If snow falls where you live – or if in warmer climes, you reach for your jacket – read “Ethan Frome” to mark the season, for winter hangs over the novella. Though many readers regard Edith Wharton’s tale as one of a man tormented by the social tyranny of his New England community, it is, in fact, a tale of justice delivered, of hard lessons learned, and of empathetic forgiveness.

With Thanksgiving receding and snow forecast for Indiana, my mind turns reluctantly to winter. For me, the classic winter piece is John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Snowbound,” the Quaker poet’s classic 1869 nostalgic remembrance of frozen seasons past, warm firesides and storytelling and feasts, and the splendid isolation of windrows and drifts, all of it in contrast to the modern grubbiness of locomotives, smokestacks, and the big city. But as I sit here watching the arriving clouds and dreading tomorrow’s dig-out, another work comes to mind: Edith Wharton’s 1911 Ethan Frome. Where Whitter was melancholic and wistful, Wharton’s winter was downright tragic. 

A bundled-up man peered jealously through the church hall window at the young dancers. His sickly and ill-tempered wife awaited him back at the derelict family farm and the happiness of the frolickers, particularly those of an Irish grocer’s son trying to court his wife’s beautiful young cousin, galled him. It reminded him of paths not taken and opportunities missed, and his reaction perfectly matched the cold winds enveloping him on the snowy winter night. In many ways, Ethan Frome’s window peeping represents the narrative heart of Wharton’s novel, rather than the infamous sledding accident at its conclusion. Readers traditionally regard Ethan Frome as the tragic tale of a man tormented by the social tyranny of his New England community, but this falls into sentimentality and modern misconceptions of liberty and duty. Wharton, plagued by an unhappy marriage and extramarital affairs, meant it as a blast at Edwardian-era social conformity denying her happiness, but her writing betrays different conclusions. 

Ethan Frome is mid-Wharton, composed after House of Mirth (1905) and before Summer (1917) and Age of Innocence (1920), and begins in the small, isolated, and appropriately named town of Starkfield, Massachusetts when an engineer posted at a neighboring power plant hires a mysterious fellow named Frome for rides to work. Filled with growing curiosity, he hears tales of Frome and his mysterious limp from townsfolk, and a “smash-up” many years ago, and when a blizzard forces Frome to house the narrator for the night, Wharton tells the terrible story in flashbacks. Bright and ambitious Ethan never left Starkfield, remaining after the death of his father to take care of the family farm, then again upon his mother’s sickness to help take care of her, and then finally upon his marriage to his mother’s nurse Zeena. Their union is dutiful rather than loving and almost immediately the growingly unpleasant Zeena falls ill, always in need of expensive treatments Ethan cannot afford. Winter hangs over everything in Starkfield. If only “his mother had died in spring instead of winter,” Ethan laments, things might have been different. Zeena might have moved on. He might have escaped and realized his dreams. 

But then Zeena’s young cousin Mattie Silver, poor and at loose ends, arrives in need of a home. Incompetent in nearly everything around the house, she makes up for her shortcomings with personality and beauty, lessening Frome’s gloom and of Starkfield itself. Ethan sees his lost youth in the spring-like Mattie and a way out, and the two fall in love. Failing to raise money from his faltering wood-carrying business to buy train tickets, he and Mattie determine that the only remaining escape is death. The two miserable lovers plunge suicidally down School House Hill on a toboggan crashing into a large oak tree but fail to take their own lives. Instead, permanently maimed like a perverted version of Romeo and Juliet, both live back at the Frome homestead nursed by a suddenly recovered Zeena. “I don’t see there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in graveyard,” a friend tells the narrator as the book closes. 

Few novels end on a grimmer note than Ethan Frome. I teach this book often – most recently in a history graduate seminar to signal the shift toward modernity, from Ethan and Zeena’s Starkfield to George Babbitt’s Zenith – but am never fully satisfied with Wharton’s portrayal of Frome and his small town. Perhaps it’s the expatriate New Englander in me, but it lets Frome off the hook for his indecisiveness and smears the village, despite ample evidence for the community’s good heart.

With Starkfield’s gaze on his mind, Ethan Frome’s actions are more often evasions and always negative, like a kind of Edwardian Bartleby the Scrivner telling himself “I would prefer not to.” He chooses not to leave town or sell the farm, convincing himself of its impossibility. Out of misplaced obligation to Zeena, he chooses not to marry out of love. He chooses not to act upon his love for Mattie but instead to kill himself and evade responsibility in this life. Ethan becomes a kind of New England Hamlet (“To be or not to be?”) in a New England hamlet. 

In addition, was Starkfield so terrible a place? The town treated Frome remarkably well before and after the accident, helping its own as a kind of model New England village in Wharton’s telling. It existed as an integral moral community with a vibrant social life for the rising generation providing friendship, courtship, and marriage (the winter dance, for example). Look how they treated the Fromes after the crash, with friends visiting and townsfolk providing him with work – that’s how the narrator meets him, after all. What isolation the Fromes experience is more their own choosing than the town’s exile. Starkfield did not snap Ethan and Mattie back to moral order, but instead softened nature’s harsh tendency toward equilibrium. The sledding accident was nature’s corrective to their hubristic search for escape and Ethan’s utopian longing for a spring that never comes, pulling them back into community and punishing them for their transgressions. It’s an eternal winter with the crisp moral clarity of the state of nature mitigated by Starkfield’s empathy and assistance. The town wasn’t a place of moral monsters ostracizing deviants but a place that treated the Fromes with decency. Thus, Ethan Frome is a tale of justice delivered, of hard lessons learned, and a small community offering empathetic forgiveness. To use my wife’s favorite phrase, “Make good choices.” 

If snow falls where you live – or if in warmer climes, you reach for your jacket – read Ethan Frome (and “Snowbound,” of course) to mark the season. Alas, my time has ended. The snow is here and I have to find my shovel. 

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The featured image is “Snow at Louveciennes” (circa 1870), by Camille Pissarro. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.