its narrator, discussing the novel's narrative structure and the implications of the narrator's perspective.